What Does Islamic Psychology Mean by “Nafs”? Sample

The word carries meanings in the classical tradition that do not map onto psyche, and a hasty translation has produced years of purely verbal disagreement.

Hesham1 min readAdvanced

The tradition uses nafs across very different settings: the nafs that commands, the nafs that reproaches, the nafs at rest. These describe one thing in different states, not three separate entities.

When the Western term psyche was rendered as nafs, the Arabic word inherited a load that was never its own, and the Western term inherited a classical weight that was never part of it.

A good deal of what looks like disagreement about the subject is really disagreement about the word. That is why this site defines what it uses before building anything on it.

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