He therefore made it clear that He sometimes punishes the unbelievers through the hands of His faithful servants—by means of jihad and the enforcement of the prescribed legal limits—and sometimes by other kinds of punishment. Through such means He afflicted them in ways that led most of them to embrace faith, just as happened with Quraysh and others. Had He destroyed them, when they first rejected him, as He destroyed Pharaoh’s people and the nations before them, they would all have perished and the benefit of his message would have ceased for them; no descendants would have remained to believe in him. By contrast, when He chastises only some of them with various forms of torment—even if merely by defeat, captivity, or the killing of a number of them, as occurred on the Day of Badr—such humiliation and subjugation render them powerless while they remain alive. When souls are able to achieve their aims in full, they seldom turn away from them; but when they find themselves incapable of doing so, that very incapacity invites them to repent. As the saying goes, “Part of divine protection is that one is not given the opportunity to sin.” What befell them, then, served to incapacitate, deter, and summon them to repentance, and for that reason the majority of them later believed. Only a few were put to death—those chieftains of disbelief whose stature in this community was like that of Pharaoh in his. It is related that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said of Abū Jahl, “He is the Pharaoh of this community.” Allah also told Moses in the Torah: “I shall harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will not believe in you, that My signs and wonders may be manifest.”