مهتدي
Muhtadī
A person who has received guidance (hudā) from God; the plural is muhtadūn.
What it means
Muhtadī is the one who has been guided, from the root h-d-y, whose noun is hudā, guidance. The Quran says, “Whomever God guides is the guided one (al-muhtadī), and whomever He leaves astray, they are the losers” (7:178). The same sentence also appears in 17:97. It teaches that guidance comes from God and is not achieved by a person alone. The believer asks for it in every prayer, in the Fatiha: “Guide us to the straight path” (1:6). The Quran also describes the guided as those who recognise the truth and follow it, and it asks believers to continue to seek guidance.
Often misunderstood as
Seeing guidance as one’s own achievement is the error that the word corrects: the Quran presents it as a gift from God that a person must accept and follow.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 47, listed as MUHTADĪ. The definition is restated here.