So if only there had been one town among the towns which We destroyed that repented from disbelief and sincerely embraced faith before witnessing the punishment at the time of the obligation, and did not delay as Pharaoh did until he was seized by the throat, and his faith was of no benefit to him because it occurred at the time of choice. And Ubayy and Abdullah read: 'If only there had been except the people of Yunus,' as an exception from the towns, because the intended meaning is their people. This is an interrupted exception meaning: but the people of Yunus, when they believed. It is also possible for it to be a connected exception, and the sentence is in the meaning of negation, as if it were said: no town among the destroyed towns believed except the people of Yunus, and its position is based on the original exception. And it has been read in the nominative as a substitution, as has been narrated from Al-Jurmi and Al-Kisai. It has been narrated that Yunus, peace be upon him, was sent to Nineveh from the land of Mosul, but they denied him. He left them angry, and when they lost him, they feared the descent of punishment. They wore sackcloth and cried out for forty nights. It is said that Yunus told them: your time is forty nights. They said: if we see the signs of destruction, we will believe in you. When thirty-five nights passed, the sky became filled with a huge black cloud that emitted a thick smoke, then descended until it enveloped their city and darkened their rooftops. They wore sackcloth and went out to the open with themselves, their women, their children, and their animals, and they separated between the women and children and the animals and their young. Some of them longed for one another, and the voices and cries rose, and they expressed faith and repentance and supplicated. So Allah had mercy on them and lifted the punishment from them, and the day of Ashura was a Friday. And from Ibn Mas'ud: it reached the level of their repentance that they returned the wrongs, to the extent that a man would uproot a stone that he had placed as the foundation of his building and return it. It is said that they went out to an old man from the remnants of their scholars and said: the punishment has descended upon us, what do you see? He said to them: say 'O Ever-Living, when there is no living, and O Ever-Living, Who gives life to the dead, and O Ever-Living, there is no deity except You.' They said it, and the punishment was lifted from them. And from Al-Fudail ibn 'Iyad: they said: 'O Allah, our sins have become great and immense, and You are greater and more exalted than them. Do with us what You are worthy of, and do not do with us what we are worthy of.'