Spirit of the Mind

Religion and Psychology

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 Spirit of the Mind
Divine Disclosure, Nafs and the Transcendental Self in
Islamic Thought

By

Sanaullah Khan

Leiden | Boston
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 2
Toward a Theological Anthropology of Islam 3
Psychosis and Divine Apprehension 5
The Place of Phronesis in Healing 7
1 Imbalances of the Soul 14
1.1 The Voice of the Soul 16
1.2 The Soul’s Relationship with the Body 21
2 Purification and Divine Disclosure 25
2.1 Psychosis or Divine Inspiration? 29
2.2 The Internal Battle 33
3 The Centrality of the Heart 38
3.1 Nafs in Abdul Qadir Jilani’s Work 44
3.2 The Experience of Unveiling 50
4 The Reception of Light (Nur) 53
4.1 Light of Lights and the Soul 55
4.2 The Visible and the Invisible 58
Conclusion 60
References 65
Acknowledgments

I presented a few sections of this essay at the Habib University in February of

2024 in a talk titled “Taming the Nafs: Islamic Notions of the Self in Cross-Cul-
tural Psychiatry.” I thank the faculty and students at Habib University for their
generous feedback. I received the motivation to work on this essay after the
completion of my fieldwork among Islamic healers in Pakistan in 2023. This re-
search was published in Ethos. The feedback I received from the anonymous
reviewers was central in shaping my ideas on questions of the self and psy-
chology in Islamic thought. Lastly, I thank my students at Brandeis University
for their close engagement with some of the concepts of the essay during a
course on “Medicine and Religion” I taught in the fall semester of 2023 and the
spring semester of 2024. The students shared excellent insights during the two
semesters which helped me approach issues of self and the psyche in Islam
from a comparative perspective.
Spirit of the Mind
Divine Disclosure, Nafs and the Transcendental Self in Islamic Thought

Sanaullah Khan
University of Akron, Ohio, USA
skhan@uakron.edu

Abstract

In this essay, I show that while there may have been differences in terms of how Islamic
thinkers have historically imagined the organization of the soul – whether as a singular
entity or as multiple – it was fundamentally viewed as bearing the traces of the divine,
and therefore the best way to come closer to God and to acquire knowledge of nature
was to return to the natural state of perfection in which the ruh was blown into the
body. The second concept that has remained central is that this spirit is continuously in
competition and hostility with the lower self which is expressive of carnal and material
desires and thus to come closer to God, it is necessary to cultivate purity of the soul so
that the influences of the lower self on the soul can be restricted. In fact, the goal is
that the lower self (nafs) comes completely under the control of the disciplined soul.
In the first part, I talk about how the disturbances of the soul were viewed as forms
of imbalances under the influence of the Greek humoral theory. In the second part, I
turn to how spiritual weakness was viewed as a move away from the original state of
perfection. In the third part, then, I consider how the heart became the seat of the soul
in Islamic thought and it was only through the ethical cultivation of the heart that one
could access the divine and control the nafs. In the fourth part, then, I consider light
as the central category through which one could access the divine. In the conclusion, I
consider the category of the self using the long-standing tradition of the “Perfect Man”
and explore the idea of ascent to a transcendental unity.

Keywords

spirit – self – heart – soul – piety – mental illness – psychology – affliction – Islamic
thought

© Sanaullah Khan, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004719033_002

2 KHAN

Introduction

The issue of mental illness in the Islamic world has been much of an anathema
for public health researchers and social scientists. This, of course, has to do with
the conditions of displacement that families experience due to the ravaging
impacts of war in Middle East, Afghanistan, South Asia and parts of Africa.
Epidemiologically there are multiple reasons for higher levels of stress among
migrant populations – this may have to do with intimate partner violence, fam-
ily conflicts, pressures of precarious economic conditions; factors that become
even more pronounced under conditions of displacement. This essay, however,
is not about ways to make the care of Muslim migrants and refugees more cul-
turally appropriate, as there have already been extensive and widespread stud-
ies exploring this aspect. This study provides a lens to consider the types of
practices Muslims undertake toward the cultivation of an ethical self. Within
this context, the figure of the Islamic cleric – who is religious, but also acquires
the role somewhat of a “healer” has become important (Ewing, 1984). Of course,
it is not necessary that the role is institutionalized, but people invariably turn
to individuals bearing markers of piety for advice on spiritual matters, on do-
mestic conflicts and also for matters of health and wellbeing. The words of the
Quran are also meanwhile understood as curative. The ability to be close to God
enables new signs and ways of living in the world as well as new ethical trans-
formations. These also include new psychological transformations – new ways
of receiving God’s wisdom to navigate the challenges of the world, which also
expose one to new satanic infractions. These psychological transformations in-
clude exposures to God’s majesty as well as to God’s grace. While the concerns
of the study are to explore issues of psychological transformation, we will rarely
consider the brain, because historically the coordinates that have been useful
to think about wellbeing and exposure to divine disclosure have been those of
the spirit and the heart. Often scholars talk about the rational capacities of the
heart, its ability to recognize God, and in other cases, the rational mind (aql).
Fundamentally it is the “spirit” that has an innate longing and bears a touch
of the divine. This study fundamentally explores a rich Islamic philosophical
tradition to conceptualize the different spiritual organs that bear the traces of
the spirit and thus are implicated in the experience of closeness to God. But
this will also entail an investigation into carnal or bodily desires referred to as
the lower self (nafs) and the spirit’s ongoing competition with it which deter-
mines one’s spiritual, and in a lot of cases, one’s psychological wellbeing. It is
my contention that one cannot fully understand the role of the spirit and its
longing for God without exploring its battles with the lower self (nafs). I also
track in the study an important linguistic transformation that takes place in Is-
lamic thought from the treatment of nafs as the self to its colloquial use as the
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 3

“lower self”, which explains the increasing emphasis placed on its disciplining
across Islamic history. In doing so, perhaps the study will also hint at some the-
ological issues about how believers are prescribed to achieve divine intimacy,
while also ensuring that the principle of oneness (tawhid) is not compromised.
Within certain other religious settings, healing the self might entail a different
invocation of God, and therefore also a different theological anthropology.

Toward a Theological Anthropology of Islam

At a very basic level, religious beliefs, as Evans-Prichard noted in the case of
witchcraft practices among the Azande, help the sufferer ask the question
about “why” and not necessarily the “how” (Evans-Prichard, 1976). The answer
to this may differ substantially based on the theological perspective taken.
One famous statement by CS Lewis about pain comes to mind, “God whispers
to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is
his megaphone to rouse a deaf world (Lewis, 1940).” It is as if pain turns the
believer toward God. Within various Christian denominations, soteriological
metaphors as in the frequent use of notions of “salvation” “redemption” and
“forgiveness” (ibid.). There are various examples within other religious scrip-
tures where the very conditions of pain become the source of remedy. Here
the crucifixion of Christ provides a good example as it “symbolizes the power
of God to address any situation and to conquer even death” representing a
“triumphal manifestation of God’s decisive victory over the evil (Conradie,
2006).” In other cases, where it is not easy to immediately resolve the problem,
because the cause of problem is complex “the underlying problem may be
understood to be alienation from God, enmity between God and humanity, a
broken relationship. If this problem is not addressed, if the relationship is not
restored, there will be no lasting solution to the other predicaments that are
experienced and deemed to result from alienation from God (ibid., 12).” What is
more important is also that the original scene of Christ’s crucifixion symbolizes
the fact the innocent too can suffer, but this is followed by a “lasting moment
of catharsis. The guilt may be pardoned. The debt has been paid. Forgiveness
is possible. Reconciliation has been achieved. The mediator has sacrificed his
life for the sake of peace (ibid.).” In other words, healing becomes possible
through the wounded healer. The structure of feelings that is often conjured in
various Christian denominations through the symbolism of crucifixion is that
Christ gave up his life “for our sins” where a temporary death is understood
as a partial forgiveness, but also paradoxically leads to new forms of guilt
among the living, where recovery is possible only through God’s grace. These
ideas are of course not enough to summarize the rich complexity of Christian
discourses and ideas about grace and salvation. They nonetheless enable us to
4 KHAN

consider how our ideas of pain and what we do to make sense of it is shaped
by our conceptualization of the divine. Theological concerns do not just shape
how people understand pain, but also how we understand the corruption of
the interiority and view it as the cause of affliction, generating a kind of theo-
logical anthropology that is more receptive to the plurality of selves (Lapsley,
1986). Though this study is not about Christian healing, the contributions of
theologians and psychologists working in the context of Christianity create an
interesting opening for us to consider how our idea of the divine shapes the
meanings we attribute to our internal psychological processes, allowing us to
think about the self as not a bounded and narcissistic entity, but one that is
split into halves receptive to different aspects of divinity and conversely of the
“this-worldly” (ibid.). Our understanding of “spiritual organs” also shapes how
we understand recovery, i.e., if the heart is the site that gets corrupted first,
different activities would be directed specifically toward the heart in order to
purify the entirety of a person.
Imaginations of spiritual organs involved in recovery are also invoked by
other religious traditions. For example, Kabbalists believe that the soul con-
sists of three parts: the soul gifted with reason, the neschamah, the experienc-
ing soul, rUach, and the vegetative soul, the nephesch, which is the living part
of the body. The three correspond to reason, soul and nature and originate di-
rectly from the Sephiroth which represents ten attributes in Kabbalah. Despite
having different parts, the soul is an organic whole, and the ethical implication
of the doctrine is that the soul can “under certain circumstances and by cer-
tain deeds, free its material limits and imperfections and can elevate itself into
higher spiritual spheres (Bischoff, 1985, p. 61).” There are certain ethical implica-
tions of such a symbolism, in that the soul is understood to be carrying a degree
of moral freedom. This perhaps also overlaps with certain ideas where the soul
“through its descent from a higher world, has an essential urge toward its ori-
gin, a natural desire for perfection, an innate tendency toward good … (ibid.)”1
If the original position is that of guilt, it can be addressed through confession,
but if the innate human condition is one of purity, as has been the premise
in much of (Sufi) Islamic thought, the methods to regain the lost purity will
be different. I would like to use a word of caution here – I am not a religious

1 The soul is “also an emanation of the living primeval forces of Sepiroth and by way of these,
it is an extended through low emanation of the absolute (Bischoff, 1985, p. 62).” But Kab-
balist ideas are much closer to the platonic conception of the soul because pre-existential
souls are considered to have knowledge of their thoughts where “all mundane science is a
retrospective recollection of this pre-existential knowledge (ibid., 65).” Still the idea that
the soul is always striving toward perfection aligns with Sufi thought as I will consider
later.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 5

scholar, which is why I cannot say with certainty what the human looks like in
Quran, as many Christian theologians have attempted in the case of Christian-
ity. I only trace how it appears in the works of prominent Islamic scholars across
generations, who draw upon a variety of traditions, some of them Quranic or
prophetic whereas others invoking the rich Islamic intellectual tradition that
received and responded to Greek philosophy.
Each religion can thus have a different theological anthropology. Even
within a single religion, people can invoke different imageries and psychologi-
cal symbolisms through which emotions are processed. Therefore, when I talk
about Islamic thought as a whole, I hope to remain mindful of the important
concepts that are deployed to explore notions of the “self” and the way they
undergo transformation. I propose that one way to do that would be by con-
sidering concepts of the soul and its purification through the remembrance of
God, and by asking what practices employed for the purification of the soul
reveal about the ordinary human condition. There is certainly an aspirational
quality, a drive to purify oneself and a return to an original purified state. This
perhaps is a unified theme that I found in many of the Islamic thinkers whose
works I review, but the methods and the parts of the self that were activated
and realized in relation to God fluctuate overtime. If the central emphasis
is on the drive to perfection, then the question is about how this perfection
is acquired through divine disclosure and what kind of psychological and
spiritual processes and imageries about the self get involved in the process.
If one part of the self is directed toward the eternal and another toward this
world, how does the body experience different temporalities of the material
and the spiritual? How do imaginative capacities become useful and provide
sites for divine disclosure but also become sources of distraction, especially
when these channels for divine apprehension are inflected by the shaytan?

Psychosis and Divine Apprehension

Having considered some aspects of theological anthropology, I would now like
to consider how one’s understanding of theological anthropology also shapes
what is understood as divine disclosure and what is not. One would also need to
define psychosis in a different way than to approach it only through its conno-
tations of pathology. By now enough anthropological evidence has shown that
hallucinatory experiences can be shaped by one’s cultural beliefs (Luhrmann,
2012). People who prioritize specific sensory channels to connect with God are
also likely to experience hallucinatory experiences through them (Luhrmann,
2020). One group of individuals laying greater emphasis on being able to hear
God may experience auditory hallucinatory symptoms that activate or inten-
sify the hearing of God, and conversely, groups that prioritize visions of God,
6 KHAN

may experience forms of visual hallucinations, as Tanya Luhrmann has persua-

sively shown in her work (ibid.). Experiences of divine intimacy are frequently
socially largely determined.
One group of anthropologists suggests that the inability of differentiate in-
ner and outer experience itself is pathological (Spiro, 2001), whereas another
group believes that people with supernatural experiences deploy them to cre-
ate faith-based clienteles and draw upon their charisma to enter new areas of
social, economic and political life (Benedict, 1934, p. 267; Lindholm, 1992). An-
thropologists have also forcefully made the point that what is considered as a
pathological experience is defined only in relation to the norms of a specific
setting (Benedict, 1934). This means that a person may be considered as abnor-
mal within one cultural setting but treated as more or less normally function-
ing in another. People with psychosis may also be revered in certain ways for
being bearers of truth, unless they experience acute symptoms. Afterall, there
are also cases when people with psychosis voice grievances and critique exist-
ing social structures in a way that others may not be able to (Sadowsky, 2003).
They may be viewed as being able to predict and say things that people other-
wise may simply not be able to say. This is largely also expressed through the
notion of intuition. If one sharpens one’s intuitive capacities, they may be able
to access knowledge that is otherwise not readily available. Still accessing oth-
erworldly knowledge entails to some extent an experience of detachment from
the mundane social universe combined with disciplined pious activity and in-
tentionality toward God.
The experience of psychosis is not one in which a person fully disengages
with the world – in fact, the experience of the supernatural helps one navigate
through the difficulties of the world (Khan, 2008). In exploring experiences
where divine knowledge can be accessed, my goal is not to normalize patho-
logical experience, but simply to consider psychosis in a looser way than we
would otherwise think. There is a lot of persuasive evidence that has shown
how people tolerate certain hallucinatory experiences but try to banish others
(Luhrmann & Padmavati, 2016, p. 110). There is also a lot of persuasive evidence
that shows that people do not have to treat their hallucinatory experience as
either divine or pathological and may consider them as both – signs from God
as well as pathological (Lester, 2003). What I am considering in this study are
not only cases of pathology. It is possible for one to experience supernatural
experiences, which may be inaccurately attributed to God, but there are other
cases in which the believer attunes one’s mind to God and receives God’s mes-
sage in one’s heart. It is a specific type of attunement that is not pathological
but enables one look at the world through God’s own perspective (though here
Islamic thinkers are careful to point out that human experience and God’s exis-
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 7

tence cannot fully converge to maintain the principle of God’s unity or Tawhid).
The attunement of one’s mind, or the heart, entails that one is receptive to re-
ceiving God’s message and uses this message to navigate through the world.
This may be in the form of dreams, but sometimes even supernatural experi-
ences of seeing and hearing things, or experiencing intuitions, which are dif-
ficult to rationalize scientifically. There is ethnographic evidence that shows
that people may actually connect with each other while being geographically
apart and receive signals about their poor health or wellbeing in dreams or
through one’s intuition that one may find difficult to comprehend scientifi-
cally (Qureshi, 2020; Seremetikis 1991). I use the word psychosis because we
will be touching upon the experience of being afflicted by, or being in com-
pany of supernatural entities which influences what one says or hears. I use
the word psychosis also in a looser sense to refer to one’s intuitive capacities
that are not present in advance but have to be ethically cultivated in order that
a person develops the ability to interpret divine signals accurately. The reason
why psychosis appears to be the best word is because what is at stake is both
the gentleness of God’s disclosure but also its magnanimity. Moments of divine
disclosure amaze humans and leave them with feelings of awe, but such mo-
ments are also accompanied by skepticism by the community with whom these
experiences are shared about the person’s spiritual qualifications to achieve di-
vine closeness through the unveiling of God. How then does one acquire this
attunement to the divine and how does it result in divine disclosure? For this
one would have to consider the sustained cultivation of one’s interiority so that
one can be prepared to receive divine unveiling (kashf ).

