their hearts such terror—some of them you killed and others you took captive (26). Then He bequeathed to you their land, their dwellings, and their wealth, and a land you had never yet set foot upon. Allah is powerful over all things (27). (Al-Ahzab 26-27)

This ordeal with which the Muslims have been tested together with their enemy (1)—that corrupt enemy who has broken away from the law of Islam—has unfolded in a way that mirrors what befell the Muslims with their enemy (2) in the lifetime of the Messenger of Allah, ﷺ, during those campaigns about which Allah revealed His Book and by which He tried His Prophet and the believers—an example (3) for anyone who hopes to meet Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah much until the Day of Resurrection. Indeed, the texts of the Qur’an and the sunnah, which together constitute the call of Muhammad, ﷺ, encompass (4) all people, whether by explicit verbal and substantive universality or by substantive universality alone. The pledges of Allah set forth in His Book and in the sunnah of His Messenger extend to the last part of this community just as they applied to its first.

Allah has recounted to us the stories of the nations that came before only so that they may serve as a lesson: that we might liken our circumstances to theirs and weigh the latter part of every nation against its first. Thus the believer (5) of the later generations will resemble the believer of the earlier ones (6), and the unbeliever and hypocrite of the later generations will resemble the unbeliever and hypocrite of the earlier ones (7), as the Exalted says—