The Self (nafs)

This entry provides a comprehensive overview of the major themes, questions, and developments concerning the concept of the self in Islamic thought. Beginning with the Qur’an and then following the various streams of Islamic thought, such as theology (kalām), philosophy (falsafa), and Sufism, this study shows how Muslim thinkers reveal themselves to be fundamentally concerned with the problem of the human condition. Their manner of addressing this central issue from their differing perspectives devolves on the cultivation of what can be called both an anthropocentric and anthropocosmic understanding of the self that emphasizes self-knowledge, self-cultivation, and self-transformation on the one hand and a relational view of the self and the cosmos on the other. A rapid survey of Islamic philosophical, theological, and mystical texts gives the impression that the question of selfhood occupies a central place, as evidenced by numerous treatises/book chapters bearing its title. In his al-Mabdaʾ wa-al-maʿād (The Origin and the Return), Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640), perhaps the most influential Islamic philosopher after Avicenna (d. 428/1037), goes as far as to claim that ‘knowledge of the self is the mother of philosophy (umm al-ḥikma) and the root of happiness (aṣl al-saʿāda), and that if one fails to attain assured certainty of the immateriality (tajarrud) and subsistence (baqāʾ) of the self, one then fails to attain the rank of a philosopher’. ‘And how is it possible’, he asks rhetorically, ‘to have any certainty concerning anything, if one did not have knowledge of one’s self in the first place’ (Mullā Ṣadrā 2002–2005: I.6)? He then goes on to aver that ‘whoever knows himself becomes deified (man ʿarafa dhātahu taʾallaha)’, a saying that he attributes to ancient philosophers (Mullā Ṣadrā 2002–2005: I.7). In his Nuzhat al-arwāḥ (The Delight of the Spirits), Shams al-Dīn al-Shahrazūrī (d. c. 1288), one of the most important commentators of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī’s (d. 587/1191) Ḥikmat al-ishrāq (Philosophy of Illumination), similarly claims that ‘understanding his [Suhrawardī’s] words and unravelling his writings and their mysteries are contingent upon knowing one’s self (bi-al-jumla, maʿrifat kalāmihi wa-ḥall kutubihi wa-rumūzatihi mutawaqqif ʿalā maʿrifat al-nafs)’ (Shahrazūrī 1976–1977: 14). Similarly, Dimitri Gutas has recently argued that the lynchpin of Avicenna’s philosophy is the ‘metaphysics of the rational soul’ (Gutas 2012: 417–425). Likewise, the Qur’an also contains hundreds of references to the word nafs (lit. self or soul) and its modalities, such as the blaming self (al-nafs al-lawwāma) or the tranquil self (al-nafs al-muṭmaʿinna).