and even when such usurious wealth remains in its owners’ hands, it is stripped of blessing: they reap no true benefit from it. All they endure are its burdens, shoulder its reckoning, and ultimately taste its punishment. The usurer is despised by Allah and by His creation alike, for he takes without giving, hoards while withholding, spends nothing and offers no charity—stingy, voracious, ever-amassing, ever-denying. Hearts recoil from him and society shuns him. This is his swift punishment, whereas the punishment awaiting him in the Hereafter is even harsher and everlasting, as Allah has declared in His Book. All of this is because riba is a filthy gain, a predatory illicit earning, and a heavy nightmare that weighs upon human societies.