How shall God guide a people, to the end of the verse: He denies His guidance to a people whom He had guided initially by the light of preparedness to faith, then by the light of faith until they witnessed with their own eyes the truth of the Messenger and acquired certainty to the extent that they no longer had a single doubt; and this [certainty] was supplemented by [their] acquisition of rational proofs from clear signs. But then after all of these testimonies their souls manifested themselves in obstinacy and obduracy. The lights of their witnessing hearts, intellects and spirits, all three of them, were veiled by the Truth for the sake of the Truth, on account of the misfortune of this [act of] injustice of theirs and the mastery which their [evil-] commanding souls acquired over them, that which constitutes the utmost in evil deed. Thus God says: God guides not the evildoing folk, because of the harshness of their veil and the great extent to which they are distant from the Truth and from the reception of the light. And these [evildoing folk] are of two classes. For one class the configuration of the mastery of the commanding soul over their hearts has taken deep root and become fixed in them. They have engrossed themselves excessively in error and the pursuit of evil and have reached extreme distance [from the Truth] and obstinacy until such [behaviour] became an inherent trait that does not abandon them. In the case of the other class, that configuration has not taken deep root in them yet and their hearts have not become rusted over; [for these] there remains behind the veil of the soul a ray of the light of their preparedness that perhaps a mercy and a gift of success from God should reach them that they might then become remorseful and feel shame by virtue of the innate disposition of the intellect. He thus alludes to the first class in His statement surely those who disbelieve after they have believed to the end of that verse [Q. 3:90], and to the second [class] with His statement:
