Punishment narratives in the Quran
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Punishment narratives or narrative of divine retribution or pericope of retribution are a literary form present in the Qur'an of narratives recounting the destruction of a people in the past in response to a refusal to listen to a divine messenger .
The term was first used[1] by Josef Horovitz in Koranische Untersuchungen in 1926.[2]
Literary scheme
This literary topos follows a usual pattern composed of a meeting between a messenger of God and a community.[2] The messenger exhorts to repentance and the worship of God,[1] while the community refuses the divine message and rejects the messenger,[1] and in turn gets destroyed by God. In this scheme, it is a past destruction and not a promise for life after death.[3] The messenger is saved, sometimes with some characters who followed him.[2]
Many passages of the Quran follow this pattern.[2] These stories are thus constructed to evoke the history of Noah, Lot, the Arab prophets, and some others anonymous groups.[3] These passages mainly belong to the Meccan period.[3] The oldest is found in Surah 91 and concerns the Thamud. This passage evokes the existence of a local legend telling of a sacrilege. If this people is evoked in pre-Islamic poetry, these evocations are mixed with later traditions.[2] Jonah is the only case in the entire Quran where the community repents and escapes punishment.[3]