My (earnest, irate) thoughts

The fight to tame one’s nafs, an Arabic word meaning self or ego, is the lifelong struggle for the Mumin.

This is a distinction I only recently learned: a Muslim is a submitter, but a Mumin is a believer. If a Muslim is someone who submits her will to God by professing Islam and its book; a Mumin is someone whose faith is firmly established in her heart, whose every thought and action strives toward God.

The Arabs of the desert say, ‘We believe.’ Say: “You have not yet truly believed, but rather say, ‘We have submitted,’ for true faith has not yet entered into your hearts. But if you obey God and His messenger, God will not detract anything from your deeds. Surely, God is oft-forgiving, most merciful.” Qur’an 49:14

I like that there’s different levels to being Muslim. It is a path for the conscientious sloughing off of harmful or useless things, and the mindful gaining of vital attributes. The destination is God.

Back to the nafs. Here is some background about each human’s own personal deterrent from the divine. The nafs — what Christians may call the wayward “flesh” as opposed to the more saintly “spirit” — is that little voice that spurs you to take the easy way, the road more traveled, the path toward self-destruction. When I first converted to Islam, I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was either a hopelessly evil person, or it was the early stages of schizophrenia.

You know it’s your nafs talking when either a) you want to do something good (helpful, kind or necessary) and a voice in your own head tells you not to bother; or b) you want to avoid doing something bad (harmful, unkind or useless) and a voice in your own head encourages you to go ahead and do it.

I have found it very helpful, this Islamic tendency to think of the nafs as an entity separate from but connected to my (better) self, my conscience. The nafs would rather do anything than pray, for example. If I should work, it wants to play. If I’ve eaten my fill, it wants more. It always wants just one more cookie, just five more minutes.

But excessive leisure is sheer cruelty for the human mind, just like Huxley said. It reminds me of the Epsilon experiment in Brave New World, where they put all the lower-caste people on a four-hour workday to see if it would make them any happier. As Mustapha Mond recalls, “What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them.”

The bad news is, the nafs is never satisfied. Each time you give it what it wants, it thinks of new and different things to want, and it gets bigger. Nafs *is* wanting. And it has no answer to the guilt that quietly invades the playing or overeating, no answer except…”more.” Listening to the voice and doing what it wants seems to lead to self-destruction… one becomes a shell of a human being, seeking only comfort or distraction. The good news is, not listening makes the nafs smaller and, eventually, easier to ignore. In Turkey, I met dozens of elderly people who have been praying and fasting their whole lives. With their humility, dignity and all-encompassing love for others, they proved by example that a human can best his nafs.

Combatting the nafs
Some Muslims don’t think anything bad should ever be shared. I don’t agree. If you should only share good things, there’s going to be an awful lot of silence, or an awful lot of phoniness.

My husband and I have spent many hours discussing the wily ways of the nafs. This is one of the ways I’ve found to combat it — talking openly and honestly to a trusted friend about what’s going on. It’s a relief when your thoughts turn out to be identical to your friend’s; then the thoughts are easily, logically dispelled as coming from a secondary source.

According to a short but great Wikipedia article, the nafs has seven stages. In its primitive stage, Nafs-i-ammara, the Commanding Self has seven heads that must be chopped off — false pride, greed, jealousy, lust, backbiting, stinginess and malice. Five of the seven deadly sins of the Roman Catholic Church are in here.

After awakening, the Regretful Self is repentant but falls back into destructive behaviors. But after repenting, the Inspired Self wants to do more than just “not-bad” and aspires to actually do good. Sufis say there are three qualities for the truly good deed: doing it immediately and without laziness; looking at it with contempt to avoid self-righteousness; and doing it in secret to avoid self-aggrandizing.

The article goes on to explain the other stages: the Contented Self, the Pleased Self, the Pleasing Self, and finally, the Pure Self — which is the perfected human, completely surrendered to and inspired by God, a soul that is in full agreement with the will of God.