—yet they persisted in rejecting Our signs (Fussilat 41:15). So Allah—exalted and glorified be He—afflicted them with a severe drought; the sky withheld its water, and they stood waiting, hoping that Allah would send them relief. Then, one morning, Allah unleashed upon them the barren wind: a mighty gale that carried such masses of sand and dust it looked like layered storm-clouds.

When they saw it as a cloud sweeping toward their valleys, they said, “This is a cloud that will bring us rain!” (al-Aḥqāf 46:24). Such was Allah’s wisdom: the wind did not strike them unexpectedly; it came just when they were counting on rainfall, so its impact would be all the more crushing. Something approached that they imagined would water them, yet it was a wind that would annihilate them. For a punishment to descend precisely when a person anticipates relief from hardship makes it severer still.

It is like promising someone a handful of coins and then snatching them away—how much harsher the blow!

Thus, when they saw it advancing and said, “This is a cloud that will bring us rain!”—for they had been challenging their prophet, saying, “If you truly possess any punishment, then bring it upon us!”—there came upon them “a wind wherein is a painful torment, destroying everything by the command of its Lord, so that nothing could be seen except their dwellings” (cf. al-Aḥqāf 46:24-25). We seek Allah’s protection.

That gale raged over them for seven nights and eight consecutive days, beginning at sunrise and ending only at sunset—relentless, cutting them off completely. It would lift a man up to the very clouds and then hurl him down, so they became like hollow trunks of uprooted date-palms, twisted upon their backs—Allah’s refuge is sought!—as though in prostration, trying to escape the wind after it had borne them aloft and dashed them to the ground, but it availed them nothing.