۞ O YOU who have attained to faith! Be ever steadfast in upholding equity, bearing witness to the truth for the sake of God, even though it be against your own selves or your parents and kinsfolk. Whether the person concerned be rich or poor, God's claim takes precedence over [the claims of] either of them. Do not, then, follow your own desires, lest you swerve from justice: for if you distort [the truth,] behold, God is indeed aware of all that you do! 135 O you who have attained to faith! Hold fast unto your belief in God and His Apostle, and in the divine writ which He has bestowed from on high upon His Apostle, step by step, as well as in the revelation which He sent down aforetime: for he who denies God, and His angels, and His revelations, and His apostles, and the Last Day, has indeed gone far astray. 136 Those who believe, and then disbelieve, and then believe, and then disbelieve, and then increase in unbelief-God is not likely to forgive them, neither to guide them on any way. 137 Give tidings of painful chastisement to the hypocrites. 138 Do those who establish friendship with the disbelievers instead of the believers seek honor? Let them know that all honor belongs to God. 139 And indeed He has revealed to you in the Book that when you hear Allah's communications disbelieved in and mocked at do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them; surely Allah will gather together the hypocrites and the unbelievers all in hell. 140 Those who wait about you; if then there be victory for you from Allah, they say: were we not with you? And if there is a portion for the infidels, they say: gained we not mastery over you, and kept we not you back from the believers? Allah shall judge betwixt you on the Day of Judgement, and Allah shall not make for the infidels against the believers a way. 141