The Place of Phronesis in Healing

One word that has stood out for me in thinking about the ways of developing at-
tunement to God’s disclosure is that of phronesis. According to Aristotle, virtue
makes the goal right whereas phronesis is the practical wisdom toward the end.
One’s decision too would not be right without phronesis nor without virtue be-
cause virtue takes us to the end, whereas phronesis represents the movement
toward it. Jessica Moss (2011) goes against many of the interpretations about
Aristotle’s idea about how humans intellectually think about the ends or per-
ceive them through some forms of intuition. She writes, “The ultimate goal each
person pursues is happiness (eudaimonia) as he or she views it, and we each
reach our view about what happiness consists of – virtuous activity, for exam-
ple, or the life of pleasure or of honor – not by any intellectual process, but in-
stead through the non-rational habituation of the non-rational part of the soul
(ibid., 205).” My goal is not to engage extensively in this debate, but it is simply
to consider how one cultivates certain habits by keeping goals in mind – which
8 KHAN

may or may not be fully supported by reason (and perhaps even entail the non-
rational self, as Moss suggests). The brilliance of Moss’ interpretation is that
she argues that “contrary to widespread opinion, Aristotle does not character-
ize phronesis in such a way that it must include a grasp of ends (ibid., 209).” She
continues, “because ethical character involves non-rational cognition of ends,
Aristotle can restrict practical intellect to reasoning about ‘things toward the
end’ without embracing a Humean view of motivation or moral judgement –
without abandoning his view that we desire our ends because we find them
good (ibid., 206).” The value of this interpretation for the present study is that
one may have an incomplete idea about the goal, nor fully be able to compre-
hend it, and yet pursue it relentlessly.
Alestair MacIntyre in his analysis of Aristotelian ethics was not concerned
with the rational or irrational nature of practice and virtue, an issue also raised
by Ross, but the relationship between means and end of virtue as he wrote,
“The means and the end can each be adequately characterized without refer-
ence to the other; and a number of quite different means may be employed to
achieve one and the same end. But the exercise of the virtues is not in this sense
a means to the end of the good for man. For what constitutes the good for man
is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a nec-
essary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure
such a life. We thus cannot characterize the good for man adequately without
already having made reference to the virtues. And within an Aristotelian frame-
work the suggestion therefore that there might be some means to achieve the
good for man without the exercise of the virtues makes no sense (MacIntyre
2007, p. 149).” MacIntrye was open to the idea that there could be a difference
between what is generally “good” of a man and what is good for a person at
a given time, but it is only for the former that we practice virtues. My analy-
sis combines Ross’ interpretation that one may not be rationally aware of a
discrete end and MacIntyre’s provocation about sustained ethical cultivation
which is a pre-requisite of virtue in which the end becomes inseparable from
the means to achieve it and where virtuosity is inseparable from practice. Mac-
Intyre distinguished between internal and external means to an end, where in-
ternal refered to the situation when the end could not be characterized inde-
pendently of the characterization of means. There are also cases like that of the
painter who achieves many goods which are external to the practice of paint-
ing such as fame due to their skills. MacIntyre uses the distinction to define
virtue, which he argues as the “acquired human quality that possession and ex-
ercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal
to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving such
goods (ibid., 194).” The reason for referring to Macintyre’s idea of virtue is be-
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 9

cause the kind of practice resembles the remembrance of God that I consider
in the essay – though there is a broadly defined goal to come closer to God and
to acquire his unveiling, this requires sustained ethical activity through con-
stant remembrance, where one’s internal good is to engage in remembrance
to acquire divine closeness (qurb), but in the process one’s goals also continu-
ously transform – after acquiring divine closeness, one may acquire a greater
responsibility to be closer to humans and to share one’s experience of success.
Similar ideas have also been taken up in anthropological theorization
around Islam, for example, Talal Asad (2009) uses the concept of “discursive
tradition” which instructs practitioners about the correct form and purpose
of a given practice while also linking past with present practices. This entails
understanding the processes of reasoning and argumentation that produce
knowledge, where actors are involved in continuous engagement with foun-
dational texts through processes of reasoning to solve practical issues. This in
turn is linked with the creation of certain moral selves. Some of Asad’s inter-
locutors and students then extended his ideas to consider the role of agency,
or to discuss the importance of certain sensory frameworks for developing
piety – including specific pious ways of attending to public discussions and
engagements with Islam. But my interest here is to pick up a strand that was
taken up by Amira Mittermaier who in her work on Islamic dreams interpreta-
tion in Egypt talks about the element of newness introduced by unconscious
processes that shape how we interact with the world around (Mittermaier,
2010). As in much of the world, many Muslims rely on intuition or unconscious
experiences to receive guidance from God and in navigating through stresses
of employment, whether to marry someone, but there are specific ways of
attending to God’s message. Divine apprehension may overwhelm senses but
may also occur in gentler ways. There is a possibility of awe, mesmerization
and sometimes even the infliction of madness. In terms of accessing divine
knowledge in a gentle way we can think of a person who recites the prayer for
istikharah and sleeps with the intension that they may be able to acquire a
signal or at least get a feeling, which if you ask someone, is only an inexplicable
feeling of something good or bad about to happen based on dreams represent-
ing evidence that is difficult to rationalize or think of in strictly logical terms.
Anthropologists have considered such feelings in relation to dream work in
non-Islamic contexts, such as Nadia Seremetakis in her work among the Mani
women.
The ability to interpret divine messages is central to the conversations on
spirituality in Islam. It is here that there is also a great potential for infractions
by the shaytan. But the only way to ensure that one can guard oneself against its
influences is through sustained ethical cultivation which entails the cultivation
10 KHAN

of one’s interiority that shapes the messages one can or cannot receive. There
are specific ways to receive guidance on social matters, but it is also possible
for one’s consciousness to be inflected by other supernatural entities, such as
jinns. In parts of the Muslim world, observers have written extensively about
spirit possession and its treatment. The diagnosis as well as treatment is fairly
unique based on each context in that in some Islamic contexts the jinn may be
viewed as causes of illness, whereas in another context, illness may be viewed
as caused by the jinn in collusion with the shaytan. Still in another contexts
there may be a bewitcher involved in spirit possession. Increasingly with the
globalization of psychiatric discourses, healers may also differentiate between
the problems they consider to be purely psychiatric versus problems caused
by jinns. A wide range of commentaries by anthropologist have shown how
spirit possession represents conditions of poverty, traumas of colonialism and
gender inequalities (Boddy, 1989; Bowen, 1993; Siegel, 2003). Many have also
used post-colonial theory inspired by the observations of Franz Fanon to think
about the long-standing impact of colonial structures and the workings of the
psyche (Fanon, 1961; Pandolfo, 2018; Anderson et al. 2011). In many contexts,
healers may engage clients in pietistic activities in order to prevent some form
of illness, and still in others, the healer may be required to negotiate with spirits,
appease or mollify them, which for James Frazer was the defining feature of
religions compared to magic in which spirits were dominated, but not mollified
(Frazer, 1890).The jinn may also represent truths that are otherwise concealed,
namely truths about family conditions and social structures. Healing episodes
may also represent characteristics of Bakhtinian carnivalesque, where people
publicly organize and in their dissociated states, challenge dominant norms.
I had the opportunity to study healing practices in Pakistan. I observed many
healers – some would try to overpower jinns, others would try to show their
dominance but also get the jinns to convert to Islam so that they could leave
peacefully with the human counterpart. Many also invoked muakkals to inves-
tigate the conditions of the relatives of a client, or to get the jinns’ children and
family released from bewitchers or the magician who had supposedly captured
them. These are all the different ways in which non-human entities inflict pain
and are used for healing. Whether or not these healing practices are effective or
not is beyond the scope of this study – but what can be said with a great deal
of certainty is that it does work for people who believe in spiritual problems
as causes of illness. The motivation to write this essay is that spirit possession
still presents a theoretical challenge that has been explored by many mental
health researchers, experts, social scientists and historians. Among social sci-
entists, there is a tendency to always think about the issue of psychosis in Islam
through the lens of western psychoanalytic thought. This has meant that the
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 11

study of psychosis in Islamic thought has been overshadowed by western psy-

choanalytic ideas in a way that the Islamic concepts that should ideally guide
its understanding are lost. For example, when one has to think about the rela-
tionship between the spirit and the self, it might be convenient to use the Laca-
nian idea of extimacy. When one has to think about the difficulties of putting
divine apprehension into words, it may be convenient for people to turn to La-
can’s distinction between the symbolic and the Real. Freudian theories can be
used in exciting ways, despite the issues associated with his comparisons be-
tween neurosis and the so-called primitive mind, as if the psychological de-
velopment could be placed on an evolutionary scale (Groark, 2019). In today’s
psychoanalytic landscape, Freudian psychoanalysis has become outdated, but
traces of his thinking can still be found, in say, psychodynamic theory, as peo-
ple try to think about ambivalent relations with parents, for which one would
have to turn to none other than the myth of the parricide where children end
up killing the father and set up a totem to assuage the guilt of killing (Freud,
1913). This idea was taken by psychoanalytical anthropologists to think about
rituals (Obeysekere, 1990). Psychoanalytic theory made major in-roads in psy-
choanalytic anthropology which has shaped the reception of Islamic healing
practices in anthropology (at least in the South Asian context). Psychoanalytic
theory does offer a lot of potential pathways to understand psychosis in Islam,
but the danger is in using ideas that are foreign to Islamic thought and expect-
ing them to elucidate concepts that have rich histories of their own. Even as one
traces rich Islamic concepts one would have to reckon with changes in termi-
nology, how these concepts transform across time, among many other issues.
But I still think that it is a worthwhile exercise to put effort into resurrecting
ideas within Islamic thought that can be used to faithfully think about issues
of psychosis and divine disclosure.
As an anthropologist, I have observed that psychosis can have ambivalent
meanings within Islamic settings. In fact, as part of my doctoral research I
investigated how families revered symptoms of psychosis, but also sensed
that there was something wrong with those experiencing hallucinatory symp-
toms. Similarly, I have previously worked in institutions of the state. During
my ethnographic work in Pakistan, I observed that police officers had sym-
pathetic attitudes toward prisoners who had experienced psychosis, when
patients had been incarcerated on being caught on charges of blasphemy
against Prophet Muhammad or God (punishable in the country). Among
military physicians’ hallucination was understood as the accompaniment of
the martyr or the sign of impending martyrdom (shahadat). One question
that has remained with me is: what is the source of this ambivalence? The
same conditions that can be treated as a “diagnosis of death” in the United
12 KHAN

States can be treated in a more ambiguous manner in a country like Pakistan.

I also observed that among religious communities in Pakistan belonging to
different orders, there were different ideas about hallucinatory experiences –
some treated them as kashf (unveiling) whereas others viewed them simply as
the expression of unconscious memories. Others considered them as spiritual
“stations” in the journey toward God. According to the latter interpretation, if
one remained fixated on a hallucinatory experience, one could easily become
boastful and be lured by shaytan into arrogance, and therefore even become
mad, by being unable to transcend one’s fixation with divine disclosure. I am
sure that such ideas can be studied in many other Islamic contexts as well. The
question that remains is about how we can turn to Islamic thought instead
of western psychoanalysis to understand the relationship between psychosis
and divine disclosure. In this essay, my goal is not necessarily to provide an
exhaustive history of scholars who have talked about psychological issues,
but simply to trace some concepts that run through the works of Islamic
thinkers across many centuries, despite their disagreements. I argue that nafs
has been a central category in the understanding of psychological wellbeing
in Islamic thought. Nafs represents the base uncultivated human self, with
corruption increasing its susceptibility to the influence of the shaytan. These
influences then result in the experience of mental illnesses. But psychosis
does not represent illness, in fact, some forms of divine disclosures or flashes
are also potential signs of one’s piety. I interpret divine disclosures a bit more
loosely than the Islamic philosophers would have liked. When they referred to
divine disclosures, they were concerned much more generally with questions
of metaphysics and epistemology, but I mainly consider the implication of
these ideas for how divine disclosure became representative of closeness to
God, where divine knowledge represented the efforts to cleanse one’s soul and
it was only by purifying one’s heart that one could access divine knowledge,
or return to the state of perfection, in which humans were born and given life
when God blew ruh (soul) into the human body. But in doing so, my goal is not
to preoccupy myself with how divine disclosures represent signs of pathology
or to chase signs of mental illness – in fact, the goal is to explore experiences
of transcendence, when there is a possibility of ascending through different
imaginary “stations” to come closer to God, as many Sufi thinkers would have
liked us to consider. Doing so would allow us to take seriously how conditions
of the nafs, have been viewed as pre-requisites for spiritual wellbeing – where
divine disclosure is not necessarily a sign of pathology as much as the corrup-
tion of the nafs and its susceptibility to influences of the shaytan is. I am not
sure how this maps onto the DSM s or the contemporary psychiatric nosology –
clearly many Islamic thinkers knew about hallucination and did talk expicitly
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 13

about melancholy and depression, but they did not treat divine disclosure
as synonymous to pathology – divine disclosure was fundamentally different
from the way we pathologize symptoms of psychosis. Divine disclosure has to
do with accessing knowledge intuitively. Divine disclosure then is not the kind
of knowledge that is based on rationality but is one that is based on one’s intu-
ition. Such intuition helps in navigating social relations and the complexity of
this world, but it requires closeness to God.
The way I structure this essay is that I start with some foundational works
by Al-Razi, Ibn-Sina and al-Balkhi on conditions of the soul and the ways in
which untrammeled desires corrupt the nafs and thus result in poor physical
and psychological wellbeing. Here I mainly consider the galenic influences that
resulted in Islamic scholars treating mental illness as a problem of bodily im-
balances and material desires. I take the part also as a vantage point to con-
sider how the ideas of the soul transform from a platonic one to an Islamic
one. Then I move to Ibn-Arabi to consider the status of divine disclosure in Is-
lamic thought and the responsibility upon believers to interpret it correctly. I
also trace how these signs are possible only through a return to the primal spirit
or the ruh, for which one’s turn to interiority, also results in greater proximity
to the divine. Then I move to the works of Abdul Qadir Jilani and Abu Hamid
Muhammad ibn Muhammad Al-Ghazali to think about the heart and the ways
in which it can be cultivated in the remembrance of God. I consider the rela-
tionship between the heart and the nafs and I show how by this time, there was
a consensus that the heart was the seat of the soul and had to be cultivated in a
specific way in order that it could overwhelm the lower self/soul (nafs). I move
to Ali al-Hujwiri to explore kashf (divine unveiling) in relation to the pollution
of the heart. In going through the works of these thinkers, I explore how the
concept of the nafs was used to think about psychological, spiritual and physi-
cal poverty and how remembrance of God (zikr) was viewed as the best treat-
ment to access divine wisdom which is necessary for success both in this world
and the hereafter. I finally consider the metaphysics of light to consider the rela-
tionship between the Divine and the heart. I consider figures within the school
of illuminism including the works of Shihab-ud-din Suhrawardy and Sadr-al-
Din Qunwani where I explore the concept of illumination to think about divine
light as knowledge, and its absence, as a sign of spiritual poverty. Of course,
the scholars whose work I review is spread across many centuries, but these
ideas have had a great deal of influence on practicing Muslims – the way the
attend to matters of spiritual and mental wellbeing, as well as the emergence
of Sufi orders in many different parts of the world. The essay tracks these works
with the expectation that we may move toward an understanding of a global Is-
lamic thought where ideas and concepts move across time undergo variations
14 KHAN

and are challenged but also acquire new valences and meanings in the lives of
the followers. In doing so my goal is not to make a case for what Islam looks
like or not but the historical debates that have taken place across generations
through which may begin to understand what contemporary Islamic life, mat-
ters of spiritual and psychological wellbeing look like.

1 Imbalances of the Soul

One member of the House of Saman from the Samanid Dynasty, Amir Mansur
b. Nuh, b. Nasr once became afflicted with an ailment which led Amir to sum-
mon Muhammad b. Zakariyya (Al-Razi) for his treatment. Al-Razi (864 or 865
to 925 or 935) was a preeminent physician of the time. Zakariyya composed
a treatise, Mansuri, which he handed to a messenger, saying, “I am this book,
and by this book thou canst attain thine object, so there is no need of me (Al-
Razi, 1950, p. 4).” Amir was not able to recover, until Zakariyya was bound by
feet and hands and brought to Mansur. After reaching, he began to treat Amir.
He got Amir to have a hot bath. Then he escaped as Amir, infuriated, followed
him until Zakariya wrote a letter to the king,

There was an extreme weakness in the natural caloric, and the treatment
of the disease by ordinary means would have been a protracted affair. I
therefore abandoned it, and carried you to the hot bath for physical treat-
ment, and administered a draught, and left you as long as it bring about
a maturity of the humors. Then I angered the king, so that an increase in
the natural caloric was produced, and it gained strength until those hu-
mors, already softened, were dissolved. But henceforth it is not expedient
that a meeting should take place between myself and the king. (ibid., 5)

Since the time of Rhazes, Islamic scholars have been under the influence of
Plato and Aristotle as well as Galenic ideas about humoral disturbances as
the cause of illness. Al-Razi was mindful of the role of excess in deteriorating
health. According to Al-Razi, it was reason that helped humans overcome the
“state of wild beasts, of children and lunatics (Al-Razi 1950, p. 20).” He poses
passion as the counter force and added, “We must not give passion the mastery
over it, for Passion is the blemish of Reason, clouding it and diverting it from
its proper path and right purpose, preventing the reasonable man from finding
the true guidance and the ultimate salvation of all his affairs (ibid., p. 21).”
Notice here that something approximating the lower self which many referred
to as nafs remained central for Al-Razi. Reason had to dominate passion;
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 15

without it, there was no difference between human and the animal. In fact,
much of the Spritual Physick is indeed about ways to manage passion. Passion
is something to be wrestled with. The problem with passion, according to
Al-Razi, was that one no longer fully enjoys the material pleasures it provides,
yet remains dependent on them. Instead of acquiring happiness a person with
untrammeled passion becomes even more miserable. According to Al-Razi,
this happens when the “lower nature” dominates reason, and in such a situa-
tion a person also aspires for states enjoyed by other individuals, and such a
situation is “always in a state of imperfect realization”. Al-Razi adds,

Excess in the rational soul is proved when a man is so swayed and over-
mastered by the consideration of such things as these that the appetitive
soul cannot obtain the food and sleep and so forth to keep the body fit,
or in sufficient quantity to maintain the temperament of the brain in a
healthy state. Such a man is forever seeking and probing and striving to
the utmost of his powers, supposing that he will attain and realize these
matters in a shorter time than that which is absolutely necessary for their
achievement. The result is that the temperament of the whole body is up-
set, so that he falls a prey to depression and melancholia, and he misses
his entire quest through supposing that he could quickly master it. (ibid.,
32)

Al-Razi suggests that the body becomes dependent on certain appetites, but
to get the same pleasure, one requires a greater dose of material gratification,
which one chases to an extent that one is not only unable to fulfill one’s de-
sire but is also left with depression and melancholia. Al-Razi also extensively
draws upon Plato to consider the idea of the sentient soul, which when the time
comes, wants to dislodge from the body without pain which is possible only if
it remains uncorrupted (ibid., 32). But if the soul remains corrupted, it contin-
ues to yearn for the physical world and in that case “it will not leave its present
dwelling-place but will continue to be linked with some portion of it (ibid., 32)”
and will thus experience continual pain. This idea was also invoked by Ibn-Sina,
and it sat very comfortably with Islamic ideas about the detachment of the ruh
from the body after death. Thus, to ensure that the separation of the soul from
the body is painless, one would have to direct it to the outer world. Here Al-Razi
creates a distinction between the rational soul and appetitive soul and argues
that it is only through discipline and by denying its appetite that the rational
soul dominates the appetitive soul.2

2 One aspect to keep in mind here is that later thinkers will refer to the heart as the rational
16 KHAN

Undisciplined passions also cause a lot of psychological maladies, Al-Razi

suggests. There are various types of behaviors that further corrupt the soul, one
of which includes envy. For Al-Razi, the soul inherently has a reflective capac-
ity of which it is robbed because of passion especially because the latter has a
stupefying influence (ibid., 55), which is why he refers to the soul as rational,
compared to the base self, which he refers to as the animal soul. The condi-
tion in which the soul has been robbed of its reflective capacities also results
in melancholia, depression and insomnia. The same thing happens in the case
of anger when a person loses reflective capabilities. Al-Razi suggests that it is
important to moderate desires so that people do not become prey to shortcom-
ings and excesses.
What is interesting is that Al-Razi provides many examples of delusions and
fears. The fact that he had an eye to detect delusions showed how closely he
had observed his cases, as in the example of a mother who was so terribly dis-
tressed over the loss of the child that she would not let her husband come near
her due to the thought of having another child and the fear of experiencing
a similar affliction (ibid., 70). The soul, he argues, had to be trained so that it
could protest little when misfortune occurred (ibid., 71). Sometimes he also re-
ferred to the choleric soul in addition to the rational soul and suggested that
its purpose was to assist the rational soul against the appetitive soul, especially
when the struggle was fierce, and the rational soul was not able to overpower
the appetitive soul or vice versa (ibid., 85). This shows that he was drawing upon
ideas of the soul (Islamic) in addition to Greek humoral theory where choler
was considered as one of the four humors. One would recall how Al-Razi de-
liberately provoked anger in Mansuri in order to induce and mature the caloric
humor. These ideas about balance have remained central to Islamic thought.
Here it is also useful to consider the works of one of Al-Razi’s contemporary,
Abu Zayd al-Balki.

