Soul
Spirit has the qualities of light, and body has the qualities of clay. Neither spirit nor body is fire, since fire combines the qualities of light and clay.[1] Hence, in order to complete our picture of the human being who came into existence when spirit was blown into clay, we need something fiery, something that is neither spirit nor clay, but something that is produced when spirit and clay are brought together. That something is typically called nafs, which can be translated as “soul” or “self”. Before spirit meets body, there is no human self, no human soul. Only after the two conjoin does a person come to exist, a person who perceives himself neither as spirit nor as body, but simply as self. https://defencejournal.com/2024/11/10/the-vision-ofislam-10 [2]
In Arabic, the word nafs is written the same as the word nafas, which means “breath” (compare the Hebrew nephesh, a sister word). Just as a spirit is a wind that animates a body, so also a soul or self is an invisible power that allows a thing to have the breath of life. When this side of the meaning of the term is considered, soul is often used as a synonym of spirit. For, in relation to the body, the soul has all the primary qualities of the spirit, such as life, knowledge, desire, and power.
The soul is frequently viewed in respect of its difference from the spirit, its immersion in the body, and its ignorance of the fact that its reality does not reside in the body but in the spirit and in God. In this sense of the term, the word nafs is used with a negative connotation. It refers to all the darkness within people that keeps them wandering in ignorance and distance from God.
In short, the term nafs in Islamic texts is full of ambiguity, in keeping with its kinship with fire and the jinn. But if we want to have an overall picture of what the human soul represents, we need to keep both sides of the nafs in view. If the soul is contrasted with the luminous spirit, it is seen to be dark, dead, ignorant, and weak. Like the spirit, the soul has desires, but these are perverted and distorted desires. The angel can think of nothing but God and it desires nothing but God, so its desire is good. But the soul in this negative sense of the term is forgetful of God and desires anything but God. This perspective, which makes the soul something negative, correlates with tanzih. In other words, the soul is looked upon as incomparable with the divine Reality. However, if the soul is contrasted with the body, then the soul is seen to be luminous, intelligent, desiring, powerful, and so on. The divine attributes are present within it, but absent from the body. This perspective correlates with tashbih.
If we take any given human individual, the picture looks something like this: Except for minor differences, the body made of clay is similar to other human bodies. The spirit made of light is, in the last analysis, identical in some mysterious way with all human spirits, since human spirits are the divine spirit blown into the bodies, and there is only one divine spirit. But the soul of each individual is both similar to and different from that of other individuals. What makes up each human personality is a unique combination of divine signs. Some people have little of the divine attribute of knowledge (intelligence and awareness), while others have more. No two people are the same. So also is the situation with every divine attribute.
Take for example the attribute of speech. The most perfect speech is God’s speech, which we perceive as his signs; that is, the universe and the scriptures. But among human beings, people actualize the attribute of speech in different degrees and modes. Moreover, any given individual possesses this divine attribute in differing degrees in various stages of his or her life. A newborn infant knows nothing of human speech, but gradually learns. One never knows for sure what sort of development will take place. We may have here a poet, a novelist, the next Shakespeare, a boor. Who knows?
Naturally, speech is intimately connected with knowledge. In fact, all the divine attributes are intimately connected with each other. The more you investigate, the more you find that some attributes depend upon other attributes, and eventually they all depend upon the essence of God. This is tawhid, the assertion that all reality is rooted in a single being, who is the Real. Since Reality is one, the attributes of Reality are also one in a certain respect.
Imagination
Many Muslim thinkers employ the Arabic words for “imagination” (khayal or mithal) to refer to the intermediate domain of fire or soul. The Koran and Hadith provide ample support for employing these words. For example, when the Koran describes Gabriel’s appearance to Mary at the annunciation, it says,
“He appeared to her in the image of”—or, more literally, “he imaginalized himself to her as”— “a mortal without fault” (19:17).
The Prophet used this term imaginalize in a number of interesting hadiths. In the most famous of these, he said, “Satan cannot imaginalize himself in my form.” Most people understand this to mean that when someone sees the Prophet’s image in a dream, it is truly his image and not a satanic deception.
In another hadith he said, “The Garden and the Fire were imaginalized for me in this wall.” When something is imaginalized, it appears to someone as an image. This apparition is considered to be “imaginal,” not “imaginary,” which is to say that it has a certain reality that needs to be considered. We cannot simply say, “You are imagining things,” and dismiss the images from further consideration. Imaginal things share the attributes of two sides, just as the soul shares the attributes of spirit and body. The most common example of a concrete, imaginal thing is the image in a mirror. Your mirror image is both yourself and not yourself at the same time. In certain respects, and for certain purposes— for example, as a guide when you are combing your hair— you can treat the image as yourself. Nevertheless, the image is not you, since it is simply light rays reflected from a piece of glass.
