O you who have attained to faith! If you remain conscious of God He will endow you with a standard by which to discern the true from the false, and will efface your bad deeds, and will forgive you your sins; for God is limitless in His great bounty. 29 And remember O dear Prophet when the disbelievers were scheming against you to either imprison you, or to kill you or to banish you; and they were scheming, and Allah was making His secret plan; and Allah’s secret plan is the best. 30 And when Our verses are recited to them they say, “Yes, we have heard – if we wanted we could also say something like this – these are nothing but stories of former people!” 31 And when they said, “O Allah! If this (the Qur’an) is really the truth from You, then shower upon us a rain of stones from the sky, or bring upon us some painful punishment.” 32 God would not punish them while you were among them nor while they were asking for forgiveness. 33 And why should Allah not punish them, when they have barred others from the Sacred Mosque, although they were not its guardians? Its only guardians are the cautious, though most of them do not know. 34 And their prayer near the Kaa’bah is nothing except whistling and clapping; “So now taste the punishment – the result of your disbelief.” 35 Those who are bent on denying the truth are spending their wealth in debarring others from the path of God. They will continue to spend it in this way till, in the end, this spending will become a source of intense regret for them, and then they will be overcome. And those who denied the truth will be gathered together in Hell. 36 In order that Allah may distinguish the wicked (disbelievers, polytheists and doers of evil deeds) from the good (believers of Islamic Monotheism and doers of righteous deeds), and put the wicked (disbelievers, polytheists and doers of evil deeds) one on another, heap them together and cast them into Hell. Those! it is they who are the losers. 37