O you who believe! do not take for guardians those who take your religion for a mockery and a joke, from among those who were given the Book before you and the unbelievers; and be careful of (your duty to) Allah if you are believers. 57 And when you call to prayer they make it a mockery and a joke; this is because they are a people who do not understand. 58 Say, "People of the Book! Do you resent us only because we believe in God and in what has been revealed to us and to others before, and because most of you are disobedient?" 59 Say: "Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? They whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into apes and swine because they worshipped the powers of evil: these are yet worse in station, and farther astray from the right path [than the mockers]." 60 For, when they come unto you, they say: "We do believe"; whereas, in fact, they come with the resolve to deny the truth, and depart in the same state. But God is fully aware of all that they would conceal. 61 You can see many of them competing with each other in sin, hostility, and in taking usury. What they had been doing is certainly evil. 62 Why do the masters and the rabbis not forbid them to utter sin, and consume the unlawful? Evil is the thing they have been working. 63 And the Jews say: "God's hand is shackled!" It is their own hands that are shackled; and rejected [by God] are they because of this their assertion. Nay, but wide are His hands stretched out: He dispenses [bounty] as He wills. But all that has been bestowed from on high upon thee [O Prophet] by thy Sustainer is bound to make many of them yet more stubborn in their overweening arrogance and in their denial of the truth. And so We have cast enmity and hatred among the followers of the Bible, [to last] until Resurrection Day; every time they light the fires of war, God extinguishes them; and they labour hard to spread corruption on earth: and God does not love the spreaders of corruption. 64 And had the people of the Book believed and feared, We would surely have expiated from them their misdeeds and would surely have made them enter the Garden of Delight. 65 If they had observed the Torah and the Gospel and what was revealed to them from their Lord, they would surely have been nourished from above and from below. There are some among them who are on the right course; but there are many among them who do nothing but evil. 66