And God said, “Get ye all down hence, the one of you a foe unto the other.  Hereafter shall guidance come unto you from me;

And whoso followeth my guidance shall not err, and shall not be wretched: 

But whoso turneth away from my monition, his truly shall be a life of misery: 

And We will assemble him with others on the day of Resurrection, blind."28

He will say, “O my Lord! why hast thou assembled me with others, blind? whereas I was endowed with sight.”

He will answer, “Thus is it, because our signs came unto thee and thou didst forget them, and thus shalt thou be forgotten this day.”

Even thus will We recompense him who hath transgressed and hath not believed in the signs of his Lord; and assuredly the chastisement of the next world will be more severe and more lasting.

Are not they, who walk the very places where they dwelt, aware how many generations we have destroyed before them?  Verily in this are signs to men of insight.

And had not a decree of respite from thy Lord first gone forth, their chastisement had at once ensued.  Yet the time is fixed.

Put up then with what they say; and celebrate the praise of thy Lord before the sunrise, and before its setting; and some time in the night do thou praise him, and in the extremes29 of the day, that thou haply mayest please Him.

And strain not thine eye after what We have bestowed on divers of them-the braveries of this world-that we may thereby prove them.  The portion which thy Lord will give, is better and more lasting.

Enjoin prayer on thy family, and persevere therein.  We ask not of thee to find thine own provision-we will provide for thee, and a happy issue shall there be to piety.

But they say, “If he come not to us with a sign from his Lord . . .!"30 But have not clear proofs for the Koran come to them, in what is in the Books of old?

And had We destroyed them by a chastisement before its time, they would surely have said, “O our Lord!  How could we believe if thou didst not send unto us an Apostle that we might follow thy signs ere that we were humbled and disgraced.”

Say:  Each one of us awaiteth the end.  Wait ye then, and ye shall know which of us have been followers of the even way, and who hath been the rightly guided.

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1 The first 14 or 16 verses of this Sura are said to have induced Omar to embrace Islam (His. 226.  Ibn Sâd, i. and v.  Comp.  Weil, p. 60.  Causs. i. 396 ff.) in the sixth year before the Hejira.

2 Freytag supposes these letters to mean, Hush! but see Sura lxviii. 1, p. 32.

3 Lit. if thou raise thy voice.

4 Lit. guidance.  Moses had lost his way, say the Commentators, when journeying to Egypt to visit his mother.

5 The Muhammadan Commentators tell how Moses when a child burnt his tongue with a live coal.  The same story is found in Midr.  Jalkut on Ex. c. 166, and in Shalsheleth Hakabalah, p. 5, b.  Ed. Amsterd.