Divine favour (luṭf, tawfīq) is the notion that God assists human beings by inspiring them to perform good acts and to refrain from bad ones and is the subject of a major theological doctrine propounded by the Muʿtazila and contested by their adversaries. This form of assistance is one of the two types of guidance (hudā, hidāya) with which God is believed to favour humans, the other being instruction (irshād) , provided through the medium of prophetic teachings. The Qurʾān depicts divine providence in a wide variety of ways, most notably