These are they who believed not, and hindered you from visiting the holy temple, and also hindered the offering, being detained, that it should not arrive at the place where it ought to be sacrificed. Had it not been that ye might have trampled on divers true believers, both men and women, whom ye knew not, being promiscuously assembled with the infidels, and that a crime might therefore have lighted on you on their account, without your knowledge, He had not restrained your hands from them: But this was done, that God might lead whom He pleaseth into his mercy. If they had been distinguished from one another, we had surely chastised such of them as believed not, with a severe chastisement.