Al A‘rāf

فَلَمَّا نَسُوا مَاذُكِّرُوا بِهِ أَنْجَيْنَا الَّذِينَ يَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ السُّوءِ وَأَخَذْنَا الَّذِينَ ظَلَمُوا بِعَذَابٍ بَئِيسٍ بِمَا كَانُوا يَفْسُقُونَ

فَلَمَّا عَتَوْا عَن مَا نُهُوا عَنْهُ قُلْنَا لَهُمْ كُونُوا قِرَدَةً خَاسِئِينَ

165 . “So when they forgot what they were reminded of, We delivered those who forbade evil and seized those who were unjust with a dreadful punishment for the transgressions they used to commit.”
166 . “So when they defied what they had been forbidden from, We said to them: ‘Be you apes scouted’.”

In this verse, the Qur’ān implies that finally mammonism overwhelmed them and they forgot the command of Allah (s.w.t.), therefore they confronted the bitter moment of punishment. The verse says:

Who Were Delivered?

From those three groups of people: (the sinners, the inattentive ones, and the admonishers), only the third group were secured from the punishment of Allah. As the Islamic traditions indicate, when this group, the third group, saw that their admonishments were not effective in the wrong doers, they became worried and said that they would go out of the city. They left the city at night and went into the desert. Accidentally, by that very night, the retribution of Allah befell upon the couple of the abovementioned groups who were inside the city.

The sort of their retribution is explained in the second verse of the above verses as follows:

It is clear that the commandment saying ‘Be you’, here, is a genetic command, which means they changed immediately in the shape of ‘apes’. According to some Islamic literature, of course, those who were transformed continued to live only for a few days, and then they died, so that there could appear no generation from them later.