1.1 The Voice of the Soul

Abu Zayd al-Balkhi (850–934) can be credited to be the first person to con-
sider psychological disturbances – and exposures to feelings and opposition
to them as cures. This was in some sense similar to the counterbalancing of
humoral excesses and deficiency. He differentiated between huzn caused by
loss and ghummah which was without an identifiable cause (al-Balkhi 2012,
p. 21) – while the former was caused by certain traumas, the latter was caused

soul and the nafs as the lower self. There are important linguistic transformations due to
translations, but there is a continuity in terms of the relationship between soul and the
nafs, or say, the higher and the lower self.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 17

by changes in the constitution of the blood. He in fact even criticized his con-
temporaries for neglecting the role of psychology in treatment. He understood
nafs or the soul to be having a direct bearing on psychological health. He sug-
gested that physicians should use emotions to counterbalance other emotion
whose excess or deficiency had caused an illness, for example, the use of arro-
gance, pride or bravery to overcome fear. I would argue that he employed a hu-
moral imagination for the understanding of behaviors. He emphasized coun-
terbalancing one emotion with another, as he wrote, “The tranquility of the
soul is its healthy condition and that of its safety, just as the health of the body
and its safety lies in the tranquility and balance of its humors (ibid., 30).” He
refers to the soul in a singular sense compared to Al-Razi who referred to the
appetitive and the rational soul. For al-Balkhi, imbalances disrupt the soul. He
refers to the soul in a metaphysical sense as Ibn-Sina and later thinkers would
do. Al-Balkhi referred to soul just as modern psychiatrists would think about
the mind. Just as it is the mind that gets disrupted from fear and traumatic
events, so too, for al-Balkhi it is the soul that gets traumatized. He writes about
the protection of the soul,

The health of the soul can be maintained from outside elements such as
what a person hears or sees that may worry or disturb him causing arousal
of emotions that include anger, panic, sadness or fear or other similar re-
sponses … Internally means to protect the soul from internal symptoms
of negative thinking about what may harm the person with respect to the
symptoms or disorders. (ibid., 31)

He often also refers to the heart and the soul interchangeably, and we will see
that linguistically there were moves even among later thinkers to consider the
heart as the site of inherent goodness, which was counterposed to the nafs.
We can already see the centrality of the heart as the seat of the soul and thus
of goodness. Like al-Razi, for al-Balkhi the soul had to be cultivated so that it
could withstand traumatic events. But al-Bakhi’s idea of the soul is arguably
also rooted in Prophetic sayings about the nafs according to some commen-
taries, unlike al-Razi or Ibn-Sina’s use of the tripartite conception of Plato’s
soul. Al-Balkhi employs a singular notion of the soul, but there are still pla-
tonic traces about the soul’s lack of form alongside a conception of the soul
supported by the Prophetic saying that the commanding center of the soul or
the nafs is the heart which is more changeable than boiling water in a pot, as
interpreted by Malik Badri (ibid., 34). According to the latter interpretation,
the conditions of the heart are ever evolving and the heart’s exact condition
at a given moment in time shapes the condition of the soul. I would argue
18 KHAN

that it might be a bit anachronistic to imbue equal importance to the heart

in al-Balkhi’s than it would later emerge in, say, the works of Al-Ghazali. My
interpretation is that while al-Balkhi discusses the heart interchangeably with
the soul, the heart may still be an intermediary to inform the soul. His under-
standing of the soul though is still somewhat comparable to the understanding
of the modern mind. Al-Balkhi then writes,

When feeling peaceful and when the faculties of the soul are in a tranquil
state, one should convince the heart that this world, dunya, has not been
created to give people whatever they wish or desire without their being
subjected to anxieties and worries or harmful unwelcome symptoms. One
should realize that this is the inherent nature of life on this earth and that
this is what one should expect from life in developing one’s habits and a
regular way of life. (ibid., 31)

He then adds that one has to train the soul just as one trains the body through
exercise (ibid., 32). Al-Balkhi backs this by considering the ephemerality of this
world. This is of course in line with the broader Islamic belief about the tem-
porariness of this world compared to the hereafter, and if such a perspective
were adopted, one could only live healthily in this world by training one’s soul
to prepare for experiences of loss. Al-Bakhi says,

This world (dunya) is the abode of anxiety, sadness, worry and calamity.
So it is only normal for man to expect, in spite of his efforts, the onslaught
of misfortune or even calamity to disturb the calmness of the soul. (ibid.,
34)

According to al-Bakhi a person may intentionally generate thoughts in one’s

soul, which can be used to overpower other harmful thoughts. He also explores
the usefulness of an internal dialogue with oneself, without which any external
help is likely to be useless. For example, this would entail being reflective of
one’s anger, especially given the fact that anger can agitate the soul to an extent
that it loses its reflective capacities. Al-Balkhi suggests that certain emotions
take away reflective capacities, which may result in a person reproducing the
body’s reaction to an external stimulus in a dangerous way to an extent that
one further harms the soul. He writes,

In this severe anxiety state, the color of the person will become yellow-
ish because the blood rushes from the surface of the body to the internal
organs and the hands and legs will shake uncontrollably, failing to per-
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 19

form their natural function. Furthermore, the person may lose the ability
to think properly to the extent of failing to find a solution to rescue him
from a frightening object or situation. This critical condition would dis-
turb the bodies’ humor, causing them to function abnormally and may
eventually cause a severe bodily ailment. This terror develops from the
fear that overwhelms a person if he thinks or imagines a scary thing (or
more so) if he actually sees or experiences it. This fear and anxiety can
also be caused by a person hearing an earsplitting sound that he cannot
tolerate or from hearing news that contains a terrifying message. (ibid.,
38)

An emotional state can thus make someone completely unaware of the impact
of certain behaviors on the soul, which may also become the basis of obsessive
compulsion, preventing a person from enjoying the pleasures of the soul. Thus,
the impact on the soul is not direct, but often modulated by emotions. Later
al-Balkhi suggests that behaviors such as anger can creep into the soul, which
could be prevented only through active reflection (ibid., 41). For al-Balkhi, the
soul has an innate capacity to think. This capacity is taken over by certain emo-
tions which become the cause of illness. The inability to reflect may even re-
duce humans to animal-like behavior, al-Balkhi argues. The solution he offers is
to educate the soul to understand that “the fear created by the expectation of a
threatening experience is much greater than the real experience itself, if it oc-
curs (ibid., 44).”3 He talks about “mental maneuvers” to overcome fears (ibid.,
46). One example of this is “to invoke anger against one’s fearful behavior by
appealing to one’s pride, thus rebuking the soul for being scared and telling
oneself that being so terrorized and panicky is not the respected behavior of es-
teemed men but rather cowards or perhaps those of weak disposition … (ibid.,
46)” Al-Balkhi therefore does not present a theory of the soul based on its in-
trinsic goodness or proclivity to sin, but is simply interested in what specific
behaviors do to the soul, which can be overcome by counterposing its tenden-
cies, for example, reminding oneself of bravery when the soul is prone to getting
scared. The soul can also be trained to overcome emotions that may eventually
overwhelm it. For al-Balkhi, the soul has the capacity to speak or has an “in-

3 One example for this is that he considers excessive fear to be similar to the experience of
fog by an Arab Bedouin and writes, “An uninformed person (like an Arab Bedouin living
in a hot desert) would think it to be a solid (black) object without any outlets and that it
can trap people inside it. However if daring to enter, he would find it to be simply moist
air that he can breathe (al-Balkhi 2012, p. 46).”
20 KHAN

ner speech” which can both help resist emotions of fear and anger but also be
overwhelmed by it (ibid., 54).
Al-Balkhi may also be considered as one of the few thinkers who had a so-
phisticated idea about the role of social relations in the experience of healing.
He talks about one’s inner voice, but also considers the importance of its voice
externally. He suggests that it is necessary to let one’s inner voice out into one’s
social life because descending into one’s inner self could itself also become the
cause of illness. He writes,

These mental maneuvers, as expected, come either from outside the soul
or within it. Externally, it is very important for the one afflicted to avoid
being alone since loneliness would naturally stimulate negative thought
and harmful self-talk. The human soul is perpetually active either exter-
nally or internally.4 Externally its activity is to busy itself with socializing
with other people, talking to them and arguing with them about things
that concern the person. Internally, it is to busy itself with thinking, mem-
ories and reflections. So if the soul is not occupied by outward conversa-
tion, it has no alternative but to be employed in inner thought and past
reflections. Such thoughts and whispering self-talk will be particularly in-
tense when the soul is by its nature sensitive and imaginative. Thus a per-
son suffering from this obsessive symptom, will find its harmful effects
multiplied when he is alone. But when in the company of other people,
actively engaged in amusing conversation and discussion, he will find the
influence of inner whispering much reduced. For this reason, being alone
and solitude are inadvisable and disapproved of, while mixing with peo-
ple is commendable (ibid).

Al-Balkhi therefore places great emphasis on turning one’s inner voice outward
to avoid the reflection of soul from being obsessive and excessive to an extent
that the voice begins to harm the person. What is useful here is the imagery
of the soul that is evoked in that it is reflective, yet this reflection can also be
dangerous if left without a social outlet. But what is also interesting here is that

4 Malik Badri, the translator, evokes the interpretation of the soul from Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyyah’s book Al-Fawaʾid in which he wrote that the human soul is active as a contin-
uously revolving millstone. Badri (2012) writes in a footnote of the translation of al-Balkhi’s
book, “The thoughts and feelings are like the seeds that the mill grinds. If you put valuable
healthy thoughts into it, it is as if you feed it with wheat. It will come out as flour, but if
you put gravel and stones, it will grind it as well, but what are you going to get at the other
end?” The evocation of soul as a millstone is interesting as it helps us consider that it bears
the after-effects of one’s moral acts.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 21

at this specific juncture in his argument al-Balkhi also reveals the role of the
shaytan. He argues that when a person is isolated and alone, the shaytan has
a greater influence over them . Al-Balkhi attributes illness to an excessive dia-
logue with one’s own soul, but also to the susceptibility in such a state to the
effects of the shaytan, as he writes, “The origin of the obsessive disorder is ei-
ther the dominance of certain body humors, or from the devil appointed to a
person (the qarin) that strives to spoil one’s life in this world and the hereafter
(ibid., 63).” He therefore throws light on the role of the shaytan in conditions
where one’s internal dialogue has become excessive, indicating that as much
as the preparation of the soul can enable the person to withstand stress, anxi-
ety and trauma, the weakness of the soul can also be a driver of illness, when
it stops resisting patterns of behavior that take over the soul’s reflective func-
tions. Here healing entails turning the soul into a reflective entity while also
ensuring that it is not in excessive dialogue with itself, therefore reducing its
susceptibility to the shaytan. Recovery would entail the right amount of self-
reflection in combination with socialization allowing the actor to be “present”
with others such that the internal dialogue is kept under check by social actors.
While al-Balkhi’s idea of the soul did not have traces of the tripartite soul, Ibn-
Sina’s idea would invoke such a conceptualization, though he was much more
under the influence of Aristotle. It remains a complicated matter to semanti-
cally trace how the meaning of the soul transforms from a tripartite system to
a dual one in which one’s rational capacities trained through pietistic activi-
ties reflect the divinity of God and bear traces of the pure ruh blown into hu-
mans by God where the nafs represents its corrupted form. For some Islamic
thinkers, spiritual activity had to be targeted toward the heart in that it was the
heart that had to be purified, but for this we would have to wait till the works of
Al-Ghazali to understand the centrality of the heart, its corruption, and yet also
its ability to receive divine disclosure. But first, it would be useful to consider
the relationship between the soul and the body. The nafs remains a semanti-
cally ambivalent term because it could represent the soul of any kind, but is
frequently used interchangeably for one’s lower self, where it is also used along
with a range of adjectives to represent its various states, especially when we get
the later Sufi thinkers.

1.2 The Soul’s Relationship with the Body

I will now track the different iterations of the ongoing battle between the base
soul and the rational soul in Ibn-Sina’s (980–1037) work. Ibn-Sina was more
titled toward Aristotle in his approach. Ibn-Sina had a much more consolidated
idea of the soul and its rational capacities. This means that in some ways he
provided important insights about the interaction between the divine and the
22 KHAN

soul’s rational faculties, which will become useful for later Islamic thinkers and
proponents of Sufi thought as well. How then does one comprehend the divine?
What role does the state of the soul play in this?
Just as Islamic thinkers were making sense of psychological conditions and
bodily maladies in relation to bodily disturbances, they were also reflecting
upon the impact of God’s essence on the soul. Under inspiration from Aris-
totelian syllogisms, in The Metaphysics of The Healing (2005), Ibn-Sina wrote
that intelligible truths could only be acquired when the middle-term of a syllo-
gism was attained (A leads to B and B leads to C and therefore A can also lead
to C). This could be done either through intuition(where intuition represented
the quickness of apprehension). In other cases though the middle-term may be
grasped through instruction (23). Ibn-Sina like many after him was interested in
thinking about the role of divine inspiration in making rational certainty pos-
sible, as was also the case in prophetic revelations (Rehman 1952, p. 37). Ibn-
Sina also had a particular idea about the soul’s relationship with the body and
insisted that the soul had an existence apart from the body (ibid., 59), in other
words, “the soul was in no way imprinted on the body.” Here drawing from pla-
tonic ideas with a curious mix of Islamic notions, he argued that the soul ex-
isted prior to the body which meant that it could not get attached to the body. A
reader might be curious about whether the soul overlapped semantically with
the ruh or nafs in ibn-Sina’s work. One could argue that when many like Ibn-
Sina were referring to the soul, they were also referring to the ruh, but one has
to keep in mind that often times in Arabic the word that is used for the soul
is nafs. When nafs constitutes the root of the word, it is used for self (repre-
senting some action and intentionality), but also has an inflection of the Greek
word for breath (pneuma). It can also be interpreted independently as the self.
Perhaps the semantic ambiguity is also informed by the different implications
of the word in Quran in the form of nafs but also when it is used in the word
anfusakum. Perhaps semantic ambiguity is also introduced because nafs is also
used as a noun along with adjectives like mutmainnah and lawammah repre-
senting its different states. Whenever I use soul in the essay it is important to
be mindful that it overlaps linguistically both with the traits of the ruh, but
also the lower self, which constituted the site of desires for Al-Razi. Ibn-Sina
particularly uses soul with connotations of the ruh because he considers the
soul as lacking a form and matter. He considers the soul as inherently incor-
ruptible (ibid., 63). For later thinkers, there was another “self” (apart from the
soul as Ibn-Sina refers to it) that remained corruptible. Now there may be an
inclination to think that the separation between the body and the soul approxi-
mates something like transmigration, which entails that once the body has lost
the soul, the latter transmigrates and begins to reside in someone else, though
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 23

something like this appears to occur in many Islamic settings especially in the
treatment of jinns and the way they are perceived to inflict pain on the human
subject. However, Ibn-Sina critiques the notion of transmigration by suggesting
that the soul preceding the body did mean that the body lacked any conscious-
ness of it. Transmigration, he argues, would imply, the presence of two souls
or more at a given time (a type of alter-ego), potentially resulting in a loss of
consciousness, as he writes,

So if we suppose a soul transmigrating into several bodies each of which

requires for itself the existence of a separate soul attached to it, then two
souls will come together in one body at the same time. Again, as we have
said the relationship between the soul and the body is not in the sense
that the soul is imprinted in the body, but in the sense that the soul is
occupied with the government of the body and the body is influenced by
its actions. And every living being is conscious of the body and the body is
influenced by its actions. And every living being is conscious that he has
a unique soul which governs and controls him, so that if there is another
soul of which the living being is not conscious, neither is it conscious of
itself, not does it occupy itself with his body – then such a soul has no
relationship with his body, for the relationship only subsists in this way.
Thus there is not transmigration in any sense. (ibid., 64)

Ibn-Sina too was of the view, like Al-Razi, that it is essential to discipline the
soul in order that upon its separation from the body from the death, it is not
agonized because of the pull of forces of passion. When trained adequately, the
lower self facilitates and in some sense lets go of the ruh for its reunion with
God. In The Metaphysics of The Healing (2005), Ibn-Sina wrote,

The mean in morals and customs is sought in two things. As for the one,
involving the breaking the dominance of the powers [of the passions],
that is for the soul’s purification and for enabling it to acquire the power
of self-mastery so that it can liberate itself from the body untarnished.
(ibid., 377)

In Ibn-Sina’s work, then, we see a move to consider a singular notion of the

soul that can be corrupted but also prepared to endure the agony of separation
from the body. This understanding is important as this makes it easier to un-
derstand the antagonisms between soul as the site of divine disclosure, as well
as the soul’s susceptibility toward corruption through its attachment to the car-
24 KHAN

nal or the bodily, instead of the divine or the otherworldly.5 Having discussed
the soul’s corruptibility, we can now discuss how Islamic thinkers perceived the
idea of the soul’s purification and the role of divine disclosure in this. When I
approach these thinkers, I remain mindful of the fact that the conditions of
divine disclosure may be misinterpreted as psychosis. Perhaps it may just be
psychosis, but a meaningful one for the subject of divine inspiration. The rea-
son why I use psychosis here is because when people experience divine disclo-
sure, there is a new kind of responsibility placed in terms of how people com-
municate their experiences, and here the possibility of shaytan’s influence is
also great. For example, one person may meet with the Prophet in their dream,
but it is very likely that without creating required pious conditions for those
dreams, these dreams may just be infractions, rather than divine inspiration.
The science of istikharah is based on a somewhat similar principle, where the
work of interpretation involves dissociating one’s ordinary unconscious expe-
riences from signals from God. The treatment of divine apprehension is treated
with reverence or abjection not based on scientific evidence, signs of delusion,
but instead based on a different criterion, namely whether the person has put
oneself through the right kind of discipline and ethical cultivation to receive
signs of divine inspiration. This ethical cultivation also has to be endorsed by a
community, without which one’s experience of divine disclosure may only be
treated as a sign of being gumrah (in Urdu) or ghamara (in Arabic) for people
on whom the doors of divine closeness and knowledge are closed. But another
fundamental point to keep in mind is that this kind of knowledge does not re-
quire any rational capacities per se but is simply a product of intuition. I will
now consider how the reception of divine wisdom is possible in the works of
Ibn-Arabi, but also what it means to correctly interpret this form of knowledge.

