al-Ḥajj 22:47-48

Wa yastaʿjilūnaka bi'l-ʿadhābi wa lan yukhlifa'llāhu waʿdah · Wa inna yawman ʿinda rabbika ka-alfi sanatin mimmā taʿuddūn · Wa ka-ayyin min qaryatin amlaytu lahā wa hiya ẓālimatun thumma akhadhtuhā wa ilayya'l-maṣīr

"They ask you to hasten the punishment. God does not break His promise. A day with your Lord is like a thousand years of what you count. How many a town I granted a respite while it was doing wrong, and then I seized it. To Me is the journey's end."

What the verse does is a change of scale.

The objection is this: the punishment does not come, so it will not come. The ground of the objection is the time that has passed.

And the answer opens up time itself to discussion: ka-alfi sanatin mimmā taʿuddūn — "like a thousand years of what you count."

The note must be recorded: mimmā taʿuddūn. The counting party is specified. The verse, in saying "a thousand years", is therefore not reporting an absolute span; it is making a comparison against man's unit of counting.

I give this as my own reading, and its ground is that note: the sentence does not report a length of time, it reports the difference between two scales. And the particle of comparison (kāf) supports this too: ka-alfi sanatin — "like a thousand years", not "a thousand years".

At al-Maʿārij 70/4 another number occurs (fifty thousand years), and at al-Sajda 32/5 a thousand years occurs again. The difference of the numbers has been dwelt on in the classical commentaries and various explanations are transmitted. No calculation is drawn from these numbers in this commentary; per the method (Method) no reckoning of numbers is made. The one thing recorded is that all three verses do the same work: not to take man's measure of time as absolute.

The verb occurred in the forty-fourth verse as well: fa-amlaytu li'l-kāfirīn. It is repeated here, and this is a link that can be verified from the text.

The difference between the two occurrences is in the object:

And in both the same sequence of verbs is repeated: granting a respite → seizing.

ٱلْمَصِير — root ص-ي-ر: to pass from one state to another; to arrive. Maṣīr — the place one comes to.