it is He who made you [people] successors to the land. Those who deny the truth will bear the consequences: their denial will only make them more odious to their Lord, and add only to their loss.
Say, ‘Consider those “partners” of yours that you call upon beside God. Show me! What part of the earth did they create? What share of the heavens do they possess?’ Have We given them a book that contains clear evidence? No indeed! The idolaters promise each other only delusion.
[The idolaters] swore their most solemn oath that, if someone came to warn them, they would be more rightly guided than any [other] community, but when someone did come they turned yet further away,
became more arrogant in the land, and intensified their plotting of evil- the plotting of evil only rebounds on those who plot. Do they expect anything but what happened to earlier people? You will never find any change in God’s practice; you will never find any deviation there.
Have they not travelled in the land and seen how those before them met their end, although they were superior to them in strength? God is not to be frustrated by anything in the heavens or on the earth: He is all knowing, all powerful.