5 In later periods, especially within Shia mysticism (Irfan) the corrupted soul and the pu-
rified soul were both treated as the same spiritual organ. For example, Muhaqqiq Narāqī
in his famous book of ethics, Jamiʿ al-Saʿādāt stated, “The soul (nafs) is that heavenly es-
sence which employs the body and uses its various organs to attain its goals and purposes.
The soul has also other names as spirit (ruh), intelligence (‘aql), and heart (qalb) although
these terms have other usages as well.” On the other hand, Shahīd Muṭahharī indicates
that these terms are used distinctly in ʿIrfān based on the qualities of the soul: “The ‘urafa’
have different words for the human soul; sometimes they call it nafs (self), sometimes
qalb (heart), sometimes ruh (spirit) and sometimes sirr (mystery). When the human soul
is dominated and ruled by desires and passions they call it nafs. When it reaches the stage
of bearing Divine knowledge, it is called qalb. When the light of Divine love dawns within
it, they call it ruh.”
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 25

2 Purification and Divine Disclosure

One of Ibn-Arabi’s (1165–1240) main concepts was that of the “Perfect Man”.
Ibn-Arabi was aware that there was a touch of divinity in man when God blew
ruh (spirit) into humans. This ruh was intrinsically good but was corrupted
overtime, and the purpose of remembrance was thus to return to this origi-
nal state, which of course was difficult to reach, but not impossible, and in this
state one’s distance from God was also minimal as the veils between God and
the human were progressively removed (kashf ). Angels were made to engage
in constant dikhr (remembrance) of God. They were made from light (nur),
but were not given any will, as was the case for humans. According to Ibn-
Arabi, humans are superior beings compared to angels because they choose to
obey God, which is exemplified in the Quran (7:11) in the commandment for
angels to prostrate in front of Adam. But angels are also sinless, compared to
humans. If humans are born with a touch of divinity, the goal is to return to the
state through constant remembrance of God, by turning to one’s interiority and
cleansing the heart. There is a fundamental shift by this time from the tripar-
tite platonic conception of the soul to a semantic overlap between the heart,
the nafs and the soul. All three have different connotations but represent the
same spiritual entity, which can be purified but also corrupted. The dualism can
be seen in the use of inner and outer selves, as ibn-Arabi also writes in Insha
al-Dawaʾir, “Man is two copies: an outward copy and an inward copy. His out-
ward corresponds to the world in its totality, and his inward copy corresponds
to the ontological level of the Divinity (Trans. Chittick, 1975, p. 41).” In fact, Ibn-
Arabi even considers humans to be like a two-sided mirror, one side represent-
ing divinity, while the other representing the corruption of the world (ibid., 43).
Humans are thus capable of divine goodness by being the best of creations, but
also of heinous crimes, making them the worst. To understand this, it would be
useful to understand Ibn-Arabi’s concept of the Perfect Man. Divine knowledge
was inscribed on the heart of the perfect man, according to Ibn-Arabi, and this
specifically includes the inscription of God’s essence (latifah) on Adam’s heart.
Ibn-Arabi writes that the Perfect Man was the locus of perfect comprehensive
theophany (tajalli) which descends upon the heart (ibid., 36). For ibn-Arabi,
God does not manifest himself within the world without the Perfect Man as
the intermediary (ibid., 38). It is for the Perfect Man that the world is main-
tained, as can be seen in the promise that as long as even one Perfect Man is
left in the world, the day of resurrection would not come (ibid., 39). Every “ser-
vant possesses an aspect deriving from divine presence (ibid., 50).” Here ibn-
Arabi refers to annihilation ( fanaʾ) as “perfect attentiveness direct toward the
Presence of God, the Absolute, for by means of this the servant’s godly aspect is
26 KHAN

strengthened until gains ascendency over the creaturely aspect to the point of
subduing and annihilating it. And this attentiveness is only possible through
the inherent love hidden within the servant (ibid., 51).” When annihilation is
achieved, God “becomes the organ of perception for the servant who is the lo-
cus of theophany (ibid., 52).” Since the heart is the locus of divine inspiration,
one begins to perceive the world around through a touch of divinity. Another
important concept introduced by ibn-Arabi is that of “interpretation”. He sug-
gests that the plane of imagination and the forms that appear within it corre-
spond to reality and are divided into two kinds: one in which the image imag-
ined corresponds to the form in the external world, and another which is exter-
nal to the plane of perception and where the image imagined no longer corre-
sponds to the external world which is where “unveiling” (kashf ) takes place and
where the role of interpretation becomes important (ibid., 53). Ibn-Arabi’s un-
derstanding of the metaphysics of light, its penetration and effect on the soul
would influence many later thinkers as we will see. The fundamental concept
he highlights is that of unveiling. The experience of unveiling also requires that
one understands the science of interpretation (taʾbir). Ibn-Arabi writes that the
most complete and penetrating light is the light through which one perceives
what God reveals in imaginations and in dreams (ibid., 59). He writes that a sin-
gle form usually appears in the imagination of different individuals, but with
different appearances, because of the difference of preparedness and the differ-
ence of place and time, but here interpretation involves the act of unveiling or
differentiating the intended meaning from all other secondary meanings. The
person who is able to make this differentiation is the person who bears com-
plete light (ibid., 59). Ibn-Arabi writes about the person who is able to make
this differentiation, “His light is the most complete light because he discerned
by means of it that which was in the extremity of obscurity and at the limit of
ambiguity (ibid., 59).” Ibn-Arabi therefore suggests that not everyone has the
capacity to differentiate between intended meanings of divine images, because
this requires cultivation of a specific response, without which a person is only
likely to be deviated from the right path. Interpretation involves careful work
like that of the trained psychoanalyst who must interpret inversions and rever-
sals within dreams to get to the actual event communicated by the dream. But
for ibn-Arabi one does not require formal training but needs to carry divine
light in one’s heart to disaggregate divine images in dreams from secondary
ones. The work of ethical training is a pre-requisite for divine disclosure, as peo-
ple without the ability to interpret these images, may be deceived by them. Ibn-
Arabi’s framework for how humans carry traces of divinity remains consistent.
The same light carried by the Perfect Man is also capable of recognizing divine
light. Ibn-Arabi reiterates the point by suggesting that the person who receives
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 27

this inspiration needs to have an intuitive eye to differentiate between different

images. He illustrates this by providing the following example,

And we only said that the one form appears in many meanings because
in a dream one person of a group is called, so he makes the hajj in the
World of Sensory Forms, and another of them is called, so he steals; and
the form of the calling is one, but the interpretation is different, because
of the differences between those who see the form. And in the same way
another person sees in a dream that he is called, so he invites to God with
sure knowledge: and another person sees that he is called, so he invites to
error. (ibid., 59)

This is indeed a profound observation and reminds us about the interpreta-

tive capabilities one needs to acquire to understand and comprehend God’s
message accurately. The message can be the same, but its interpretation can
be profoundly different and lead to different actions, one that is right and the
other that leads people astray.
Even when Ibn-Arabi talks about divine experiences in dreams, he goes into
detail to show the possibility of misinterpretation. In Fusus, he shares his dream
about having seen the Prophet Muhammad and wrote,

Indeed I saw the Envoy (S.A.) in a dream of announcement of good

news (mubashshirah) in the last decan of the month of Muharrem in the
year 627 (hegira) in the city of Damascus, and in his (S.A.) hand was a
book and he said to me: ‘This is the book of the Fusûs al-Hikam. Take it
and bring it out to the people who will benefit by it.’ And I said I heard
and obeyed God the High and His Envoy and the people of order (people
who are masters of command) from among us, as I was ordered. (Ibn-
Arabi, 2002)

This evidence is important as it provides a divine validation of the work he

was doing and based on this validation, he then introduces the contents of the
book. Ibn-Arabi also prays to God to help him with the arbitration of the truth
to prevent any possible signs misinterpretation. He then adds,

I verified the desire (amniyah) and purified the intention, and abstracted
the purpose and the himmah to expose this book as it was limited to me by
the Envoy (S.A.) himself, without increase or decrease. And I asked of God
that He bring it about for me in this (that is, in exposing this book), and
all that my fingers write and all that speaks with my tongue and all that
28 KHAN

is folded in the core of my soul and mind, by the irradiation of the praise
of God and the blowing (nafas) of the Spirit in the chest (rauʾ) of my nafs
by the strengthening of the holding on. So that I become the interpreter
and not the false arbiter. So that those who understand be certain of it,
those from among the people of God who are the people of the Heart,
that this is the book from the station of Sanctifying, transcendent from all
self-interests of the nafs into which enters misrepresentation (talbîs). And
I pray that it be so, that when God hears my prayer He will indeed respond
to my cry. Indeed, I do not irradiate except that which has been irradiated
to me, and do not bring down in these lines (in this book) except that
which has been brought down in it to me, and I am not of the prophets,
nor envoy, but I am an heir and a cultivator (hârith) of the other world.
(ibid.)6

The challenge then is not only to be able to hold the truth, but also being able
to communicate it in the best possible manner.
Hearts that receive theopanies are likened to containers of water where
water takes the shape of the container without changing it characteristics
(Chittick, 1975, p. 65). The divine light itself could never be polluted, because
this would diminish God’s own divinity. In order to uphold the case of God’s
unity Islamic thinkers differentiated between the light of the Perfect Man and
God’s own light, as we will see shortly. Ibn-Arabi also stresses on the remem-
brance of God without any form, and if one is engaged in the remembrance
from this premise, the theopanies too would be limitless (ibid., 66). Ibn-Arabi
too retains an idea of the lower self, as al-Razi, al-Balkhi and ibn-Sina before
him also retained (either in the form of a tripartite platonic arrangement or
through a dual antagonism between body and the soul). Ibn-Arabi reserves
the place of goodness and corruption in one’s heart, but this does not mean he
does not consider something like the lower self, as his predecessors. For ibn-
Arabi the struggle to achieve divine closeness results in the power of “inten-
tion” in this world, but paradoxically also a sense of powerlessness vis-à-vis the
divine which is both emancipating and spiritually enriching. For example, he
writes,

And the strength which is after it, or after the original weakness, is the
strength of the constitution, to which is added in the understanding of the
elite the strength of the spiritual state (hal), which gives man the power

6 The use of nafas is also important in relation to nafs. Here nafas represents the blowing
of the soul and the nafs represents the self within which the ruh is contained.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 29

to exercise free disposal (tasarruf ) and domination (taʾthir) in the world

through Intention (himmah). And the second weakness is the weakness
of the constitution, to which is added in the understanding of the elite the
weakness attained through knowledge, or the knowledge of God, which
weakens man and extracts him from his accidental strength and returns
him to his original weakness, until it joins him to the clay which was his
origin. So he has no power over anything, and he becomes in himself and
in his own personal essence, disregarding the manifestation of the divine
Qualities within him, in his own eyes like a suckling infant with its mother,
for just as the infant sees no power or strength in itself and entrusts itself
completely to its mother, who feeds and nurtures it, the gnostic assumes
the same relation to the Real Being and Absolute Lord. (ibid., 67)

Powerlessness in front of the divine results in power over the world. For ex-
ample, ibn-Arabi gives the example of Asif (credited for bringing the Queen of
Sheba’s throne to King Solomon in the twinkling of an eye, a story frequently re-
counted in Islamic folklore) who showed superiority over the jinn, which was
possible through “the exercise of the power of free disposal through his soul
with the aid of cosmic influences and the natural properties of things … (ibid.,
71).” This becomes particularly salient because human and jinn relations are
particularly complex, as they can be hostile, and a source of affliction for hu-
mans (in the form of seizures, mental and physical illness), but this is usually
resolved in contemporary Islamic healing practices in many settings by provid-
ing the soul with the strength to overpower the jinn which is initially not pos-
sible (Khan, 2023). The word of the Perfect Man, ibn-Arabi writes, is “like the
word of God concerning something he wants to come into existence (Chittick,
1975, p. 72),” as in the case of Solomon’s control over jinns which is an exam-
ple of the Perfect Man making a petition for some form of sovereignty upon
creation to God and being granted with miracles and extraordinary powers in
response (ibid., 73).

2.1 Psychosis or Divine Inspiration?

Another concept that is important for Ibn-Arabi is that of a trial (ibtila) which
refers to the testing to which God puts human beings and the jinn. The ele-
ment of trial emerges from the element of taklif which can be translated to
pain but has also been interpreted as “prescription” and this element of taklif
emerges from the connection between the spirit and the body, a throwback to
some of the earlier concerns raised by Ibn-Sina (and to some extent al-Razi),
when they mentioned how one has to prepare for the agony of death because
of the pull that the body exerts on the unprepared spirit. An element of an on-
30 KHAN

going struggle is therefore part of ibn-Arabi’s view of the relationship between

the body and the soul. The world in some sense is a site of trial through which
one can survive through ongoing struggles. In Chapter 317 of Futuhat, Ibn-Arabi
alludes to the human body as a vehicle for the spirit and a locus for the trials
which the spirit undergoes. As suggested by Chittick, the spirit and the body
are “the two poles of macrocosmic and microcosmic existence (Chittick, 1993,
p. 4).” Here the spirit refers to the breath of God whereas the body is the site of
carnal desires. The concept of ibtala has previously been used by Stefania Pan-
dolfo (2018) in her work on jinn possession in Morrocco, and the concept is use-
ful in helping us think about the competing desires of the spirit and the body.
Chittick in his interpretation writes, “The body stands at the opposite pole of
cosmic existence; compared to the spirit it possesses hardly any trace of these
attributes and can conveniently be referred to by its opposites, such as death,
ignorance, darkness and dumbness (Chittick, 1993, p. 4).” Ibn-Arabi clearly sets
the tone for later contributions by Islamic scholars to consider body-sprit du-
alisms, and the trial and tribulations of the body as well as the need to disci-
pline the spirit in order to reduce them. Chittick adds that for Ibn-Arabi if one
looks at the body in relation to the spirit one is mainly talking about contrasting
notions like lightness and darkness, but, “if we look at bodily things inasmuch
as they are self-disclosures (tajalli) of God, then, like the spirit, they manifest
the attributes of God through their very existence, since wujud (being) is the
Real himself (ibid., 4).” The mere existence of being (wujud) represents spirit
as Ibn-Arabi writes, “Life is an intrinsic attribute of spirits, so spirits do not be-
come manifest to anything unless that thing comes to life; the life of the spirit
that becomes manifest to it permeates it.” God is both manifest and non-mani-
fest and for ibn-Arabi, it is through the nonmanifest that humans come to know
God, and it is though light that humans witness Him (ibid., 6). There are people
on whom the unveiling of God’s attributes takes place (al-kashf ) and there are
others who have no unveiling; there are some who have faith and others who
lack faith and misinterpret divine attributes and say that “glorification takes
place through the state (hal) (ibid., 6).” In other words, people who lack faith
think that divine disclosure only takes place through hal when in reality the
attributes of God, for ibn-Arabi, are revealed only through the right interpreta-
tion (taʾabir). Hal is an important word. It literally translates to a “state”, but it
is colloquially used in parts of South Asia, as in much of the Arabic world, for
moments when a person loses consciousness during intense moments of re-
membrance. Hal can be induced through intensified spiritual activity, but the
condition also represents moments when a person loses control over oneself,
when one’s agency and control over the body shrinks to an extent that one may
become more susceptible to the effects of jinns and shaytan.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 31

The spirit (ruh) departs from the body, but Ibn-Arabi, like Ibn-Sina differenti-
ates the Islamic belief from the concept of transmigration. Ibn-Arabi discusses
the soul departing from the body after death and entering a state of barzakh
until the day of judgment. The soul carries traces of God’s brightness and is
engaged in constant glorification. Ibn-Arabi also extends the analysis of the
soul’s presence in the human body to a larger understanding of the cosmos.
Ibn-Arabi writes that “being” demonstrates life and its existence is possible only
through divine disclosure (ibid., 10). This self-disclosure is constant for inani-
mate things like plants, but for humans, jinns and angels, this disclosure takes
place from behind the veil of the unseen (ibid.). Broadly, self-disclosure takes
place differently for angels and is dependent upon God imparting knowledge,
whereas for humans and jinns knowledge requires constant reasoning. The hu-
man spirit carries traces of the divine without being conscious of it. With the
help of God’s unveiling, it comes to grasp nature and the material world (ibid.,
12). But in chapter 339 then, Ibn-Arabi writes that unveiling does not take place
for every person, but still there are traces of the Real on every step (ibid., 16).
Ibn-Arabi brings together the two ideas of the Perfect man and divine disclo-
sure together in chapter 339. Ibn-Arabi introduces the imagery of the mirror to
explain divine light and its refraction through the heart. He writes,

I mean by ‘man’ perfect man, since he is perfect only through the form
of the Real. In the same way a mirror, though complete (tamm) in cre-
ation, is only perfect (kamil) through disclosure within it of the form of
the other. That is the ‘level’ of the mirror, and the level is the ultimate end.
In the same way the Divinity is complete through the names which it de-
mands from the divine thralls, so It lacks nothing, while Its perfection – I
mean the level of which It is worthy – is independence from the worlds.
Hence It possesses non-delimited perfection through independence from
the worlds. (ibid., 17)

This is an important provocation as it shows that the light of the heart is de-
rived from God himself and it is only the actual light that reflections are possi-
ble. The difference between an angel through and the human is important here.
The angel and the human are different in the sense that the former is engaged
in the remembrance of God around the clock, whereas humans are engaged in
remembrance only at certain times. Still, the human can approximate angelic
qualities i.e., purity through continuous remembrance of God. The human may
not completely acquire these qualities by still aspire toward them precisely be-
cause God imposed his own form onto the human (ibid., 17).
32 KHAN

The idea of the Perfect man emanating God’s light is similar to the relation-
ship between the sun and the moon. The moon carries light during the night,
but it is merely a reflection of the actual source of light which is the sun. Upon
achieving a certain level of closeness, the perfect man sees the world through
God’s senses which represents “the opening of unveiling through the Real, the
opening of sweetness in the inward dimension, and the opening of expression
(ibid., 21).” Here the room for misinterpreting one’s spiritual experience is also
great. There have been figures within Islamic history who experienced this un-
veiling and tried to communicate this feeling and were either treated as having
become mad or for committing blasphemy. One example that stands out in this
regard is the famous story of Al-Hajjaj who shouted in ecstasy “I am the Truth, I
am the Truth” which was interpreted as a proclamation of becoming God him-
self, which led to his hanging. Ibn-Arabi’s point was much more profound, and
it would be inaccurate to read current psychiatric problems through his idea
of divine disclosure or unveiling, but it is still useful to think about why the
experience of divine exposure increases the room for misinterpretation. I have
conducted many years of research studying mental illness in Pakistan and have
found people whose families brought them to psychiatric hospitals for their re-
ligious mania, for being unable to interact with the world and thus becoming
increasingly isolated, for being engaged in supposed acts of blasphemy due to
delusions about being and chosen by God to rid the world of evil. I want to re-
sist the urge among readers to treat Ibn-Arabi’s idea of unveiling as a form of
psychiatric morbidity – instead, I want to encourage the reader to think about
the strict conditions that a person has to undergo and the social sanction that
is required to successfully make the claim about having experienced God’s un-
veiling, without which spiritual experiences are likely to be treated merely as
signs of illness, or perhaps even blasphemy. Sociologically, if one experiences
any signs of unveiling, these experiences can be mobilized to demonstrate one’s
charisma which can even be routinized, and a person may acquire prestige
within religious circles which may not be possible otherwise (Lindholm, 1992).
This is also the logic that shapes the ascent of religious figures to positions of
prestige within different societies, and particularly also the principle that is ap-
plicable to the prominence of shamans in different societies. Some anthropol-
ogists have made the claim that all shamans are neurotic (Devereux, 1961). In
addition, anthropologists have suggested that the inability to differentiate be-
tween inner and outer worlds is inherently pathological and within this frame-
work, there may be a temptation to interpret intense spiritual states as signs of
psychological disorders, but in reading the works of important figures in global
Islamic thought like Ibn-Arabi, what we arrive at is that he was not necessar-
ily referring to the loss of touch with reality in intense spiritual states. Instead,
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 33

he was referring to states where a person acquires an understanding of reality

by accessing streams of divine knowledge in small portions which would not
be possible otherwise. Such a state can be explained through the concept of
intuition (not Kantian “intuition” which referred to objective representation).
Here, I invoke intuition in a different manner, in that it does not represent ra-
tional or logical knowledge. Instead, it is knowledge that one acquires through
closeness with God, though which a person acquires the ability the grasp the
invisible via divine flashes. These flashes shape how one behaves in this world,
how one interacts with others, and how one approaches future events. For the
psychologist, these visions may only be a product of one’s unconscious mem-
ories, but for the believer, they represent a combination of deep-seated fears,
ambitions and anxieties combined with a touch of newness and of inspiration
which is possible only through one’s closeness with God. This is perhaps also
a common experience for people from other faiths who experience certain vi-
sions, develop fears and feelings that they may not be able to express in words,
but may represent a real impending danger related to future events.
One has to go through the right kind of discipline in order to experience
the unveiling of God and one also has to carry the light of divine attributes in
one’s heart in order to interpret the unveiling correctly. This interpretation of
divine signals also takes place socially in that interpretations need to be so-
cially acknowledged and validated. Often these experiences are accompanied
by feelings of intense bodily fatigue, mezmerization and awe approximating
something like the descending of divine revelations described in the Quran,
for example, Prophet Muhammad’s first revelation in the cave of Hira and the
narration of his experience of receiving God’s word to his wife. Another exam-
ple of course is of Moses and his experience of divine exposure as has been
recounted in Exodus 33:7–23 and in Surah Al-Aʾraf 143 of the Quran. Why is the
right form of interpretation so important and what does “interpretation” reveal
about the ongoing battles between the nafs and the soul?

