The Bee
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[16:112]
AND GOD propounds [to you] a parable: [Imagine] a town which was [once] secure and at ease, with its sustenance coming to it abundantly from all quarters, and which thereupon blasphemously refused to show gratitude for God’s blessings: and therefore God caused it to taste the all-embracing misery of hunger and fear in result of all [the evil] that its people had so persistently wrought.

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* v.112 : Lit., “the garment” (libās) – idiomatically used in classical Arabic to describe the utmost degree of misfortune which “envelops man like a garment” (Tāj al-‘Arūs, with specific reference to the above verse).
* This parable is meant to show that deliberate ingratitude for the manifold blessings which God bestows upon man – in other words, a deliberate refusal to submit to His guidance – is bound, in the long run and in the context of aggregate social life, to have disastrous consequences not only in the hereafter but in this world as well, inasmuch as no society may expect to live in security and ease unless it conforms to the ethical and social standards inherent in the concept of man’s “bond with God” (as explained in sūrah 2, note 19).