And that the infirm of heart and the unbelievers may say, What meaneth God by this parable?

Thus God misleadeth whom He will, and whom He will doth He guide aright:  and none knoweth the armies of thy Lord but Himself:  and this is no other than a warning to mankind.

Nay, by the Moon!

By the Night when it retreateth!

By the Morn when it brighteneth!

Hell is one of the most grievous woes,

Fraught with warning to man,

To him among you who desireth to press forward, or to remain behind.5

For its own works lieth every soul in pledge.  But they of God’s right hand

In their gardens shall ask of the wicked;-

“What hath cast you into Hell-fire?”6

They will say, “We were not of those who prayed,

And we were not of those who fed the poor,

And we plunged into vain disputes with vain disputers,

And we rejected as a lie, the day of reckoning,

Till the certainty7 came upon us”-

And intercession of the interceders shall not avail them.

Then what hath come to them that they turn aside from the Warning

As if they were affrighted asses fleeing from a lion?

And every one of them would fain have open pages given to him out of Heaven.

It shall not be.  They fear not the life to come.

It shall not be.  For this Koran is warning enough.  And whoso will, it warneth him.

But not unless God please, shall they be warned.  Meet is He to be feared. 
Meet is forgiveness in Him.

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1 This Sura is placed by Muir in the “second stage” of Meccan Suras, and twenty-first in chronological order, in the third or fourth year of the Prophet’s career.  According, however, to the chronological list of Suras given by Weil (Leben M. p. 364) from ancient tradition, as well as from the consentient voice of tradionists and commentaries (v.  Nöld.  Geschichte, p. 69; Sprenger’s Life of Mohammad, p. 111) it was the next revealed after the Fatrah, and the designation to the prophetic office.  The main features of the tradition are, that Muhammad while wandering about in the hills near Mecca, distracted by doubts and by anxiety after truth, had a vision of the Angel Gabriel seated on a throne between heaven and earth, that he ran to his wife, Chadijah, in the greatest alarm, and desired her, perhaps from superstitious motives (and believing that if covered with clothes he should be shielded from the glances of evil spirits-comp.  Stanley on I Cor. xi. 10), to envelope him in his mantle; that then Gabriel came down and addressed him as in v.  I. This vision, like that which preceded Sura xcvi., may actually have occurred during the hallucinations of one of the epileptic fits from which Muhammad from early youth appears to have suffered.  Hence Muhammad in Sura lxxxi. appeals to it as a