2.2 The Internal Battle

This battle between the body and the soul has implications for the way we
understand the relationship between psychosis and divine disclosure. When
a person receives a divine image (kashf ), it is possible for the same signals to
be misinterpreted and be influenced by carnal desires through which shaytan’s
influence (waswasa) is experienced most acutely. The line between a divine in-
spiration that can help in the transcendence to God and its misinterpretation
is blurry. Misinterpretation can cause one to go astray. When I use the word
psychosis, my attempt is not to refer to it as a pathological category – instead
my goal is to show how it represents both goodness and evil, based on whether
34 KHAN

a person is able to interpret the images correctly. What is also important is that
when the soul is overpowered by the desires of the body, the likelihood of be-
ing possessed by jinn is greater, as I observed in my ethnographic work among
healers in Pakistan. My goal here of course is not to discuss my ethnographic
findings, as I have done elsewhere, but to consider more generally how the body
becomes a vessel for the contestation between the good and the evil, which also
represents the state of losing consciousness, experiencing a trance, or under-
going what is referred to as hal. The hal, however, does not necessarily repre-
sent divine disclosure and may also be a product of misinterpretation. Within
psychiatric discourses, there has been a long history of treating states of un-
consciousness as the splitting of personality, but within Islamic discourses and
especially mainstream healing practices, the condition of possession requires
not only the ill-intention of an intimate other, but also the domination of the
soul by the jinn, where recovery involves strengthening the soul and allowing
it to have mastery over the body, so that human will that is suspended due to
the effects of possession is reinserted and the person finds themself regaining
lost agency. Of course, this was not a concern for Ibn-Arabi, but his concept of
ibtala, following Pandolfo, can be used to consider the competition between
forces of Good and Evil and the overpowering influence of the latter. Here it
would be useful to also consider the cosmology of non-human entities within
Islamic thought in order to make sense of how the “external” becomes manifest
through the human body, especially when it is susceptible.
Since it is the condition of the nafs that determines health as well emotional
wellbeing, it is important to fully understand what nafs means within Islamic
thought. The impurity of the nafs and its implications for wellbeing means that
illness does not reside in the brain, but is shaped by spiritual conditions of the
heart, which is treated as the seat of emotions, as shown in other Islamic con-
texts (Good, 1977). The word nafs also forms the root of the Urdu world naf-
siyat (used for psychology) showing close connections between spiritual and
psychological recovery, at least etymologically. Sufi Islam posits a complex re-
lationship between soul expressed in a spiritual dualism between the nafs, the
vital self and the eternal soul, the rūḥ. Self-purification involves the transforma-
tion of the self, the nafs, through a transcendence of bodily or material needs.
Given the susceptibility of the nafs to satanic influences, nafs in some contexts
may even be referred to as the shayṭān’s sister (Pandolfo 2018; 315). By totally
denying the self and material needs, however, nafs is purified and externalized
in the death of saints where it comes to guide the living (Werbner 2003). In
dying, therefore, the nafs is eternalized. Conversely when one is alive, nafs has
to be morally cultivated for the pious self to emerge through remembrance of
God. Scholars have also differentiated between nafs in its different states, such
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 35

as nafs al-ammāra where the nafs incites evil (Schimmel 1975), nafs al-luwwāma
where the nafs aspires for perfection, and nafs al-muṭmaʾinna, when the nafs is
at peace, which is the ideal state for any believer. However, nafs also remains
corruptible due to material desires, and thus for the nafs to be at peace, it is
necessary to ethically cultivate it. Though the nafs cannot be pinned down to
a specific body part, it is still an integral part of the body’s spiritual wellbe-
ing. Its corruptibility can enhance human susceptibility to the effects of jinns.
Jinns can be good and bad or Muslim or non-Muslim, just as humans, and can
be prompted by demons to engage in evil acts, but jinns and shayṭān both are
viewed as being made out from fire (or smokeless fire) and thus having a greater
affinity for one another, at least in some local Islamic cosmologies. Yet jinns are
also similar to humans because of being susceptible to waswāsa or the deceit
of the devil. The shayṭān is an important force as he can lure both humans and
jinns to engage in sinful activities, including minor sins, but also major ones
like harming another person. Jinns can inflict harm autonomously or by being
captured by the witch. Muwakkal refers to jinns, a word derivative of wakil, who
is charged to negotiate with the evil jinn, occupying the space between angels
(made from light) and jinns (made from fire) in the Islamic cosmology. It is the
corrupted nafs that increases susceptibility to jinns, but paradoxically greater
piety also introduces a person to greater risks of infractions, as the influence
of the shaytan becomes even more intense. The relationship between light and
fire also shows the affinity between the jinn and the shaytan, and it is the el-
ement of light that makes human resemble angels, but still be differentiated
from them, given the fact that humans have been granted with free-will, un-
like angels, which grants them a higher status than other creations. The same
element of free-will also makes humans capable of acts that lower them to the
worst of creation.
It is useful to consider the relationship between jinns and humans as well.
Ibn-Arabi provides an interpretation of spiritual entities which we can use to
think about the relationship between the soul and the body that we have tried
to track in the essay, as well as the openness of the self to other entities, espe-
cially the influence of the shaytan and the jinn (having a close affinity to one
another) under conditions of piety (or its lack thereof). In this cosmology, the
jinn has a tricky internal-external character. It can exist outside but may also ex-
ist within the human self. According to Gracia Lopez Anguita (2008), the root of
the word jinn J-N-N represents concealment, signifying many things, which are
not mutually exclusive. The jinn’s ontological status might also be considered
to be that of a being between the human and the angel. In Futuhat, according to
Anguita, Ibn-Arabi often talks about the jinn in the same ambivalent manner.
Anguita (2008) writes that in parts of the Futuhat, the angelic qualities of the
36 KHAN

jinn bring it closer to the realm of the divine, making it a much more suitable
candidate to make sense of revelations. Anguita writes,

In other parts of the Futūhāt (Chapter 198) it is stated that its angelic
dimension brings it closer to the sphere of the Divine and makes it more
suitable to receive and understand the Revelation. Genies “not only have
knowledge which is their own, but also the knowledge of the terms in
which they are to be found; they reflect the one and the other like a
mirror” (Chapter 336). However, their nature of fire and air makes them
proud, disobedient and intellectually unstable in the face of the strength,
humility and intelligence of the human being’s nature, which consists of
water and earth. (Anguita, 2008)

Anguita then notes a different understanding of the jinn where the jinn’s root
J-N-N which is used for concealment overlaps with the meaning of the root S-T-
R. Anguita notes that Ibn-Arabi had written that jinns include “all that which
is concealed” for which he also used the word mustatir (Futuhat II, 228). An-
guita writes that perhaps Ibn-Arabi understood jinns as all the entities that are
invisible to the human eye. Anguita adds here, “What is interesting in this per-
spective is that it does not state that genies are angels, a question which was
a source of controversy among classical theologians, but rather that angels are
genies,” quoting from Ibn-Arabi when he stated, “[when I refer to] jinn in the
absolute sense of the term, [I include] those which are made of light and those
which are made of fire (Futuhat I, 254 qtd in Anguita, 2008).” The fundamen-
tal internal-external binary (as well as good-evil binary) represents something
like the trickster figure in psychoanalytic thinking and folklore which is always
shape-shifting and overpowering opponents (Radin, 1956). The ontological sta-
tus of the jinn becomes even more complicated with what Anguita observes
next,

The polysemy of the term jinn in Ibn ʿArabī’s work does not end here. The
genie can also denote the interior of the human being: “According to the
haqīqa (transcendent Reality) man’s interior is jinn.” This reading sheds
new light on the exegesis of the Quranic verse “I did not create men and
genies except to worship Me” (51:56). Ibn ʿArabī states: “With regard to the
verse: ‘I did not create men (ins) and genies (jinn) except to worship Me’, it
is as if God intended to say: ‘I did not create genies’, i.e. the concealed part
of human beings, ‘and man’, i.e. the apparent part of human beings, ‘ex-
cept to worship Me’ externally (in deeds) and internally (by purifying their
intentions) (Futuhat III: 354).” That is to say, God must be worshipped
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 37

from a zāhir or ritual perspective, following the prescriptions, and from a

bātin perspective, with sincerity and spiritual intent. Would it be possible
to draw a parallel between the antithetical pair ins/jinn and the classical
zāhir/bātin, which appears so frequently in Sufi thought? (ibid.)

This is an important provocation as it not only highlights the presence of multi-

ple ontological entities placed on a continuum between the human and the di-
vine (where jinns own’s affinity to angels or humans is unclear), but also the dis-
tinction the jinns between the external either and the internal. The jinn could
be an existence that is concealed, but semantically, it also represents one’s in-
ner being. The distinction between ins and jinn for ibn-Arabi also constitutes
the difference between the visible and invisible, especially when he wrote,

This verse (“I did not create men and genies except to worship Me”) shows
the wisdom that He has placed in all (created) things. This wisdom re-
mains and is unknown to anyone except God and those to whom He has
shown it. Thus He has used the term jinn, designating that which is con-
cealed and is known only by Him. Ins refers, on the other hand, to that
which is manifest and known directly. (Futuhat IV: 101 qtd. in Anguita,
2008)

This ambiguity around whether the jinn exists inside or outside of the body
also has implications of how healers treat the status of jinns among the afflicted
within the human body – the idea that they exist externally also shapes the be-
lief that they can both overpower humans but also be overpowered by them, as
is often believed to happen in healing rituals within Islamic societies. If jinns
represent signs of divinity, then by possessing humans they provide a window
to see things that the human subject would not have access to otherwise, as
has also been shown in anthropological literature (Khan, 2007), where jinns
co-habit with humans to help the latter negotiate social relations, providing
intuitive knowledge about how to act in the world. But if jinns represent in-
flections of the shaytan, their influence on interiority and outward expressions
would need to be managed and controlled. This also explains why the ques-
tion of spirit possession within the Islamic world has been extensively debated
where there is a consistent tension between the premise of psychosis being
caused by jinn versus treatment having purely psychological roots. When psy-
chiatrists argue that the belief in jinns is shaped by ignorance and superstition,
they disregard the immensely powerful wisdom about the place of divine bod-
ies in the cosmos as well as the close interactions between them and the human
interiority.
38 KHAN

These ideas still give psychosis an overall ambiguous status within many Is-
lamic contexts, and in casting ideas about hallucinatory experiences attributed
to jinns as mere ignorance, what analysts fail to understand is the centrality
of similar notions that have dominated psychiatric discourses as well, where
clients or patients are engaged in imagining and externalizing entities in order
to gain control over them, as is often the case among patients suffering from
eating disorders who are made to imagine an externalized self in order to gain
control over it as the first step to regain agency (Lester, 2017). This is very sim-
ilar to the notion that in order to reduce the effects of the jinn in momentary
and frequent loss of consciousness, one has to acquire greater power over it,
which is possible by engaging in pietistic activities as I have also shown else-
where (Khan, 2023). How then does the heart become the site of the soul or the
ruh in Islamic thought?

3 The Centrality of the Heart

Anthropologists have noted that in Islamic settings people use metaphors of

the heart to describe conditions of distress (Good, 1977). Often it is the heart
rather than the brain that is viewed as processing feelings, most prominently
grief. Some anthropologists working within Islamic contexts have considered
how the heart is used to represent grief and psychological pressures due to do-
mestic problems, where the adjectives used to represent conditions of the heart
also reflect longer histories of grief that are re-actualized with experiences of
distress (ibid.). Given the reception of galenic medicine in the Islamic world,
the human body is also viewed as a microcosm of the wider world, with the
heart as its center. How then did the heart become central to human wellbeing
within Islamic thought? When did the heart begin to be used synonymously
with the idea of the soul, or as the host of the spirit? Many of the ideas pre-
viously expounded upon about the conditions of the heart and divine disclo-
sure remained central even in the works of Islamic thinkers by the turn of the
millennium. In this part, I specifically draw upon the works of Al-Ghazali and
Abdul Qadir Jilani to think about how the heart became central to the under-
standing of spiritual wellbeing.
Al-Ghazali’s (1058–1111) continuing the legacy of earlier thinkers would talk
about the experience of spirituality in terms of acquiring angelic qualities
through continuous remembrance of God. The angelic is an important point
of reference – though humans cannot become angelic, they can still strive
toward it by being engaged in constant remembrance. The remembrance of
God creates an effect on the heart. Al-Ghazali draws upon the same distinction
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 39

between the visible (zahir) and invisible (batin), but instead of going into
detail about how the experience of divine proximity enhances one’s agency in
the world, talks about the compartmentalization of the body into its visible
and invisible features. These invisible features include the heart which does
not refer to the physical heart but heart in a more metaphorical sense – the
departure from earlier thinkers is that though they may have been interested
in the soul, they did not refer to the heart as the seat of the soul, as Al-Ghazali
did. Al-Ghazali (2018) wrote in the Alchemy of Happiness.

If you wish, O seeker of the way! To know your own soul, know that the
blessed and glorious God created you of two things: the one is a visible
body, and the other is a something internal, that is called spirit and heart,
which can only be perceived by the mind. But when we speak of heart, we
do not mean the piece of flesh which is in the left side of the breast of a
man, for that is found in a dead body and in animals: it may be seen with
the eyes, and belongs to the visible world. That heart, which is emphati-
cally called spirit, does not belong to this world, and although it has come
to this world, it has only come to leave it. It is the sovereign of the body,
which is its vehicle, and all the external and internal organs of the body
are its subjects. Its special attribute is to know God and to enjoy the vision
of the beauty of the Lord God. The invitation to salvation is addressed to
the spirit. (4)

Like Ibn-Arabi before him, he considered the heart as the organ of divine recog-
nition, one that was separate from the body, but whose conditions can affect
bodily organs as well. The heart as a physical organ and an imagined organ are
thus different, though when many Sufi practitioners engage in the practice of
dikhr, they do imagine God’s light as descending onto the location of the phys-
ical heart. Like Islamic thinkers since Ibn-Sina, Al-Ghazali upholds the view
about the unity of the soul (ibid., 5). He argues that it is matter that can be di-
vided and not the soul. He differentiates between animal spirit and the heart
which possesses the spirit to recognize God. He writes,

There is spirit, beloved, which is called animal spirit, which is susceptible

of division. It is found in animals. But that spirit, which has the property
of knowing God, and which is called the heart, is not found in beasts, nor
is it matter or an accident. The heart, on the contrary, has been created
with angelic qualities. (ibid., 5)
40 KHAN

Humans should, according to Al-Ghazali, be engaged in realizing the angelic

qualities of the heart perseveringly. Though Al-Ghazali’s concern is not with
illness, he still thinks that happiness can only be acquired with the soul’s recog-
nition of God. The heart (soul) has an inherent desire for God and can easily
recognize God – the question then is about how this happens. He writes, “The
heart was destined to acquire the knowledge of God, in which its happiness
consists (ibid., 6).”
Al-Ghazali also refers to the body metaphorically as a city, whose leader is
considered to be the heart. It is a useful imagery to show carnal desires and
the power of the heart over them. Perhaps his understanding too is a permuta-
tion of the tripartite platonic model of the soul, except that he treats the heart
as the locus of the soul compared to earlier thinkers. In order for one to func-
tion properly and be happy, Al-Ghazali writes, it is important to let the heart
become the sovereign of the entire body, putting all the demands of the body
subservient to the wishes of the heart. AAl-Ghazali writes,

Know, O student of wisdom that the body, which is the kingdom of the
heart, resembles a great city. The hand, the foot, the mouth and the other
members resemble the people of the various trades. Desire is a standard
bearer; anger is a superintendent of the city, the heart is its sovereign, and
reason is the vizier. The sovereign needs the service of all the inhabitants.
But desire, the standard bearer, is a liar, vain and ambitious. He is always
ready to do the contrary of what reason, the vizier, commands. He strives
to appropriate to himself whatever he sees in the city, which is the body.
Anger, the superintendent, is rebellious and corrupt, quick and passion-
ate. He is always ready to be enraged’ to spill blood, and to blast one’s
reputation. If the sovereign, the heart, should invariably consult with rea-
son, his vizier, and, when desire was transgressing, should give to wrath
to have power over him (yet, without giving him full liberty, should make
him angry in subjection to reason, the vizier, so that passing all bounds
he should not stretch out his hand upon the kingdom), there would then
be an equilibrium in the condition of the kingdom, and all the members
would perform the functions for which they were created, their service
would be accepted at the mercy seat, and they would obtain eternal felic-
ity. (ibid., 7)

