Alongside its treatment of individual gratitude, the Qur'an repeatedly narrates the shukr and kufr of entire peoples, treating collective ingratitude for a nation's material blessings as a historical pattern that precedes and explains its downfall, distinct from, though related to, the personal devotional sense discussed elsewhere in this collection.
The clearest case is the account of Sheba (34:15-17): the Qur'an describes a prosperous land, "a good land and a forgiving Lord," with gardens on both sides of the community's settlements, and narrates that the people turned away in ingratitude, so God sent against them the flood of the dam of Ma'rib, destroying their gardens and replacing them with bitter fruit and thorny shrubs, concluding starkly, "thus We recompensed them for their ingratitude; do We ever so requite any but the ungrateful?" The historical dam at Ma'rib in Yemen did fail catastrophically in antiquity, and the Qur'anic narrative, along with pre-Islamic South Arabian poetry lamenting the event, both draw on the same remembered catastrophe, though the Qur'an reads it through the moral lens of collective shukr and kufr rather than as an engineering or political failure.
This collective register recurs across the Qur'an's narratives of destroyed peoples, Aad, Thamud and others, and Islamic exegesis generally reads these accounts as establishing a general historical law: material prosperity is itself a test of gratitude, and a community's failure to recognize its blessings as gifts requiring grateful response is presented as the specific mechanism by which prosperity turns to ruin, a framing that gives shukr a historical and political dimension well beyond the personal piety usually associated with the term.