the earth after the Torah had been sent down to humankind—except for the town whose people were turned into apes. Have you not considered that Allah the Exalted says: “We certainly gave Moses the Book after We had destroyed the earlier generations” (al-Qaṣaṣ 28:43)?

Al-Bazzār transmitted this report in one version as marfūʿ, but the more probable view—Allah knows best—is that it is mawqūf. Its purport is that every nation destroyed wholesale met that fate before Moses, and among them were the People of the Rass.

Allah, Most High, says in Sūrat al-Furqān:
“‘Ād, Thamūd, the People of the Rass, and many generations in between—We set forth examples for each of them, and each We utterly annihilated” (25:38–39).

And in Sūrat Qāf He says:
“Before them, the people of Noah, the People of the Rass, and Thamūd denied, as did ‘Ād, Pharaoh, the brothers of Lot, the dwellers of the Thicket, and the people of Tubbaʿ. All rejected the messengers, so My warning came to pass” (50:12–14).

These passages, together with what preceded, clearly show that they were destroyed, demolished, and obliterated—that is, they perished.

This invalidates Ibn Jarīr’s view (1) that they were the People of the Ditch mentioned in Sūrat al-Burūj, for those, according to Ibn Isḥāq and others, lived after Jesus, and that opinion itself requires scrutiny.

Ibn Jurayj related that Ibn ʿAbbās said: “The People of the Rass were the inhabitants of a village belonging to Thamūd.” (2)

The great ḥāfiẓ Abū’l-Qāsim Ibn ʿAsākir, at the beginning of his History when discussing the founding of Damascus (3), quoting the History of Abū’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Khurdādhbeh and others, states that the People of the Rass were in Ḥaḍūr (4).

Allah sent to them a prophet named Ḥanẓalah ibn Ṣafwān, but they rejected and killed him. ʿĀd ibn ʿAwṣ ibn Iram ibn Sām ibn Noah then departed with his family from al-Rass and settled in the Aḥqāf. Allah destroyed the People of the Rass, while ʿĀd’s descendants spread throughout Yemen and, beyond that, across the earth. Eventually Jīrūn ibn Saʿd ibn ʿĀd ibn ʿAwṣ ibn Iram ibn Sām ibn Noah settled in Damascus, built the city, and named it Jīrūn. This is “Iram of the lofty pillars,” and nowhere are there more stone columns than in Damascus. Allah then sent Hūd ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Rabāḥ ibn Khālid ibn al-Khulūd ibn ʿĀd to the tribe of ʿĀd—that is, the descendants of ʿĀd in the Aḥqāf. They denied him, and Allah destroyed them. This implies that the People of the Rass lived many ages before ʿĀd; Allah knows best.

Ibn Abī Ḥātim narrated—through Abū Bakr ibn Abī ʿĀṣim, from his father, from Shabīb ibn Bishr, from ʿIkrimah, from Ibn ʿAbbās—that al-Rass is a well in Azerbaijan.