This is a useful imagery to consider the interplay of different emotions, includ-

ing the emotions that need to be controlled. For example, the heart requires
all the different emotions, but these emotions need to be channeled through
the vizier. Anger is representative of impulsiveness which can be prevented by
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 41

channeling one’s emotions through reason. Desire, he says, tries to appropriate

all the emotions, which should be controlled through wrath. All these maneu-
vers are possible only when reason has been adequately trained to support the
heart in maintaining dominion over the body and its various organs and emo-
tions.
The condition of fanaʾa where one perceives the world through the divine
is also present in the work of Al-Ghazali like ibn-Arabi. Al-Ghazali talks about
the window of the heart,

The most wonderful thing of all is that there is a window in the heart from
where it surveys the world. This is called the invisible world, the world of
intelligence, or the spiritual world. People in general look only at the vis-
ible world, which is called also the present world, the sensible world and
the material world; their knowledge of it also is trivial and limited. And
there is also a window in the heart from whence it surveys the intelligible
world. (ibid., 10)

Here the heart provides an anchor into the immaterial world in that it reaches
out to the divine, perceiving things that are invisible to the naked eye. The win-
dow of the heart also makes intuition and divine inspiration possible. Like Ibn-
Arabi, Al-Ghazali also refers to the heart as a mirror. The heart has the ability to
reflect and Al-Ghazali uses ideas of the light, which becomes much more cen-
tral to the thinking of later scholars as I will show. Even when a person sleeps,
the heart preserves the forms reflected upon it (ibid., 10). When the body is
alive, the heart can only realize divine potentiality in traces, but upon death
“the heart can contemplate the invisible world and its hidden mysteries, with-
out a veil, just as lightening or the celestial rays impress the external eye (ibid.,
10).” In order to acquire the vision of God, it is important to be engaged in the
constant remembrance of God, through which the windows of the heart are
opened and “what others may have seen in a dream, he [the pious] in this state
sees in reality (ibid., 11).” The vision of God is not possible without concerted
effort – in fact, vision into the immaterial world is possible when the heart is
free from worldly lusts and desires (ibid.). While Ibn-Arabi had written about
the jinn as having an ambiguous relation between the angels and humans, in
Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness we see a closer affinity between humans and
the angels because of the innate purity of angels for being engaged in the con-
stant remembrance of God.
However what Al-Ghazali refers to as the alchemy of happiness cannot be
“acquired without spiritual self-denial and effort (ibid., 13).” When Al-Ghazali
refers to the heart as carrying traces of the divine, like others before him, he also
42 KHAN

made a case for its intrinsic purity or its inherent proclivity to reach out to the
divine, where the chief obstacle remains that of material desires. Al-Ghazali’s
explanation adds to Ibn-Arabi’s concept of fanaʾ where a subject experiences
annihilation, Al-Ghazali’s explanation is that when a human begins to acquire
angelic qualities, they also begin to possess greater power over nature, an idea
previously also considered by ibn-Arabi when he talked about the role of hu-
man intention. Al-Ghazali writes,

Know then, that the heart is endowed with properties like those of angels
and such as are not found in animals; and just as the material world is
subjected by divine permission to the angels, and when God wills it, the
angels send forth the winds, cause rain to fall, bring forth the embryo in
animals, shape their forms, cause seeds to sprout in the earth and plants
to grow, many legions of angels being appointed to this service, so also the
heart of man being created with angelic properties must have influence
and power over the material world. (ibid., 13)

All this is after all based on God’s will, just as angels have the power to bring
about rain in accordance with the commands of God. By making the compar-
ison with angels then Al-Ghazali also avoids any potential criticism about hu-
man being acquiring Godly qualities or even approximating them, despite car-
rying the breath of the divine in the soul (ruh), especially as he writes, “The
knowledge possessed by the heart in comparison with the knowledge of God
himself, is but an atom compared with the sun (ibid., 22).”
The ability of the heart to retain dominion was central for Al-Ghazali. For
prophets, the heart acquires dominion through divine revelation, through its
control over the body, but also through knowledge, which too, is mostly possi-
ble through the discretion of the divine. While difficult to achieve, Al-Ghazali
argues that to fully comprehend how prophets received knowledge, one can
still consider the impact of divine knowledge on the transformation of the self
as a form of alchemy. This alchemy though is only possible with control over
the body just as the rider controls the horse, as Al-Ghazali writes,

The body is but an animal to be ridden by the heart, which is its rider,
while the heart’s chief end is to acquire a knowledge of God. The dig-
nity of anything depends upon what it is in itself. A person therefore who
does not understand his own body, heart and soul, and yet pretends to the
knowledge of God, resembles the bankrupt, who, although he has noth-
ing to eat himself, should yet plan a feast for all the poor of the city. In
short, man ought to make every possible exertion to gain the knowledge
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 43

of God, because the knowledge of God necessitates the love of God. (ibid.,
22)

There is overall an extensive discussion about ways to keep the heart healthy,
and conversely, to prevent it from becoming sick. In one book which has a com-
pilation of works from Ibn Rajab, Ibn al-Qayyim and Ghazali, the editors talk
about the conditions of the heart in the binaries of health and sickness. The
living heart experiences pain as a result of ugliness that it “encounters and
through its recognizing its level of awareness, it is capable of recognizing the
onset of decay – and the increase in the severity of the remedy that will be
needed to stop it – but then sometimes it prefers to put up with the pain rather
than undergo the arduous trial of the cure (Farid, 1993).” The best way to expe-
rience recovery is by taking Quran itself as medicine. According to the authors,
one of the conditions of the diseased heart is that it is always preoccupied in its
longing for worldly desires, whereas the “healthy heart continues to trouble its
owners until it returns to Allah (ibid.).” The decay of the heart can be imagined
as making it dark, as in the case of a prophetic saying narrated via Hudhayfa
ibn al-Yamani,

Temptations are presented to the heart, one by one. Any heart that ac-
cepts them will be left with a black stain, but any heart that rejects them
will be left with a mark of purity, so that hearts are of two types: a dark
heart that has turned away and become like an overturned vessel, and a
pure heart that will never be harmed by temptations for as long as the
earth and the heavens exist. (ibid., 21)

The impurity of the heart also results in people confusing between the good
and the evil.
There is an elaborate symptomatology around the diseased heart. This of
course does not refer to the heart’s actual physical experiences, but it is very
likely that the spiritual condition of the heart overlaps with its physical condi-
tions. One should not be surprised if an Islamic healer or an alim recommends
prayers as an antidote for poor physical health, because the impurity of the
soul makes one much more susceptible to physical affliction, mainly by caus-
ing material desires that are damaging to one’s spiritual and physical wellbeing
and by weakening one’s defenses against the shaytan. There are types of be-
haviors that further impurify the heart which include talking excessively as is
mentioned in a hadith reported on the authority of Ibn Umar, “Do not talk ex-
cessively without remembering Allah, because such excessive talk without the
mention of Allah causes the heart to harden, and the person furthest from Al-
44 KHAN

lah is a person with a hard heart (ibid.).” A good heart is therefore a soft one,
that is receptive to the needs of others, is directed toward the remembrance of
God, but is also conscious of worldly desires. One of the ways in which mate-
rial desires enter the faculty of the heart is through sight. The shaytan “enters
with the glance, for he travels with it, faster than the wind blowing through an
empty place (ibid.).” This results in the person confusing good with the evil,
making the heart forgetful. The authors also suggest that the heart and the eye
are linked where “it has been said that between the eye and the heart there
is an immediate connection; if the eyes are corrupted, then the heart follows
(ibid., 28).” Though from English translations it appears that Al-Ghazali does
not use nafs as some Sufi thinkers would, he still has a similar idea of acquiring
divine wisdom by dominating the body (as al-Razi had referred to as the lower
self, and Abdul Qadir Jilani would refer to as the nafs). In Jilani’s work nafs fi-
nally appears as the equivalent of the lower self where all material desires are
seated. The nafs has to be dominated for the pious self to emerge, which is a
long move from the treatment of soul (equivalent to the “mind”) itself as nafs
and the treatment of the nafs through its tripartite platonic arrangement, as we
have discussed in part 1.

3.1 Nafs in Abdul Qadir Jilani’s Work

In Jilani’s (1077–1166) work, the nafs is frequently treated as a contentious en-
tity that has to be struggled with. Jilani also retains nafs as the self, but this self
is often treated as selfish in nature and for having a selfish appetite. Jilani dif-
ferentiates between different stages/notions (khawatir) in one’s passion. There
is a selfish khawatir, where the nafs is used not only to refer to the self or to per-
sonhood generally, but also to one’s selfish nature. Other states include those of
passion, states arising from the heart, the diabolical state and the angelic state.
But Jilani uses the nafs mostly to refer to the lower self, as he writes,

Do not allow your lower self (nafs) to rear its head. Either you ride it, or
it will ride you. Either you pin it down, or it will pin you down. If it does
not obey you when you wish you obey Allah, chastise it with the whips of
hunger, thirst and humiliation, nakedness and seclusion in a place devoid
of any human companion. Do not lay these whips aside from it until it
becomes tame, and obeys Allah (Almighty and Glorious is He) under all
circumstances. Even when it is tame, you must not stop chiding it: “Have
you not done such and such, and such and such?” Apply the appropriate
punishment to keep it permanently subdued. (Jilani, 1992, p. 77)
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 45

What emerges is a muscular kind of logic around the treatment of the nafs.
There is a linguistic transformation that takes place in that there is a greater
emphasis on nafs as the lower self than its use merely as the “self”. The nafs
while is part of the self is also the preeminent site of shaytan’s influence on
the body. Jilani frequently talks about the lower self, shaytan, passion and the
contemplation of worldly interests alongside one another as if all are symptoms
of the same spiritual disorder (ibid., 80). For Jilani, the control of the lower self
does not completely take place in the absence of help from others – in fact, he
suggests that there is no salvation for those who have been able to bring their
own nafs under control but are unwilling to help others struggling with their
nafs. He writes,

If you happen to have acquired a whole loaf of this world, and your lower
self (nafs) is fighting for control and your desires are making demands,
then is the time to look after those who cannot get even a slice. There is
no salvation ( falah) for you, until you despise your lower self and take up
arms against it on the side of the Lord of Truth (Almighty and Glorious is
He). (ibid., 87)

In addition to the heart (qalb), Jilani employs the concept of the sirr. Sirr refers
to the “innermost being”. He says that the quality of a tamed nafs is that it takes
instructions from the heart as well as the sirr (ibid., 143). The changes and trans-
formations required do not just have to do with putting on an appearance of
piety, but also to put a cloak on one’s heart in order to protect it from the ef-
fects of sin. Jilani writes,

You who have taken to wearing wool (suf ) clothe your innermost being
(sirr) in wool, then your heart (qalb), then your lower self (nafs), then
your body. Asceticism (zuhd) starts from here, not from the outer (zahir)
toward the inner (batin). When the innermost being is pure, the purity
(safa) will spread to the heart, the self, the limbs and organs, the food and
the clothing, and will extend to all your states (ahwal). The interior of the
house must be constructed first. Then, when its construction has been
completed, go outside to build the entrance. There would be no outer
without an inner. (ibid., 160)

Jilani also suggests that it is not difficult to undergo these changes – it only re-
quires one to turn to God for all their sicknesses (of course here sickness is
used for one’s spiritual sickness). The spiritual recovery of the heart requires
the mobility of the heart through the shunning of the demands imposed by
46 KHAN

the nafs and through receptivity to inspiration (ilham) and dreams (manam).
Jilani writes about the need for mobility within the heart, “If your limbs and or-
gans are immobile, it is not a serious matter; this will cause you no harm. What
is serious is immobility of the heart, for this is the supreme calamity (ad-dahiya
al-uzma) (ibid., 198).” Meanwhile the disciplining of the nafs requires isolation
from creation, but this interaction would not be a problem until the “lower self
[dies] and is loaded into the bier of your sincerity (sidq) (ibid., 202).” The heart
also represents presence in this world and attunement to God. For Jilani, it is
only the heart or the sirr that can be attuned to God in this world, and in differ-
entiating between nafs and sirr/heart, we see a fundamental shift in detaching
the nafs from one’s soul. Jilani writes,

O Allah, relent toward me and toward them! O Allah, awaken me and

awaken them, and have mercy on me and have mercy on them! Let our
hearts and our physical bodies be devoted entirely to You, or at least, if
the body must belong to one’s dependents in matters of this world, and
the lower self (nafs) to the hereafter, let the heart (qalb) and the inner-
most being (sirr) belong to You. (ibid., 207)

The nafs here represents the repository of all human actions based on will and
free choice. The sirr is used for the ruh blown by God in the body. But there
is also a slight difference in that the sirr represents the innermost which Jilani
suggests has a natural proclivity to God, as if worshipping God is an intrinsic
human quality that humans depart from when the heart has darkened due to
sin and when it loses its ability to “see”.
The penultimate stage of divine closeness is described by Jilani in the fol-
lowing words, “When you have accomplished this fully, your heart will come to
have eyes with which you can see (ibid.).” The state of annihilation takes place
when the creation becomes one with the creator, and the effect of nafs is also
reduced or even made negligible. Jilani writes,

Meaning (mana) will become form (sura), what was absent (ghaʾib) will
be present (hadir), and what was known only by report (khabar) will
be witnessed directly (muʾayana). When the servant is worthy of Allah
(Almighty and Glorious is He), He will be with him under all circum-
stances, changing him, transforming him and moving him from state
to state. The whole of him will become a meaningful entity (maʾna).
The whole of him will become a faith (iman), a conviction (iqan), a real
knowledge (maʾrifa), a nearness (qurb) and a direct perception (musha-
hada). He will become a day with no night, a light with no darkness,
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 47

a clarity with no confusion, a heart with no lower self (nafs) and an

innermost (sirr) with no heart, an extinction ( fana) with no existence
(wujud), an absence (ghaiba) with no presence (hudur). He will become
absent from them and from him. (ibid., 220)

Whereas in some places in Jilani’s writings there is a discussion about the ex-
tinguishing of the nafs, in other places, Jilani talks about the need to expel it
from the heart. In the presence of the nafs, he argues, there will continue to be
confusion and a lack of certainty. Here the emphasis is on purifying the heart
from the effects of the nafs. Jilani writes,

O young man! In that which does concern you there is plenty to keep you
busily distracted from that which does not concern you. Expel your lower
self (nafs) from your heart so that good may come to you, for it is the trou-
blesome cause of confusion; once it has made its exit, pure serenity (safa)
will come. Change, that you may be changed. (ibid., 222)

Yet as much as Jilani talks about the expulsion of the nafs, Jilani also talks about
the need to ascend from one’s nafs and becoming detached from it. Still in other
parts of his writing, Jilani talks about the need to keep one’s nafs trained, which
is possible by being in the company of others (ibid., 239). Maybe a consoli-
dated idea of the nafs was not a central preoccupation for Jilani, and maybe
he too wrestled with the linguistic ambiguity of the world (nafs) invoking both
the meanings: “oneself” (representing intentionality) as well as one’s lower self.
Still, the need to keep the nafs under control is a central one, either by expelling
it, or through the body transcending the pull of the nafs. Like Al-Ghazali who
referred to the body as a horse, Jilani talks about the need to conquer the world
by riding on the nafs to reach the hereafter. Jilani writes,

Mind the business of your own lower self (nafs), until you can control it,
subdue it, hold it captive and make it serve as your riding animal. Then
you will be able to ride it across the deserts of this world in order to reach
the hereafter. It will carry you past creatures until you reach the Lord of
Truth (Almighty and Glorious is He). Then, when you have accomplished
this and have gained strength, you will be able to give rides to others. Out
of this world you will take them, to their Master (Mawla) you will convey
them, and with morsels of wisdom you will feed them. (ibid., 243)

Unless this does not happen, the nafs continues to collude with the shaytan
in order to trap the human in shaytan’s service, for which one needs to whip
48 KHAN

the nafs by the suppression of carnal desires. If one does not whip the nafs and
by extension the shaytan, the shaytan continues to play “with ordinary peo-
ple, just as the horseman plays with his polo ball. He can take them and steer
him any way he wishes, as one of you may steer his mount in any direction
he desires. He strikes the backs of their hearts and uses them however he may
wish. He pulls them down from the minarets (sawami), drags them away from
the prayer niches (maharib) and traps them in his service, while the lower self
(nafs) assists him in this and paves the way for him (ibid., 244).”
Jilani suggests that nafs and the “truth” are incompatible (ibid., 259) and fun-
damentally what we observe in some of the allegories used by Jilani is that nafs
is something to be left behind so that the heart can be kept pure. Jilani’s ty-
pology, unlike Al-Ghazali is not one in which the soul and the heart are inter-
changeable. For Jilani, the heart leads to an even deeper existence known as
the sirr, as he writes, “There is nothing to be said until you depart from you,
leaving your lower self (nafs), your passions and your natural urges at the door,
leaving your heart in the lobby and leaving your innermost being (sirr) in the
closet with the King (ibid., 263).” In some ways, Jilani also draws the example of
alchemy to talk about the possibilities that are present when one’s nafs is fully
under control and this alchemy entails that each organ absorbs something from
another one of a higher grade, for example, when the nafs becomes the heart
and the heart becomes the sirr and the sirr is transformed in the process of
annihilation. Jilani wrote,

My people! If there is nothing else for it, let your lower selves be at the
door of this world, your hearts at the door of the hereafter, and your in-
nermost beings (asrar) at the door of the Master (al-Mawla), until such
time as your lower self (nafs) is transformed into a heart (qalb) and tastes
its experience, your heart is transformed into an innermost being (sirr)
and tastes its experience, and your innermost being is transformed into a
state of annihilation ( fana) in which there is nothing to taste or be expe-
rienced. Then He will bring you back to life for His sake, not for the sake
of any other than Him. At this stage an alchemy will occur, so that ev-
ery dirham (small coin] from Him turns into a thousand weights of brass,
which He converts into gold. (ibid., 287)

In order to attain reunion with God it is also necessary to leave behind the self
because the self only has this-worldly qualities whereas the inner essence is
directed toward God. Jilani overall employs a language of the spirit’s ascent to-
ward God for which it is necessary to strip oneself of the nafs.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 49

