﴿ وَإِذَآ أَرَدْنَآ أَن نُّهْلِكَ قَرْيَةً أَمَرْنَا مُتْرَفِيهَا فَفَسَقُوا۟ فِيهَا فَحَقَّ عَلَيْهَا ٱلْقَوْلُ فَدَمَّرْنَٰهَا تَدْمِيرًۭا ﴾

“But when [this has been done, and] it is Our will to destroy a community, We convey Our last warning to those of its people who have lost themselves entirely in the pursuit of pleasures; and [if] they [continue to] act sinfully, the sentence [of doom] passed on the community takes effect, and We break it to smithereens.”

And when We desire to destroy a town, to the end [of this verse]: to everything in this world there comes elimination and this elimination comes as a result of a preparedness that entails it. Just as the elimination of the body, by the elimination of moderation and the actualisation of deviance, makes a thing distant from the shadow of the Oneness, which is the cause of the subsistence and firm existence of everything, so too is the case when it comes to the destruction of a town and its elimination because of the occurrence of a deviation in it from the straight path, which is the path of God, that is, the [divine] Law that preserves [the cosmic] order. So when the time comes for the destruction of a town it will have undoubtedly become deserving of destruction, and that will be as a result of some wickedness or refusal to obey God. Thus when His will pertains to its destruction there precedes necessarily the wicked acts of its affluent inhabitants, those wealthy and comfortable folk who were arrogant and insolent with God's graces, using them in other than the way in which they ought to be [used]: that [comes] by a command of God and a determining by Him, because of a wretchedness that had adhered to their preparednesses and upon which their destruction became necessary.