Book Review: Nicolai Sinai: Key Terms of the Qurʾān: A Third Review


This third review of Nicolai Sinai’s Key Terms of the Qurʾān is not an isolated response to a single author nor a continuation of some academic fixation. It is part of a broader concern: why does so much Western Qurʾānic scholarship
remain unable to grasp the internal logic, conceptual architecture, and hermeneutical sophistication of the Islamic scholarly tradition? The first review surveyed the work’s structural promises and its pervasive superficiality; the second examined the entry on “Allah”—the heart of Qurʾānic theology—and showed how the methodological framework of the Key Terms project is incapable of accommodating the Qurʾān’s metaphysical grammar. This third review takes a single term of immense significance, Guidance (hudā)—together with its opposite, Misguidance (ḍalāl)—in order to expose, with concrete illustration, the deeper epistemic traps and inherited habits of interpretation that continue to plague Western academic approaches to the Qurʾān.
Among the conceptual constellations of the Qurʾān, guidance occupies a privileged place. It lies at the heart of Qurʾānic anthropology, cosmogony, prophecy, and soteriology; it involves divine will, human response, moral responsibility, and eschatological culmination. An entry on hudā in a critical dictionary of Qurʾānic concepts should illuminate these dimensions. Sinai’s entry begins with a promising nod in this direction: he notes that guidance and misguidance belong to the Qurʾān’s pervasive moral polarities, linked conceptually to belief and repudiation, sightedness and blindness, moral
health and moral sickness. One anticipates a careful mapping of the Qurʾān’s internal semantics, its metaphysical commitments, and its multi-layered portrayal of divine and human agency. Instead, what follows is the familiar descent into the methodological crucible that has shaped Western Qurʾānic studies for over three centuries: Sinai’s entry opens with “Guidance in pre-Qurʾānic poetry and the Biblical tradition!”

Journal of Islamic Sciences, Vol. 18 (Winter 2025)​ No. 2

Muzaffar Iqbal

Muzaffar Iqbal is the President of the Center for Islamic Sciences and the General Editor of the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qurʾan.