Ar-Rasheed

The root. Ar-Rasheed comes from r-sh-d, a root meaning sound judgment and right guidance, most often set against ghayy, misguidance or error. Rushd is the noun for sound direction, the maturity of judgment a person is recognized to have reached; rasheed is the intensive adjective form of the same idea, used of someone whose direction and decisions are consistently correct.

What it means here. Ar-Rasheed is read, when applied to Allah, as the one whose every decree reaches exactly its intended end without deviation or waste — a governance so soundly directed that nothing in it needs correcting and nothing in it fails to arrive where it was meant to. It is distinguished carefully in the tradition from the same word used of a person: a human rasheed has learned sound judgment or been guided to it, while applied to Allah the word describes a soundness that was never learned because it was never absent.

Where it is met. The word Ar-Rasheed's only occurrence in the Quran, Surah Hud 11:87, describes not Allah but a person, and sarcastically at that: Shu'ayb's people mock him, asking, "Does your prayer command you... Indeed, you are the forbearing, the discerning!" — ar-rasheed used against Shu'ayb himself, not for Allah. No verse in the Quran applies this word to Allah directly; the name is drawn entirely from the wider tradition and from its resonance with Ar-Rabb's governance of creation, rather than from any Quranic verse naming Allah with it.