Blessed is He who, if He willed, could have made for you [something] better than that - gardens beneath which rivers flow - and could make for you palaces. 10 But nay! It is [the very coming of] the Last Hour to which they give the lie! However, for such as give the lie to [the announcement of] the Last Hour We have readied a blazing flame: 11 When it will see them from afar, they will hear its raging and roaring. 12 And when they are thrown into a narrow place therein bound in chains, they will cry out thereupon for destruction. 13 (Then it will be said to them:) "Do not call for one death today, but call for many deaths." 14 Say thou: is that better or Garden of Abidance that hath been promised to the God-fearing? It shall be theirs as a recompense and a retreat. 15 They shall have therein what they desire abiding (in it); it is a promise which it is proper to be prayed for from your Lord. 16 BUT [as for people who are oblivious of thy Sustainer's oneness] one Day He will gather them together with all that they [now] worship instead of God, and will ask [those to whom divinity was falsely ascribed]: "Was it you who led these My creatures astray, or did they by themselves stray from the right path?" 17 They will say: "Glory to Thee! not meet was it for us that we should take for protectors others besides Thee: But Thou didst bestow, on them and their fathers, good things (in life), until they forgot the Message: for they were a people (worthless and) lost." 18 the Remembrance, and were a people corrupt.' So they cried lies touching the things you say, and you can neither turn it aside, nor find any help. Whosoever of you does evil, We shall let him taste a great chastisement. 19 We never sent before you apostles who did not eat food and walk the market places. We make some of you the means of trying the others. So will you persevere? Your Lord is always watching. 20