Nafs

The human being is a walking laboratory designed for the purpose of observing and understanding Allah, who created him from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high, from the coarsest matter to the finest essence. He is at once a limited, flesh-bound corpus and a being capable of manifesting all of Allah's Beautiful Names. Man's animal nature, comprised of bodily functions and egoistic desires, is known as the nafs. The nafs is tied to the material world, and is therefore restricted by the temporary quality of all creation. The perspective from which the nafs perceives reality is itself. This self-biased aspect of the human being is part of the triad which describes him more thoroughly. For the purpose of simplification, nafs can be thought of as the outer man, ruh as the inner man, and aql, the composite faculties of rational discrimination and decision-making, as the bridge between the two.

The basic motivation of the nafs is survival, self-preservation. This inherent urge to stay alive and reproduce itself colors its behavior. Void of wisdom, the nafs is prone to conduct itself on a reactive basis, as higher knowledge is not within the realm of its operation. However, the fact that the human being does possess the other elements of the triad brings a moral factor into how we perceive and are judged. There are some actions animals engage in within their natural habitat, which, if performed in identical fashion by a human being, would be considered wrong or, at least, indelicate. Cows may mate shamelessly in an open field, but for the human being such an act would be considered open fornication. A pack of wild dogs may partake in a frenzy of ripping apart the carcass of their prey, but they are not denounced as greedy or selfish. The same behavior in man would send him to prison or a mental hospital. Although he has an animal nature, man is distinguished from and considered a higher being than an animal because of his rational and spiritual capacity, even though his actions far too often do not reflect that capacity.

Excerpted from The Sun Will Rise In The West
Chapter 8, Fighting the Enemy Within
By Shaykh Taner Ansari

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