For Jilani since the spiritual organs exist in proximity, they draw influence
from each other. For example, the heart may draw from the sirr and vice versa.
The same is the case with the heart and the nafs. Jilani writes, “The heart draws
its water from the innermost being. The tranquil self (nafs mutmaʾinna] draws
its water from the heart (ibid., 334).” The tongue which is otherwise controlled
by the nafs is informed and it then begins to engage in the remembrance of God
while spreading his divinity. While there is an inherent opposition between the
heart and the nafs, the latter can be prevented from being distracted through
remembrance of God (ibid., 355). The self eventually becomes tranquil in this
manner (nafs mutmaʾinna] with all material desires subdued. For Jilani, even
though the nafs in its inherent state has to be repressed, there is a state reached
when the innermost being informs the heart and the heart, in turn, informs the
tranquil self (ibid., 428). The self, when completely under control and at peace,
then enables the person to live a life without material desires. This would ap-
parently seem to be a paradox, but it shows both the effects of nafs on the heart
and the person’s whole being, as well as the heart’s ability to receive guidance
from the sirr for the heart to achieve a state of tranquility.
Jilani (2010) considers a similar typology in other works such as Pearls of the
Heart where he urges believers to find the “determined aspiration of the heart
and the innermost being” (117), as in other works like Utterances (1992). Jilani’s
work also reveals the central role of interpretation in distinguishing between
divine inspiration and satanic infractions, as Ibn-Arabi had also considered. An
untrained heart may treat the infractions of shaytan as signs from God, as is also
revealed in one of the famous stories attributed to Jilani. Muhtar Holland writes
about a story that one day the shaytan appeared in front of Jilani pretending to
be Gabriel saying that he brought the buraq from Allah and then invited Ji-
lani to be in the presence of God. Mohtar, the translator of Jilani’s book Futuh
al-Ghaib, writes, “To this the Shaikh promptly replied that the speaker of these
words before him could be no other than the devil because neither Gabriel nor
the buraq could come to the world for any reason other than the Holy Prophet
Muhammad. Satan, however, had still another missile to throw. He said, ‘Well,
Abdul Qadir, you have saved yourself by dint of your knowledge.’ ‘Be off, Satan,’
the Saint retorted, ‘Do not tempt any further; it is not through my knowledge
but through the grace of Allah that I have escaped from your trap (16–17).’”
Such an example is useful because it reveals that one has to be adequately
disciplined in order to fend off the risk of being lured of shaytan. Whether a per-
son will be detracted by the shaytan is determined by who God wants to save
or to leave astray. But there is also the possibility of divine disclosure (kashf ),
which as I have been considered in the previous parts, is both intuitive, but also
entails mesmerization through proximity with God. Jilani describes kashf for
50 KHAN

overpowering senses and reason, but here Jilani differentiates between two ele-
ments, namely those of Jalal and Jamal. He writes, “the jalal produces a disqui-
eting fear and creates a disturbing apprehension and overpowers the heart in
such an awful manner that its symptoms because visible on the physical body
(Jilani 1992).” This is different from the experience of God’s graceful manifes-
tation, which can be very routine and ordinary which entails “his reflection on
the heart of the man, producing light, joy, elegance, sweat words and loving
conversations and glad tidings with regard to great gifts and high position and
closeness to Himself … (ibid., 40).”
Most of the “discourses” in the volume Futuh al-Ghaib were given as ser-
mons. They were also conducted as dialogues with people in the audience. In
some of the later lectures, Jilani’s sons also inquire about his health. When his
son Abdul Aziz asked him about his disease, he replied, “Surely no one, neither
any man nor any jinn, nor any angel knows or understands my disease. The
knowledge of God is not diminished by the command of God. The command
changes but the knowledge does not change …” His son Abdul Jabbar then asks
him, “What part of your body is ailing?” To which he said, “All the parts of my
body are ailing except my heart which has no pain in it and is sound with God.”
He died while saying, “Allah, Allah, Allah (ibid., 179)” as recounted in his lec-
tures.

3.2 The Experience of Unveiling

The concept of divine unveiling (kashf ) is best described in the works of Ali
Hujwiri. One would not be mistaken to trace these ideas back to Ibn-Arabi and
his engagement with Quran, and of course, the idea of unveiling that he en-
gaged with so extensively entailed that it was after all divine wisdom that both
veiled and unveiled the realities of the world to us. Hujwiri refers to maʾrifat al-
lah as the gnosis of God and says that the gnosis of God is typically of two kinds:
cognitional (ʿilmi) and emotional (hali). Ali Hujwiri (1009–1072) says that typi-
cally Islamic scholars talked about the importance of ilm in the understanding
of God, but it is possible to have the cognition of God and yet not be a gnos-
tic (arif ). This means that feeling is a much surer way of achieving gnosis and
here he also goes against the Mutazilite school according to which one could
arrive at God’s proof of existence through logic. One reason for taking this posi-
tion was because of the longstanding belief that it is indeed God that enlightens
one’s heart, though this does not mean that a person who strives in the path will
necessarily get its fruits (Hujwiri 2000, p. 285). Ali Hujwiri maintains the same
language about the soul residing in the heart as Abdul Jilani and Al-Ghazali had
considered, saying, “God created the body and committed its life to the spirit
( jan) and he created the soul (dil) and committed its life to Himself (ibid.).”
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 51

The language of texts I have considered changes from Arabic to Persian but the
concept of the spirit’s relationship with the body remains the same. Jan is an
interesting word to refer to spirit, as it is used for both one’s beloved, as well
as the spirit that animates one’s life, as people may refer to its departure on
the site of death. This means that jan corresponds to the use of ruh or nafs as
considered by earlier scholars.
Al-Hujwiri also considers the antagonisms between reasons and the feelings
of the soul. He writes,

Therefore, when reason is gone as far as possible, and the souls of His
lovers must search for Him, they rest helplessly without their faculties,
and while they so rest they grow restless and stretch their hands in sup-
plication and seek a relief for their souls; and when they have exhausted
every manner of search in their power, the power of God becomes theirs,
i.e. they find the way from Him to Him, and are eased of the anguish of
absence and set foot in the garden of intimacy and win to rest. And rea-
son, when it sees that the souls have attained their desire, tries to exert
its control, but fails; and when it fails it becomes distraught; and when
it becomes distraught it abdicates. Then God clothes it in the garment
of service (khidmat) and says to it: “While thou wert independent thou
wert veiled by thy faculties and their exercise, and when these were anni-
hilated thou didst fail, and having failed thou didst attain.” Thus it is the
allotted portion of the soul to be near unto God, and that of the reason
is to do His service. God causes Man to know Him through Himself with
a knowledge that is not linked to any faculty, a knowledge in which the
existence of Man is merely metaphorical. Hence to the gnostic egoism is
utter perfidy; his remembrance of God is without forgetfulness, and his
gnosis is not empty words but actual feeling. (Hujwiri 2000; 288)

Here Ali Hujwiri directs us to antagonisms between the soul and rationality, be-
cause rationality forces one to think about the divine through intellect rather
than one’s feelings which one cannot fully put into words. Ali Hujwiri like ibn-
Arabi who had talked about the role of interpretation in distinguishing good
from the bad refers to people who claim they have received gnosis from inspi-
ration (ilham) unlike the gnostic who has a criterion for distinguishing between
the good and bad. Based on the perspective that one may not fully be able to
put feelings into words and that words transform one’s intrinsic feelings, he dif-
ferentiates his ideas from those who self-proclaimed that they either received
an inspiration or talked about achieving divine intimacy experience publicly
(ibid., 288). He talks about how people thought that they had received divine
52 KHAN

inspiration but were altogether in error. He also refutes those who reasoned
that the knowledge of God was necessary (dururi) to achieve divine intimacy,
because this would imply that every reasonable man comes in the end to the
same truth.7 He also departs from the understanding that gnosis is based on “in-
tuitive” knowledge simply because intuition would entail some form of neces-
sity of arriving at divine truths which is not the case in this world, as humans are
given a free will (ibid., 289). The way intuition is used here is with an inflection
of necessity, unlike Kantian intuition which involves a higher level of abstrac-
tion. Interestingly intuition is also used by translators to refer to spontaneous
bursts of knowledge that have no rational basis. Ali Hujwiri writes that the hu-
man free will is supported by the concealment of God’s presence as he writes,
“The excellence of gnosis and faith lies in their being hidden; when they are
made visible, faith becomes compulsory … (ibid., 290)” Ali Hujwiri argues that
“man’s knowledge and his gnosis of God depend entirely on the information
and eternal guidance of Truth (ibid., 290).” But another important condition of
a successful gnosis is that one does not claim gnosis, as he writes, “Do not claim
gnosis, lest thou perish in the pretension, but cleave to the reality thereof, that
thou mayest be saved (ibid., 291).”
The idea of avoiding the claim to gnosis resonates with Ibn-Arabi’s idea of
“interpretation”, but here Ali Hujwiri also states that one should not claim to
have experienced gnosis at all, as the very claim corrupts the experience of
revelation. Another important point here is that upon achieving gnosis, one
should detach oneself from the world, “When one is honored by the revelation
of the Divine majesty, his existence becomes a plague on him and all his at-
tributes a source of corruption (ibid., 291).” Here the believer should also not be
astonished by God’s acts (ibid.), and as soon as God’s light enters the heart, the
contemplation of mysteries would no longer overwhelms a person; every act
would become an act of contemplation (ibid., 292). This process also referred
to as annihilation destroys all human attributes (ibid., 292), as the subject car-
ries experiences that can no longer be accommodated in language (ibid., 293).
Gnosis is referred to as an un-ending process, and Ali Hujwiri, like many before
him talks about how the attunement of the heart to the divine, results in the
suppression of the lower self (nafs). He writes, “When a man feels desire and
passion he turns to the soul (nafs), which is the seat of falsehood, and when he
finds the evidence of gnosis, he also turns to the soul in order that it may guide
him to the spirit, which is the source of truth and reality (ibid., 293).” The spirit
here of course represents eternal guidance. But the question that has been left
unanswered is that if the heart is the organ of the soul, how does the heart be-

7 I have used necessary instead of intuitive, as the translator of kashf al-mahjub used.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 53

come attuned to the divine and carry its traces? One way to think about this
communication is through the metaphysics of light.

4 The Reception of Light (Nur)

In the previous part, we have considered how Islamic thinkers treated the heart
as the receptacle of divine grace. In this part, I will consider the relationship
between the heart and divinity through the metaphysics of light using the
works of Shihab ad-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) and Sadr al-din al-Qunwani
(1207–1274). This will also help us get to broader questions of epistemology
as well about what constitutes knowledge of the world in relation to the
knowledge about the divine. Suhrawardi too claimed like Ibn-Arabi to have ac-
quired knowledge through intuition during his retreats and visions (1999, p. 1).
Suhrawardi suggests that “in every soul there is a portion, be it small or great,
of the light of God (ibid.)” and suggests that every person striving in the way of
God has at least some intuition. Suhrawardi like many of his contemporaries
critiqued the peripatetic position that all forms of knowledge, including the
existence of God could be acquired through logic and syllogisms. Like Al-Razi
before him, he says that the path he follows had been trodden by many others
was also the same as Plato’s. One can clearly notice his fascination and respect
for Greek philosophy. He combines his interest in philosophy and after paying
homage to Hermes, Pythagoras and others also refers to Persian philosophers
and their interest in metaphors of light and darkness.
Suhrawardi creates a distinction between light that refracts the originary
light (accidental light) and the original light itself (incorporeal light). Acciden-
tal light can also be divided into a range of dusky substances. Accidental light
redirects a light from a different source and its refractions also create certain
dark states (which also appear when light is absent or when the obstruction of
light creates a shadow). For both the dusky and the dark state, that which gives
light must necessarily be something other than barriers and dark substances
(ibid., 78). Shadows emerge when barriers obstruct light. Collectively acciden-
tal light is not the originary and pure light, it is in fact, only a light of something
else. However, incorporeal pure light is light in itself (ibid., 79). This necessar-
ily implies that “light is that which is evident in its own reality and by essence
makes another evident (ibid., 81).” Suhrawardi then says that “since an incor-
poreal light gives all the barriers their lights and existence, that light must be
alive and self-conscious, since it is a light in itself (ibid., 86).” Meanwhile he also
states that the existence of two independent incorporeal lights is inconceivable
(ibid., 87), as there can only be one originary light. Luminosity can be increased
54 KHAN

by the originary light which Suhrawardi refers to as the “Light of light” stating,
“It would be composite and not pure light. A luminous accident may only be-
long to that in which light is increased. Were the Light of Lights made more
luminous by a state, Its independent essence would be illuminated by an acci-
dent dependent light that it Itself necessitated (ibid., 88).” The Light of Lights
is thus a single incorporeal light but can generate many other lights through
reflections and refractions. Though the accidental light my look like the incor-
poreal light, only the latter represents the unrefracted version, as Suhrawardi
writes,

Just as among the objects of sensation the acquired light is not like the
radiating light in its perfection, so too, is the case with the incorporeal
lights. The accidental lights may differ in their perfection and weakness
by the reason of the light that illuminates them, though the recipient and
its capacity remain the same. (ibid., 91)

The difference is just as the difference between the light of the Sun and the
moon. The moon’s appearance may be much more prominent at night than
the sun, but its light too after all originates from the sun. The role of the agent
is also important here to determine receptivity, for example, the light that clay
receives from the sun may be more perfect than that which is reflected of the
glass, or which comes from a lamp (ibid., 91). The luminosity of the light there-
fore depends upon the surface upon which it falls, even when the agent is the
same. Here the incorporeal light is undivided even when there is a multiplicity
in the barriers (ibid., 95).
But there are requirements for one’s receptiveness toward the Light of Lights.
Here in addition to making a point about the metaphysics of light, Suhrawardi
also makes a spiritual point, as he writes, “… The Light of Lights shines Its Light
upon the Proximate Light simply by virtue of the suitability of the recipient, its
love for the Light of Lights, and the absence of any veil. There is a multiplicity
of aspects here, a receptive cause, and conditions (ibid., 96).” In a way reso-
nant with the heart’s longing for the divine, Suhrawardi talks about the desire
of the deficient light for the Light of Lights, writing, “At the root of the defi-
cient light is passion for the higher light (ibid., 97).” The magnitude of domi-
nating lights is infinitely higher than for all other types of lights (ibid., 99). Just
as sound waves accumulate, so is the case with the refraction of the Light of
Light, as Suhrawardi suggests, “The second dominating light receives the pro-
pitious light from the Light of Lights twice; once from it, without intermediary,
and another time, with respect to the proximate light. The third light receives it
four times: the two reflections from its master, from the Light of Lights without
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 55

mediacy, and from the Proximate Light (ibid., 100).” The fundamental point is
that many lights can become combined and acquire greater intensity, but they
will still not overwhelm the Light of Lights, as is the relationship between the
sun and the stars, “for the magnitude of all that which is seen from the fixed
stars at night and from the rest of the planets is incomparably greater than the
Sun and yet does not make the day (ibid., 104).”

4.1 Light of Lights and the Soul

In another book, The Shape of Light (1998), Suhrawardi explores the implica-
tions for his metaphysics of light for spirituality and divine wisdom more gen-
erally. But Suhrawardi also proposes important ideas about the soul and the
mind that are in line with the long tradition of Islamic philosophical and reli-
gious thought, as I have been tracking in the essay, that treated the soul as the
seat of rationality. For example, in the Shape of Light, Suhrawardi talks about
the rational soul as having its own powers of realization. He adds that there
are often evil influences that prevent the rational soul from realizing its true
potential, as he writes,

It is an evil force which leads man astray from that which the mind pro-
poses: honestly, generosity, justice, valor, munificence. Mind knows that
its origin is not of the realm of the senses alone but belongs to the imma-
terial world. Mind with the exaltation of reason and spirituality weakens
its dependence upon the body and wishes to return to the realm of the
spirit and of the essence. (55)

Here platonic influences on Suhrawadi’s thinking are evident. Interesting here

is also that he occasionally treats the mind as the center seat of rationality, in-
stead of the heart, as others had considered. Suhrawardi also retains more or
less the same idea about the lower self which he compares with animal urges
as his other contemporaries and those before him had considered. He writes,

In animals and in the animal in man, there is a double-forked primor-

dial urge. One of its forks is sexual energy, which wishes and attracts that
which is pleasant. The other, negativity or anger, repulses that which is
unpleasant. The animal also has an energy of struggle (for self-preserva-
tion). It is the animal soul both in the animal and in the lower soul in man
which contains these energies. It is a vaporous matter composed of bile,
sex, blood, and mucus. It is produced in the left cavity of the heart, and
receives some energy from the light of the human soul. (56)
56 KHAN

This point too resembles the typology laid out by Abdul Qadir Jilani who talked
about the influence of the sirr on the heart and then onto the nafs. Similarly,
Suhrawardi talks about how the lower self exists in proximity to the human
soul and receives light from it. This entails the cultivation of the nafs such as
that it is not eliminated, but that it remains under the influence of the soul.
Suhrawardi even goes on to say that the soul is part of the Divine, which is an
idea that has been influenced by the Quranic verse about God blowing ruh into
humans, and yet cannot be mistaken with God being present in any shape or
form within humans, as this would challenge the concept of the unity of God.
Suhrwardi writes about the soul,

The human soul is part of the Divine and is under the direct command
of Allah. It is only with the enlightenment which the animal soul receives
from the human soul that it able to manifest in the mind. (56)

What is unique about Suhrawardi’s understanding is that the mind bears the
output of the competition between the human soul which bears traces of the
divine and the so-called animal soul. Scholars mentioned in the previous parts
did not have the same understanding of the mind, except Abdul Qadir Jilani,
who had an elaborate idea of the sirr, but this too did not overlap with the mind
as much. Suhrawardi says that the animal soul still has a pull on the human
soul, but this influence can only be controlled by training the animal soul by
the human soul. He then links this influence with his metaphysics of light,

The animal soul serves as a beast of burden for the human soul, providing
it with the fine state which can only be obtained through training by the
faculty of reasoning received from the enlightenment of the human soul.
It becomes disconnected and independent when it dispenses with the
faculty of reasoning. The animal soul is in opposition to the Sacred Soul
(the highest of souls in man). (ibid., 57)

It would not be inaccurate to suggest that with Suhrwardi, we see somewhat

of a return the platonic conception of a soul(s) with Islamic overtones, unlike
others who had only referred the soul in relation to carnal desires. Suhrwardi
adds, “The human soul is a sacred light among the lights of Allah, which has no
dimension and no place,” thereby securely linking his theological anthropol-
ogy to the metaphysics of light. In the Shape of Light, Suhrawardi also cautions
against thinking that the human soul is actually part of Allah, as this would
challenge the premise of Tawhid or the Oneness of God. Meanwhile he also
distances himself from the original platonic conception about soul as eternal,
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 57

as such a premise too would challenge the premise of Tawhid if something were
to exist eternally like God (ibid., 58).
Suhrawardi then also explores what was known as the realm of the mind by
Greek philosophers, which was one of the three divisions of the universe. He
referred to this realm as al-nur al-Muhammadi also known as the ʿaql al-kull
(the absolute mind). He transposes the Greek typology of the mind onto an
Islamic one, saying, “According to the ancient Greek philosophers, the realm of
the Mind is composed of three aspects. The first is its existence, the second is
the dependence of its existence on a creative force, and the third is its being a
possible existence that contains all other possibilities (ibid., 70).” Transposing
this typology onto an Islamic one, he then writes,

From its aspect of existence the mind is created. From its dependence
on a creative force, the nafs, the self, is created. From its aspect of being
a possible existence containing all other possibilities, matter is created.
(ibid., 70)

He refers to the prophetic saying, “Awwalu ma khalaqa Allahu al-ʿaql (the first
creation of Allah is the mind),” and compares this with the idea of the Absolute
Mind, as understood by ancient Greek philosophers. He then says that the mind
is divided into ʿaql-al-maʾash or the ordinary intelligence which realizes the af-
fairs of the material world and the ʿaql al-maʾad or the divine intelligence which
realizes spiritual matters and whose “principal function is to lead man to the
knowledge of Allah through realizing the mystery of man (ibid., 70)” suggesting
that one can only learn about God by knowing about oneself, as suggested in
the prominent Islamic saying man ʿarafa nafsahu faqad ʿarafa rabbahu which
translates to “he who knows himself, knows his Lord (ibid., 70).”
Just as the universe is divided into sections, so is the mind. The second sec-
tion of the universe as mentioned above consists of the realm of the nafs, or the
self. Following the division of the mind, the realm of the universe is divided into
integrative souls: al-nafs al-tabiʾI (the soul of nature) which holds the creation
together and prevents it from disintegrating, al-nafs al-nabai (the soul of vege-
tation) which helps the creation evolve and grow and finally al-nafs al-haywani
(the animal soul) which enables the creation to move and to sense.
These souls map onto the human soul. Suhrwardi writes that that when
these souls are separated from the body, death occurs (71). He writes that
among humans there is a human soul (al nafs al-natiqah) which is of divine
origin “as Allah below with his own breath into Adam” and uses the Hadith
Qudsi, “Wa naffastu fihi min ruhi (And I breathed My Soul unto him).” Like
many of the thinkers starting from Ibn-Arabi and Suhrawardi writes that
58 KHAN

this type of nafs is the force of perfection within man and uses a Quranic
verse to discuss how it evolves through seven stages from nafs al-ammarah
(the dominating soul) to nafs al-lawwamah (the soul of conscience) to nafs
al-mulhimah (the enlightened soul) to nafs al-mutmaʾinnah (the soul of bliss)
to nafs al-radiyah (the soul of total submission) to nafs al-mardiyyah (the soul
which is close to its Creator) and finally to nafs al-zakiyyah or al-kamilah (the
purified and perfect soul). All these belong to the realm of nafs al-natiqah. This
is a different typology than one in which there is contestation between the
ruh and the nafs. In the typology provided by Suhrawardi, nafs goes through
several stages in purification to finally achieve divine closeness.
Suhrawardi then connects divine closeness to the metaphysics of light where
he talks about the cumulative effect that holy lights have on the heart, as they
reflect from one heart to another through which “the Mind” is “increased” and
became “manifold” (ibid., 74). He writes, “Because we apply the rules of causal-
ity, this light revealed to us reflecting from heart to heart seems very close to us.
In reality, because of its overwhelming intensity, what is farthest seems nearest
to us (ibid., 74).” The First light, according to Suhrawardi is the highest of the
highest, but also the nearest of the near.

