al-Baqara 2:214 — "Did you suppose you would enter the garden?"

"Or did you suppose you would enter the garden without there coming to you the like of what came to those who passed away before you? Poverty and hardship touched them and they were shaken, until the messenger and those who believed with him said, 'When will God's help come?' Surely God's help is near."

The verse descends in three steps:

And the fourth step is a word spoken: مَتَىٰ نَصْرُ ٱللَّهِ — "When will God's help come?"

Who says this is stated plainly in the verse: al-rasūlu wa'lladhīna āmanū maʿahū — the messenger and those who believed with him.

This is a detail worth recording: the question itself is not condemned. The verse transmits this word not as an instance of weakness but as a measure of the point the hardship had reached. And the answer is not a rebuke but a statement: alā inna naṣra'llāhi qarīb.

The choice of the word زُلْزِلُوا۟ is meaningful too: the root is the name of the 99th sūra (al-Zilzāl), and there the shaking of the earth is recounted. Here what is shaken is not the earth but people.