Abū Yaʿlā al-Mawṣilī relates:

“Jarrāḥ ibn Makhlad narrated to us; ʿUmar ibn Yūnus narrated to us; ʿĪsā ibn ʿAwn narrated to us; ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Zurārah narrated to us, from Anas who said:
The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said:
‘Whenever Allah grants a servant a blessing in the form of family, wealth, or children, and he then says, “Whatever Allah wills; there is no power except with Allah,” that blessing will suffer no affliction short of death.’ ”

He (the Prophet) used to interpret this in light of the verse: “If only, when you entered your garden, you had said, ‘Whatever Allah wills; there is no power except with Allah’” (al-Kahf 18:39).

The ḥadīth scholar Abū al-Fatḥ al-Azdī commented: “The narration of ʿĪsā ibn ʿAwn from ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Zurārah from Anas is not authentic.”

Then the believer said to the disbeliever: “Yet it may be that my Lord will give me something better than your garden in the Hereafter, and will send upon it a ḥusbān from heaven” (al-Kahf 18:40). Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḍaḥḥāk, and Qatādah explained ḥusbān as “a punishment from the sky.” The apparent sense, however, is a devastating, overpowering downpour that uproots its crops and trees, so that “it becomes bare, slippery ground”—smooth dust on which nothing grows. Or “its water may sink deep,” the very opposite of a flowing, accessible spring, “and you will never be able to recover it” (18:40-41).

Allah the Exalted says: “And his produce was encompassed” (18:42)—an event overtook him that swallowed up all his possessions, laid waste to his garden, and destroyed it—“so he began wringing his hands over what he had spent on it, while it lay in ruins upon its trellises.” It was utterly demolished, with no hope of return, the opposite of what he had once imagined when he said, “I do not think this will ever perish.” He now regretted the statement by which he had disbelieved in the Almighty, crying, “Would that I had not associated anyone with my Lord” (18:42).

Allah, Blessed and Exalted, continues: “He had no company to help him apart from Allah, nor was he able to defend himself—there and then” (18:43); no one could remedy what he had neglected, nor did he possess any strength of his own. As He says elsewhere: “So he will have neither strength nor any helper” (al-Ṭāriq 86:10).

And His words: “The authority belongs to Allah, the True” (18:44). Some begin the recitation with: “There, the authority belongs to Allah, the True,” which is likewise appropriate, for He also says: “Dominion that Day, in truth, shall be the Most Merciful’s, and it will be a difficult day for the disbelievers” (al-Furqān 25:26)—an irrevocable judgment that none can overturn.