Book Review: Key Terms of the Qur'an

Abstract

Key Terms of the Qurʾan—A Third Review

Nicolai Sinai: Key Terms of the Qur’an • Princeton: Princeton University Press • 2023 • pp 840 • ISBN 978-0691241319.

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.