Three unusual stories dominate this sūra: stories about young men in a cave, Moses and a mysterious riddler, and a character named Dhū ’l-Qarnayn, who builds a barrier. Unlike many other stories in the Quran, these three stories do not seem to serve an obvious purpose. The Moses story, for example, seems to be a kind of folk tale that could be attached to any character. It makes no imaginable connection to the account of Moses in the Torah, and it is also categorically different from all of the Quran’s other Moses stories. Muslim tradition connects the tales about Moses and the companions of the cave with a story about a “test of prophethood.” Some recent scholars have sensed an anti-Christian tone in the first verses of the sūra and have suggested that perhaps the story of men in the cave is presented in a competitive or polemical way. The theme of worshiping gods other than Allah certainly appears in the story of the cave, and “associating” ( shirk ) with Allah dots the sūra until the final verse.