While the Sayf al-muʾminin is mostly concerned with matters of scriptural interpretation as they pertain to theological dogma, and while the use of biblical signs dominates the argumentative embroidery of the text, with occasional complementary recourse to sources like the hadith, some sections of the book stand apart both structurally and thematically. For the purpose of their study, these can be grouped within two blocks: one concerned with Jadid al-Islam's direct responses to the challenges posed by Guadagnoli in his Apologia, and the other with matters of morality and ritual practices of Christians.

Response to Guadagnoli

The most obvious question to ask when examining Jadid al-Islam's responses to Guadagnoli is whether he worked exclusively with the 1631 Latin Apologia (that is, the Apologia properly speaking) or whether he also had access to the 1637 Ijaba and the 1649 Considerationes ad Mahomettanos. Another tempting line of inquiry would be to determine whether he also read Aimé Chézaud's Mash-i misqal-i safa-yi Aʾinih-i haqq-numa, which as we have seen in Chapter two was essentially an abridged Persian version of the Apologia. Answering these questions requires a certain amount of educated speculation, given the documentary gaps we face. To my knowledge, we do not have enough information to know whether our author was acquainted with Chézaud's text. As for his reading of Guadagnoli, however, it is possible to advance an approximate identification of the parts of the Apologia he chose to target. This does not necessarily resolve all the questions regarding the editions he could have used. However, while answering them would no doubt shed light on the history of the circulation of these texts, the importance of doing so is secondary to that of understanding the ways in which our author integrated Guadagnoli's objections into the broader thematic composition of his own work.

Some general thematic considerations are now pertinent. Although Guadagnoli's Apologia deals with many matters that are also implicitly addressed in the Sayf al-muʾminin as a whole, such as the discussion on the divine nature of the Gospels and the dogma of the Trinity, the passages in which Jadid al-Islam rebukes Guadagnoli more directly deal with debates on the character of Muhammad and on the sanctity of the Qurʾanic Scripture.