If we look inside ourselves, the best place to find imaginal things is in our dreams. Here we have a tremendous diversity of objects and people that are both themselves and not themselves, or both ourselves and not ourselves. The tree you see in a dream is a tree—it is not a frog or a baseball. Yet, it is not a tree, if we mean by tree something that grows in the ground in the physical world. Or again, the tree that you see in a dream is both you and not you. It is not you because it is a tree. And it is you because it is simply the picture of a tree as imagined by you.
Notice that the domain of dreaming is the soul. Hence, the soul is often called the “microcosmic world of imagination,” while the world where jinn and satans live is called the “macrocosmic world of imagination.” The microcosm is the human individual, while the macrocosm is the whole cosmos.
One of the important characteristics of imaginal existence is constant change. Imagination does not stay the same for two successive moments. Nothing in the world of intermediacy is fixed. Every dream image is constantly in the process of being transformed into other images. Lack of fixity is important to keep in view when we discuss the soul. People tend to think of the soul as something solid and defined, on the analogy of the body, with which it is usually paired. Even the body, of course, is not fixed, but it is relatively solid and constant, especially when compared to a dream image.
The soul is born from the meeting between a relatively fixed body and the divine breath, which is pure, unchanging luminosity. Hence the two sides of the soul are relatively constant. But the soul itself is a flux, a continual flow of impressions, a running stream of consciousness and awareness. Muslim cosmologists often say the soul is “an ocean without shore.”
The soul is like the ocean because the ocean has hidden depths and moves constantly, as the waves on its surface make clear. However, unlike the ocean, the soul has no boundaries, no fixed limits. When we discuss the Return, we will see that the non-fixity of the soul has important consequences for human becoming. It means that because human beings are not this or that, they can be anything, and what they become in this world determines the form they take in the next world.
We have come a long way from the premise that “angels are messengers of God,” but we have not wandered far from the various ideas and concepts that Muslims consider when they want to have more than just a superficial faith in angels. And we have hardly begun exploring these ideas.
Some of them will come up again in what follows, and naturally so, because tawhid demands the interrelationship of all things. Before moving on, let us summarize what we have learned about angels.[3]
Angels play the role of intermediaries between the physical world and God. Because they are made of light they represent the closest things to God, who is Light. The attributes of angelic light are the same as the attributes of God’s light, except that the angels’ light is created and contingent, while God’s light is uncreated and eternal.
The attributes of light can best be understood by contrast with the attributes of darkness, which is the absence of light. The opposite of created light is created darkness. One kind of created darkness is clay, which is the substance from which all material things, such as stones, plants, and the bodies of animals, are made.
Angels are one kind of spirit, and spirit is ultimately the breath of God. Just as we understand light in terms of darkness, so also we understand spirit in terms of body. The two represent opposite poles on the spectrum of existent things—those which are near to God and those which are distant from God. Though bodies are distant, they are good, since they are creatures of God and manifest his attributes, even if the attributes of severity and wrath are more clearly displayed within them than the attributes of gentleness and mercy. The qualities of spirits are strongly, but not exclusively, associated with tashbih, while the qualities of body are strongly, but not exclusively, associated with tanzih.
If we investigate the contrasting qualities of light and clay, we find that fire embodies both sets of qualities. In the world outside us, there exist creatures who are neither spirits nor bodies, called jinn. In our own inner worlds, there is a dimension of us that is neither spirit nor body, called self or soul or imagination. Our souls are ambiguous and ever-changing, like fire or dream images. The attributes of our souls are neither those of our bodies nor those of our spirits; alternatively, they are a combination of the attributes of the two sides.
Whenever imagination is discussed, the stress of the discussion is on the ambiguity of the situation, the fact that light and darkness are mixed, that tashbih and tanzih[4] are intertwined.
To be continued ……
Book Reference:
Vision of Islam[5] https://docs.google.com/ document/d/e/2PACX-1vSk54LyG0fFBP11X6D38ang541hhwReWIMcUpysrMJs2R6tIFFlQVtEtE4Qnyc_NY9hkaqML82GTN3b/pub ____________________________
[1] “The Vision of Islam” authored by Dr. Sachiko Murata and Dr. William C. Chittick delves into the multifaceted aspects of Islam,
[2] https://defencejournal. com/2024/10/10/the-vision-of-islam-9/
[3] https://defencejournal. com/2024/10/10/the-vision-of-islam-9/
[4] https://defencejournal. com/2024/07/10/the-vision-of-islam-6/
[5] Islam of Vision: اردو ترجمہ مکمل کتاب
http://www.williamcchittick.com/ wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ Chittick-and-Murata-Vision-of-Islam-Urdu-Translation-by-Muhammad-Suheyl-Umar.pdf
