(35–40) “We certainly gave Moses the Scripture and appointed his brother Aaron as a helper alongside him. * Then We said, ‘Go, both of you, to the people who denied Our signs,’ and We utterly destroyed them. * And as for the people of Noah, when they denied the messengers, We drowned them and made them a sign for mankind; and We have prepared a painful punishment for the wrongdoers. * We also destroyed Ād, Thamūd, the people of al-Rass, and many generations in between. * To each We set forth examples, and each We annihilated completely. * They have certainly passed by the town that was showered with a terrible rain. Have they not seen it? Rather, they do not expect any resurrection.”

Allah refers here to these accounts, which He recounts at length in other verses, in order to warn those being addressed against persisting in their denial of their Messenger, lest they suffer what befell those nations that had lived nearby and whose histories they knew through the widespread and well-known reports concerning them.

They could even see the ruins of some of those peoples with their own eyes, such as the people of Salih at al-Hijr and the town that was showered with a terrible rain of stones of baked clay. They passed by their ruins morning and night during their journeys. Those nations were no worse than they are, and their messengers were no better than the Messenger sent to these people: “Are your disbelievers any better than those, or is there an exemption for you in the Scriptures?”

Despite the signs they had witnessed, what kept these people from believing was that they did not expect to be raised or resurrected. They neither expected to meet their Lord nor feared His punishment, and so they persisted in their obstinacy. Otherwise, signs had come to them that left no room for doubt, specious objection, confusion, or misgiving.