Believers, if you fear God, He will give you guidance, will expiate your bad deeds and forgive you. God's favors are the greatest. 29 The unbelievers planned to imprison, murder or expel you (Muhammad) from your city. They make evil plans but God too plans and God's plans are the best. 30 When Our Signs are rehearsed to them, they say: "We have heard this (before): if we wished, we could say (words) like these: these are nothing but tales of the ancients." 31 And when they said, 'O God, if this be indeed the truth from Thee, then rain down upon us stones out of heaven, or bring us a painful chastisement.' 32 But God did not choose thus to chastise them while thou [O Prophet] wert still among them, nor would God chastise them when they [might yet] ask for forgiveness. 33 What (plea) have they that Allah should not punish them, when they debar (His servants) from the Inviolable Place of Worship, though they are not its fitting guardians. Its fitting guardians are those only who keep their duty to Allah. But most of them know not. 34 Their prayers at the Sacred House are nothing but whistling and clapping of hands. "So taste the punishment because of your denial." 35 Surely those who deny the truth spend their wealth to hinder people from the way of Allah, and will continue to so spend until their efforts become a source of intense regret for them, and then they will be vanquished, and then these deniers of the truth will be driven to Hell, 36 In order that Allah may distinguish the vile from the good; and the vile He shall place one upon another, and shall pile it all together, and shall place it into Hell. Those! It is they who are the losers. 37