Ghāfir (al-Muʾmin) 40:77-85

"When they saw Our might they said: 'We believe in God alone, and we deny what we used to associate with Him.' But their faith, once they had seen Our might, was of no use to them. This is God's way, which has passed among His servants."

The close sets in place the measure the sūra has been building from the start.

In the thirty-fifth verse the measure of those who dispute was asked after: bi-ghayri sulṭānin — with nothing to stand on. In the twenty-eighth verse the believing man built an argument with two branches. In the fifty-sixth verse the thing lying beneath the dispute was named: kibr.

And here it is told how the dispute ends: when the punishment is seen.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the verse's own expression: lammā raʾaw baʾsanā — the moment of seeing. Faith comes at the end, but not by proof, by sight. And it is not accepted.

The reason is given too, and it is named as a rule: sunnata'llāhi'llatī qad khalat fī ʿibādih.

The root س-ن-ن: to open a way, to make a thing smooth and flowing. Sunna — the way followed, the manner of working that continues. Here the word states not an exception but continuity: qad khalat — it has been so in the past as well.

وَخَسِرَ هُنَالِكَ ٱلْكَٰفِرُونَ — "and there the deniers were lost."

هُنَالِكَ — "there". An adverb of place, used for time. The sūra closes an eighty-five-verse narrative of dispute with a marker of place: the point at which the dispute ends.