the wicked and the unbelievers. The sense of the verse is that none persists in disobedience while feeling safe from Allah’s counter-plotting—His requital for evil schemes—except those who are doomed to loss.

What those who truly know Allah fear of His plotting is fourfold:

1. That He may delay the punishment due for their deeds, so they fall into delusion, grow comfortable with sin, and the chastisement then strikes them suddenly and unawares.
2. That they grow heedless of Him and forget to remember Him; when they abandon His remembrance and obedience, He abandons them, tribulation and trial rush upon them, and His plot against them consists in His forsaking them.
3. That He knows of their sins and defects what they themselves do not perceive, so His plot reaches them from where they least expect.
4. That He tests them with what they have no patience to bear, they are thereby tempted, and that too is a form of plotting.

Section
• The year is a tree, its months are the branches, its days the boughs, its hours the leaves, and breaths are its fruit. Whoever spends his breaths in obedience will reap sweet fruit; whoever spends them in disobedience will harvest colocynth—bitter to the taste. The gathering of the crop will only be on the Day of Return; then it will be clear which fruits are sweet and which are bitter.
• Sincerity and monotheism are a tree in the heart; its branches are righteous deeds, and its fruit is wholesome life in this world and abiding bliss in the Hereafter. Just as the fruits of Paradise are never cut off nor withheld, so too is the fruit of monotheism and sincerity in this world.