“They urge you to hasten the punishment; but Allah will never fail in His promise. Indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning. (47)”

“Have they not travelled throughout the land?” That is, the disbelievers of Mecca, so that they might observe the places where the former nations who denied the truth met their destruction. “So that they may have hearts by which to understand, or ears by which to hear”—that is, the accounts of past generations related to them, from which they may take admonition. “For indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts within the breasts that are blind.” The pronoun is syntactically supplementary. The phrase “within the breasts” is mentioned for emphasis, like His saying, “A bird that flies with its two wings” (The Cattle 6:38).

Its meaning is that the harmful blindness is the blindness of the heart. As for loss of physical sight, it is not harmful in matters of religion. Qatadah said: “Outward sight is a means of provision and enjoyment, whereas the sight of the heart is the beneficial sight.”

“They urge you to hasten the punishment.” This was revealed concerning al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, when he said, “If this is truly the truth from You, then rain down stones upon us from the sky.” (1) “But Allah will never fail in His promise.” Thus, He fulfilled it on the day ⦗28/A⦘ of Badr. “Indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of your reckoning.” Ibn Kathir, Hamzah, and al-Kisa’i recited it here in the third person, in view of the words, “They urge you”; the remaining reciters read it in the second person, because this is more general, being addressed to both those who demand that it be hastened and the believers. They all agreed on the second-person reading in Surat al-Sajdah.

Ibn Abbas said: It means one of the six days in which Allah created the heavens and the earth.

Mujahid and Ikrimah said: It means a day from the days of the Hereafter, as is indicated by what was narrated from Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri: