they say. So glorify your Lord with His praise and be among those who prostrate, and worship your Lord until certainty comes to you.” (al-Ḥijr 95–99)

Notice how, immediately after saying, “We certainly know that your breast is constricted by what they say” (al-Ḥijr 97), Allah commands him to declare His transcendence and praise. The situation demands that the Lord be exalted and thanked in the midst of the anguish Quraysh were causing the Prophet ﷺ—meaning: declare Him above everything unbefitting. And know that whatever Allah, majestic and exalted, brings to pass is sheer wisdom and sheer mercy, for which He is ever deserving of praise.

He then concluded the cited passages with Allah’s words: “When they forgot what they had been reminded of, We delivered those who forbade evil and seized the wrongdoers with a wretched punishment because of the corruption they used to commit” (al-Aʿrāf 165). This refers to the town mentioned earlier—a coastal community whose people were forbidden by Allah to fish on the Sabbath. Allah tested them so that on Saturdays the fish would come in abundance, surfacing on the water, while on the other days none would appear. As time passed they said, “How can we ignore all this fish?” So they resorted to a stratagem that availed them nothing: they spread their nets on Friday; when the fish arrived on Saturday they were caught in those nets, and on Sunday the people collected them.

The exemplary punishment from Allah, exalted is He, was that He said to them, “Be despised apes!”—a decretive command: “Be apes, rejected.” They therefore became apes. Had He wished He could have said, “Be donkeys,” but He said, “Be apes,” because the ape most closely resembles