al-Zumar 39:50-52

"Those before them said this too; but what they had earned availed them nothing."

قَدْ قَالَهَا — "they had said it". The pronoun goes back to the sentence in the forty-ninth verse: innamā ūtītuhū ʿalā ʿilm — "this was given to me by my knowledge."

That is, the verse ties a sentence to history: this saying is not new; it is a saying that recurs.

I record this as an observation: the sūra brings no evidence to refute the claim — it shows the end of those who made the same claim. The same method was treated in al-Aḥqāf at 46/27: mā ḥawlakum mina'l-qurā — the ruins around you.

أَوَلَمْ يَعْلَمُوٓا۟ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَبْسُطُ ٱلرِّزْقَ لِمَن يَشَآءُ وَيَقْدِرُ — basṭ (to spread out and widen) and qadr (to give by measure).

The two verbs must be recorded together: both the abundance and the scarcity of what is given are tied, in the same sentence, to the same will. That is, abundance is no proof of desert, and straitness no proof of having fallen from favour — and this is the direct answer to the claim of the forty-ninth verse (I earned it by my knowledge).