(97–100) “Whoever Allah guides is truly guided, and whoever He causes to stray—you will never find for them any protectors besides Him. We will gather them on the Day of Resurrection upon their faces—blind, mute, and deaf. Their abode is Hell. Whenever it subsides, We increase the blaze for them. * That is their recompense because they disbelieved in Our signs and said, ‘When we have become bones and crumbled remains, will we truly be raised as a new creation?’ * Do they not see that Allah, who created the heavens and earth, is able to create the likes of them? He has appointed for them a term about which there is no doubt. Yet the wrongdoers refused anything but disbelief. * Say, ‘If you possessed the treasuries of my Lord’s mercy, you would withhold them for fear of spending. Man has ever been miserly.’”
Allah Most High informs us that He alone controls guidance and misguidance. Whoever He guides—making the path of ease easy for him and keeping him away from hardship—is truly guided. Whoever He causes to stray—forsaking him and leaving him to his own devices—has no guide besides Allah and no protector to save him from Allah’s punishment, when Allah gathers them upon their faces, disgraced, blind, and mute, neither seeing nor speaking.
“Their abode”—meaning their place of settlement and dwelling—“is Hell,” which contains every worry, grief, and torment.
“Whenever it subsides,” meaning when it nears extinction, “We increase the blaze for them”; that is, We stoke it with them. The punishment never relents for them, nor is death decreed for them so that they might die, nor is its torment lightened for them. Allah Most High did not wrong them. Rather, He recompensed them because they disbelieved in His signs, denied the resurrection proclaimed by the messengers and affirmed by the Scriptures, deemed their Lord incapable, and denied His perfect power.
“They said, ‘When we have become bones and crumbled remains, will we truly be raised as a new creation?’” That is, they maintained that this could never happen because their corrupt minds considered it exceedingly far-fetched.
“Do they not see that Allah, who created the heavens and earth”—which are greater than the creation of mankind—“is able to create the likes of them?” Indeed, He has power to do so.
“Yet” He has “appointed for that a term about which there is no doubt” or uncertainty. Were it not for that appointed term, He could, had He willed, have brought it upon them suddenly. Despite His having established the arguments and proofs for the resurrection, “the wrongdoers refused anything but disbelief,” out of injustice and fabrication on their part.