This paper examines the loss of the present and the agonizing human condition in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Ahl al-Kahf (The People of the Cave). Although hailed by Taha Huysan as the first work in Arabic literaturewhich may be properly called ‘drama’ and “an important event, not only in modern Arabic literature alone, but in the whole of Arabic literature,” al-Hakim’s play failed to gain the audience appreciation, causing financial loss to the Opera House Theater where it was performed in 1933. While al-Hakim attributes the failure of audience appreciation to the play’s unsuitability for "the actual stage," there is more to this “failure” than mere belonging to al-Masrah al-Dhihni (Theater of the Mind) as al-Hakim himself proclaimed. A play that opens and ends in the darkness of a cave and is inspired by a Quranic Chapter that addresses the story of a number of believers escaping the ruthless brutality of their society must raise many questions: How can time be "ideological"? Of what reality is "the stage of the mind" in The People of the Cave really the image? Al-Hakim’s play swerves dramatically from the Qur’anic course of the story as an example of God’s ability to protect his believers and resurrect the dead, and offers us instead a staging of human isolation, a death interrupting itself, and a lost ontological battle against time through scattered moments of Aristotelian anagnorosis and peripateia. More specifically, this paper investigates the political and ethical stakes of loss, mourning, and trauma in confronting death after 300 years of deathful sleep. Instead of seeing the loss of self in time as a merely deleterious condition, this paper offers a more nuanced and socially symbolic reading of The People of the Cave as an enactment of loss, a pervasive performativity laden with political allusions, including the possible reading of the sleepers’ final return to he cave as a symbolic rejection of Egypt’s apathy towards its colonial destiny. At stake is a particular level of antithesis performed throughout the play: a tension between the sacred and the secular on the one hand, and the philosophical conundrum of being and time, on the other. The paper interrogates al-Hakim’s capacity to extract humanism from divinity only to connect them both to individual temporality and to the larger drama we call Existence.