4.2 The Visible and the Invisible

Another prominent scholar to have drawn upon ideas of Ibn-Arabi was Sadr
al-Din Qunwani. He played an important role in combining Ibn-Arabi’s teach-
ings with Suhrawardy’s within the milieu of the pre-Ottoman intellectual
tradition. He was of the view that the non-delimited entity (God) possessed
all the possibilities of self-manifestation (tajalli). He differentiated between
Unseen Theophany (tajalli-e-ghaybi) and Visible Theophany (tajalli-e-shabadi)
through which the archetypal entities become visible; a process referred to as
self-entification. This aligns with Ibn-Arabi’s idea of the Perfect Man for whom
God created the world, but also in whose image God granted the world’s perfec-
tion. In Qunwani’s words, “Although the ontological levels are numerous, they
are reducible to the Unseen, the Visible, and the reality which comprehends
these two (Chittick & Wilson, 1982).” He differentiates between things that
are visible to us and other things that are invisible to us. There may be things
that are invisible to us, but may be visible in relation to God’s knowledge, a
vision made possible by spirits as in the case of angels. But there are some
entities that exist between spirits and corporeal bodies which are known as
“image-exemplars”. They are luminous like spirits but unlike them, they can
appear in corporeal shapes. As Chittick writes in his description of Qunwani,
these represent the “isthmus” between the spirit and corporeal bodies, helping
establish a relationship between the seen and the unseen.
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 59

For Qunwani the two levels of the seen and unseen also overlap with five
“presences”. The first presence represents divine knowledge and is the unseen.
The second presence represents the world of corporeal bodies and the visible
world within which humans are situated (this is the material realm). This is fol-
lowed by the third and the central presence of the Perfect Man who serves as
a partition between the two sides and comprehends both material and divine
realms, as well as the visible and the invisible. The fourth presence is nearer
to the Unseen and includes the world of angels and spirits. The fifth presence
is that of the world of image-exemplars (mithal) and imagination (khayal),
within which spirits become corporealized and appear to prophets and saints
in visions. These represent all levels of entification from the created to the un-
created. Only God stands beyond these different presences as a Non-entified
Being. The Perfect Man has exposure to both the inside and the outside, the
intimate and distant. The Perfect Man encompasses all these levels, his macro-
cosmic nature has five levels. The first level represents reality, the second one
represents the universal intellect, the third one serves as an intermediary be-
tween the spirit and the body, the fourth one represents the body which rep-
resents the corporeal world and the fifth one represents the nature of humans
which comprehends all presences. All these levels are important in Qunwani’s
typology as they reveal how God’s presence becomes accessible to the Perfect
Man, highlighting his stratified approach to the visible and the invisible at the
micro and macrocosmic levels.
Here it is the Perfect Man who “acts as a receptacle for all of Being’s per-
fections. He does not delimit and define Being, so that some of Its perfections
would be visible and others hidden. Hence it is sometimes said that the Per-
fect Man has no entity. For the ‘entity’ is that which is nonexistent in itself
and detracts from Being’s pure Radiance. But the Perfect Man reflects Being
as such. In this sense he himself is nothing but Sheer Being and is therefore
nonentified (ibid.).” Nonentification still does not result in the man in any way
resembling God because God stands apart from any entification or non-entifi-
cation. The important point here is how everything becomes visible around
us through whatever God makes visible, as Qunwani writes, “The world is the
form of and locus-of-manifestation for His Knowledge, and God never ceases to
encompass the things in Knowledge and Being. … Everything which becomes
manifest becomes manifest only from Him, since nothing else possesses a be-
ing which might accompany His Being. This is the news given by the Prophet:
‘God is, and nothing is with Him (qtd. in Chittick & Wilson, 1982).’” Only the Per-
fect man can know God, since he is the mirror for the totality of God’s names, as
Qunwani writes, “God cannot be the Sought or the Beloved of anyone, save the
Perfect Man (ibid.).” The reality of the world also becomes available when the
60 KHAN

Perfect Man seeks the outward manifestation of their realities and perfections.
In Qunawi’s words, “When the theophany of Love pervaded the entities, they
sought from God the Outward Manifestation of their own realities and perfec-
tions. Hence this theophany is the key to all the … motions which make hidden
things manifest and which bring the archetypal-entities … out into actuality
(ibid.).” The love between the human and the God then takes place through
a better understanding of one’s own self, but also loving the other in a way
that one also finds the traits of the beloved in oneself and vice versa, and it is
through this that divine unveiling takes place in the hearts of humans. This also
results in the discovery of the realm of the invisible which is made accessible
for humans as they come closer to God.
These ideas remained powerful and would continue to influence Islamic
thinkers in many different parts of the world. The reason why the history I have
considered is an important one is precisely because the power of these con-
cepts in shaping how Muslims across the world came to understand questions
of interiority and its relationship with the divine. The idea that the world be-
comes visible through divine light remained powerful even in the thinking of
Mulla Sadra, and some would argue even made deep in-roads into the Shia con-
cept of Irfan, especially as thinkers inclined toward Sufism were looked down
upon by the Shia orthodoxy. The relationship between the divine and the hu-
man being that Ibn-Arabi had considered led Mulla Sadra many years later to
also reflect on the nature of matter and movement in the universe. The idea that
our spirit has an innate longing for the divine and the fact that the Perfect Man
provided the impetus for creation of the universe meant that not only were Is-
lamic thinkers like Mulla Sadra proposing a different type of epistemology in
relation to the divine but were also reflecting on the overall nature of the cos-
mos. According to Sadra’s concept of substantial motion everything in universe
undergoes transformation through a kind of self-flow and penetration of being,
where Sadra defined change as an all-pervasive reality running through the en-
tire cosmos including the substances that constitute the universe. As much as
these ideas shaped how one approached the world around, these ideas also led
to a deeper understanding of how one could look into interiority to connect
with God in order to move through the complexities of this world.

Conclusion

Sufi thought has been powerful and has influenced thinkers in many different
parts of the world. It also arguably played an important role in de-colonial ef-
forts, in thinking about the role of Islam in education, and in combating the
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 61

spiritual maladies of secularism (see Dole, 2012). One evident example of this
can be found in the works of Allama Muhammad Iqbal whose idea of the self
was not too different from the idea of the Perfect Man used by Ibn-Arabi in
some ways, where he understands the human as God’s vicegerent and thus
makes a case for his ascension to the level where God too asks the human about
what he desires. Iqbal famously once wrote in poem, “Khudi ko kar buland itna,
kay har taqdeer say pehlay, Khuda banday say yay poochay, bata teri raza kya
hai (Raise the self to the heights, that before determining fate, God asks man
what he wants).” Though he was directing his audience to a greater sense of
self-awareness and divine potential in the context of the anti-colonial struggle,
his work was overall influenced by both his rich training in eastern philosophy
alongside his interest in western philosophy, specifically his engagement with
William James, Fredrick Nietzsche, Alfred Whiteheard and Henri Bergson.
To present his argument, he uses the concept of the self and refers to Quranic
references to the individuality and uniqueness of man. He explores the concept
of human ego in the same way as Ibn-Arabi had talked about the Perfect Man
in his famous work Reconstruction of Islamic Thought (2019). Here he refers to
humans as God’s vicegerents on Earth despite their ability to sin. What makes
Iqbal unique is his strong emphasis on ego and the potential of its transcen-
dence. His notion of the ego is not too different from that of the soul as we
have considered in the previous parts. He refers to the ego as not bound by
space as is the case with the body (Iqbal 2009, p. 108). Drawing upon the work
of Al-Ghazali he refers to the ego as indivisible and immutable. Interesting here
is the use of ego rather than soul, but fundamentally the implication and the
relevance is the same. He says that our conscious experience “can give us no
clue to the ego regarded as a soul-substance; for by hypothesis the soul-sub-
stance does not reveal itself in experience (ibid., 110).” Of course, by this time,
he would have had Freud’s ideas of the unconscious as a repository of mem-
ory as well as Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious as reference points in
making the case for the “soul-substance”. Differentiating consciousness from
straightforward understandings such as “streams of thought” as William James
had envisioned, Iqbal makes a move to go beyond consciousness as simply con-
sisting of discrete memories to make a case for a more transcendental notion
of the self,

William James conceives of consciousness as ‘a stream of thought’ – a

conscious flow of changes with a felt continuity. He finds a gregarious
principle working in our experience which has, as it were, ‘hooks’ on
them, and thereby catch up one another in the flow of mental life. The
ego consists of the feelings of personal life, and is, as such, part of the
62 KHAN

system of thought. Every pulse of thought, present or perishing, is an

indivisible unity which knows and recollects. The appropriation of the
passing pulse by the present pulse of thought, and that of the present by
its successors, is the ego. The description of our mental life is extremely
ingenious; but not, I venture to think, true to consciousness as we find
it in ourselves. Consciousness is something single, presupposed in all
mental life, and not bits of consciousness, mutually reporting to one an-
other. This view of consciousness, far from giving us any clue to the ego,
entirely ignores the relatively permanent element in experience. There is
no continuity of being between the passing thoughts. When one of these
is present, the other has totally disappeared; and how can the passing
thought, which is irrevocably lost, be known and appropriated by the
present thought? I do not mean to say that the ego is over and above the
mutually penetrating multiplicity we call experience. Inner experience is
ego at work. We appreciate the ego itself in the act of perceiving, judging,
and willing. The life of the ego is a kind of tension caused by the ego
invading the environment and the environment invading the ego. The
ego does not stand outside this arena of mutual invasion. It is present in it
as a directive energy and is formed and disciplined by its own experience.
(ibid.)

He is mindful of the role of intentionality and one’s force in the world. He then
goes on to use a Quranic verse as an example (17:85) to talk about how God
commands the soul with humans having little knowledge of the divine a priori.
Iqbal interprets the verse by differentiating between two words Amr and Khalq
where Amir represents “direction” and Khalq represents “creation”. He uses the
verse to talk about how the soul is “directive” and how it proceeds from the di-
rective energy of God (ibid., 112). Meanwhile the soul also has an individuality
because of the will provided to it. Iqbal then adds the element of directive force
to the idea of mutually enforcing experiences, as he writes, “My experience is
only a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the
unity of a directive purpose. My whole reality lies in a directive attitude. You
cannot perceive me like a thing in space, or a set of experiences in temporal
order; you must interpret, understand and appreciate me in my judgements, in
my attitudes, aims and aspirations (ibid., 112).” Iqbal’s idea of the soul then taps
into the longer tradition of Sufi thought, but he also adds the element of direc-
tive action, will and aspiration toward the divine, challenging the notion that
consciousness simply consists of a stream of random memories. This is after all
also a type of attunement to divine will that I have considered in the previous
parts, except that Iqbal has available psychological discourses to take up in his
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 63

descriptions, such as “streams”, “energies” and “memories”. This results in sys-

tematic unity where the Ego (with a capital E) acts on various sub-egos. Iqbal
was also mindful of Christian influences in western philosophy, for example,
he detected Manichean influences of early Christianity in Descartes’ work and
critiqued his framework, “This reduces the soul to a merely passive spectator of
the happenings of the body. If, one the other hand, we suppose them to affect
each other, then we cannot find any observable facts to show how and where
exactly their interaction takes place, and which of the two takes the initiative
(ibid., 113).” For Iqbal then it was not easy to create a distinction between the
body and the soul – in fact they both created a coherent whole. He added,

The system of experiences we call ego is also a system of acts. This does
not obliterate the distinction between the soul and body; it only brings
them closer to each other. The characteristic of the ego is spontaneity; the
acts composing the body repeat themselves. The body is an accumulated
action or habit of the soul; and as such is undetachable from it. It is a
permanent element of consciousness which, in view, of this permanent
element, appears from outside as something stable. What then is matter?
A colony of egos of a lower order of which emerges the ego of a higher
order, when their association and interaction reach a certain degree of
coordination. (ibid., 114)

It is at this point that “Ultimate Reality” reveals its secrets.

Fundamentally then we see a move to psychodynamic approach of consid-
ering energies and integration whereby the soul moves from a lower level of
perception to a higher one which also results in access to divine knowledge.
Of course, there are fundamental shifts in the language Iqbal uses compared
his Sufi ancestors, but what places him securely in the same intellectual lin-
eage is the concept of “flights” to higher modes of knowledge which is possible
where the body becomes expressive of the habit of the soul. With Iqbal we see
an important move, namely that of the central role of aspiration and ascent
of the humans to higher planes of knowledge, for which he taps into existing
corpus of knowledge about the perfection of man present in Quran along with
notions of individuality and continuity of egos and their struggles that resem-
ble something like eternal consciousness that consists not merely of memories,
but represent the integration of sub-egos with the transcendental Ego. It is to
this end that one’s spiritual yearning and knowledge should be directed, Iqbal
would argue.
There are other thinkers who invoked the same intellectual tradition such as
Said Nursi in his famous Risale-i-Nur. His interest unlike Iqbal was not strictly
64 KHAN

philosophical, but the reason why he is important is because he was also try-
ing to address the spiritual effects of secularism on Muslim life in Turkey, like
Iqbal. In talking about spiritual maladies, he famously wrote that God “Opened
up windows which would show Himself, that is, make known, His existence
and unity. He left a telephone in every heart (Nursi, The Tenth Word, 2008).” He
devoted an entire chapter to spiritual maladies addressing traits such as un-
happiness, lack of patience, those who complain about suffering, those who
are pleased with pleasures of this world. Literature on spiritual maladies is still
widely produced by many Islamic scholars (e.g., Yusuf, 2004). The enduring le-
gacy of Sufi thought to offer a spiritual solution to myriad political and social
problems acquired salience in the context of the divisions in Islamic caliphates
and their subsequent colonization. In this context, scholars urged for new pre-
scriptions to return to the state of perfection, an idea that became influen-
tial once again during the global war on terror and the devastation of many
countries in the Middle east, with clerics and religious leaders making renewed
calls for spiritual reform, under conditions of great surveillance, suspicion and
Islamophobia. The reformist agenda during the global war on terror led to a
re-reconfiguration of struggles inward for the cultivation of the soul rather than
against an external enemy (Khan, 2023).
My goal in this essay has been to think about psychology and spiritual well-
being through the vantage point of Islamic philosophy and thought instead of
attempting to impose ideas from western psychoanalytic thought. Many have
tried to explore the extent to which these ideas correspond to concepts in west-
ern psychoanalysis, but such a project also entails reading foreign concepts into
a system which has its own ways of thinking about the psyche, what it can or
cannot comprehend and the ways in which it grasps knowledge. One has to ex-
plore Islamic concepts about the soul, the psyche and the Divine on their own
terms. While an explicit reference to the mind, as we know it, with the psychol-
ogization of populations following the psychoanalytic turn of the 20th century
may have been missing, this does not mean that Islamic thinkers were not grap-
pling with questions of subjectivity, viz. about how the self perceives the world
around, what it means for the mind to be distracted, and what it means to be
oriented toward God. In order to study concepts in the soil in which they have
grown it is necessary to think about the understandings of the soul within a
specific tradition and also explore how Islamic understandings of the soul have
transformed across generations under the influence of Greek, Islamic and mod-
ern Western ideas. My contention is that while there may have been differences
in terms of how the soul was thought to be organized – whether as a singular
entity or as multiple, it was fundamentally viewed as bearing the traces of the
divine, and therefore the best way come closer to God and to acquire knowl-
SPIRIT OF THE MIND 65

edge of nature was to return to the natural state of perfection in which the
ruh was blown into the body. The second concept that has remained central
is that this spirit is continuously in competition and hostility with the lower
self (expressive of carnal and material desires) to achieve divine intimacy. It is
necessary to cultivate purity of the soul so that influences of the lower self on
the soul can be restricted and so that the lower self (nafs) can come completely
under the control of the self and thus ascend to higher states of proximity to
God. In the first part, I talk about how the disturbances of the soul were viewed
as forms of imbalances under the influence of the Greek humoral theory. In the
second part, I turn to how spiritual weakness is viewed as a move away from the
original state of perfection using the works of Ibn-Arabi. Then in the third part,
I consider how the heart became the seat of the soul in Islamic thought and it
was only through the ethical cultivation of the heart that one could access the
divine and control the nafs. In the fourth part, I consider light as the central
category through which one can access the divine. In the conclusion, I turn to
Iqbal to think about the category of the self and try to situate his idea of the
ascent to a transcendental self within a longer tradition of engaging with the
perfection of humans in Islamic thought.

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