—and no one holds such a view. What the verse intends by “days of ill fortune” is that those days were ill-omened for them alone.

Allah the Exalted also says:
“And in [the case of] ʿĀd, when We unleashed upon them the barren wind” (51:41),
that is, a wind that yields no good. A single, isolated wind stirs no clouds and fertilizes no trees; it is barren, producing nothing beneficial. Hence His statement:
“It left nothing of whatever it touched without reducing it to decayed ruin” (51:42)—
like a thing worn out and perished, from which no benefit at all can be derived.

Both al-Bukhārī and Muslim relate—through Shuʿbah, from al-Ḥakam, from Mujāhid, from Ibn ʿAbbās—that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said:
“I was aided by the easterly wind, and ʿĀd were destroyed by the westerly.”

As for His words:
“Remember the brother of ʿĀd when he warned his people in the sand-dunes, when warners had come and gone before and after him: ‘Worship none but Allah; I fear for you the punishment of a tremendous day’” (46:21),
the apparent sense is that this refers to the first ʿĀd, for its context parallels the story of the people of Hūd, who were the earlier nation. It is, however, possible that those mentioned here are the later ʿĀd, as suggested by what we have already cited and by the ḥadīth from ʿĀʾishah that will follow.

Concerning the verse:
“When they saw it as a cloud advancing toward their valleys they said, ‘This cloud will bring us rain’” (46:24),
when the people of ʿĀd observed this formation rising in the sky like a cloud, they supposed it to be a rain-cloud. In reality it was a cloud of punishment: what they took to be mercy proved to be retribution; what they hoped would bring good visited upon them the utmost harm. Allah said:
“Rather, it is what you sought to hasten” (46:24)—
that is, the chastisement—
and He clarified it with:
“a wind wherein is a painful torment” (46:24).

That torment may have been the piercing, icy, furious wind which assailed them for seven nights and eight days, leaving none of them alive. It pursued them even into mountain caves and clefts, whirled them about, cast them out, and destroyed them, laying waste their solidly built houses and lofty palaces. Just as they had boasted of their might—saying, “Who is stronger than us in power?”—Allah sent against them One stronger and more capable than they: the barren wind.

It is also possible that this wind, in the end, raised a cloud which the survivors imagined to be a cloud of mercy and succor; Allah then turned it into sparks and fire, as more than one scholar has mentioned. This would resemble what befell the Companions of the Canopy among the people of Midian, combining for them icy winds and the torment of fire—the most severe form of punishment, uniting opposites—along with the overwhelming Cry referred to in Sūrat al-Muʾminūn. Allah knows best.

Ibn Abī Ḥātim narrates: My father related to us, Muhammad ibn Yaḥyā ibn al-Ḍurays related to us, Ibn Faḍl related to us, from Muslim, from Mujāhid, from Ibn ʿUmar, who said that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) declared: “No wind that Allah loosed upon ʿĀd …”