What Is the Nafs? The Meaning of the Soul in the Quran and in Sufism

One of the words that appears most often in Sufi books is nafs. The books speak of training the nafs, of not following the nafs, of the stages of the nafs. But what the word itself means is rarely explained; the reader is assumed to know. In this article we will look first at the meaning of the word, then at how the Quran uses it, then at the difference between the nafs and the ruh, the heart and the intellect, and finally at why the nafs is trained at all. The seven stages of the nafs and the detail of each stage have their own articles on this site; this one is the introduction to be read before all of them.

The Meaning of the Word

Nafs comes from the same Arabic root as nafas, “breath”. In the dictionary it means soul, person, self and one’s own being. English keeps a trace of the same range: we say “he could not help himself” for a desire and “she gave in to herself” for a weakness of one’s own. This breadth of meaning is found in the Quran too. So nafs is not the name of a single thing; depending on the context it means the whole human being, the person himself, or one side within him.

The Nafs in the Quran

The word nafs occurs in many places in the Quran and does not carry the same meaning in each of them. In some verses the whole person is meant: “Every soul shall taste death” (Surah Al Imran 3:185). In some verses it means “self”: the command “Do not kill yourselves” (Surah an-Nisa 4:29) literally reads “your nafs”. In other verses the nafs is the side within a person that pulls toward evil: “The nafs commands evil insistently, except when my Lord shows mercy” (Surah Yusuf 12:53).

Surah ash-Shams explains this last meaning for every human being: “By the soul and by Him who formed it, and then inspired it with its wickedness and its God-fearing: he who purifies it has succeeded, and he who buries it has failed” (Surah ash-Shams 91:7-10). According to these verses the nafs was created and formed by God. Both the capacity to go toward evil and the capacity to hold back were placed inside it. That is, the nafs is not evil from the start; it is a structure that can move in either direction. A person’s task is to decide which way to take it.

The Quran names three states of the nafs: the nafs that commands evil (Surah Yusuf 12:53), the nafs that blames itself (Surah al-Qiyama 75:2) and the nafs at peace (Surah al-Fajr 89:27). The Sufi masters drew the teaching of the stages of the nafs from these three verses.

Nafs, Ruh, Heart and Intellect

Alongside nafs, Sufi books also use the words ruh (spirit), qalb (heart) and aql (intellect). These four words sometimes mean the same thing and sometimes different things. Al-Ghazali untangled the confusion most clearly. In the section of the Ihya Ulum al-Din that deals with the states of the heart he says that each of these four words has two meanings. In the first meaning they all point to the same thing, the knowing and responsible part of a human being, the part that is truly him. In this sense nafs, ruh and heart are one. In the second meaning each word points to something different. The second meaning of nafs is the side of a person that gathers anger and appetite together and is the source of the blameworthy traits.

When Sufis say “nafs” they usually mean this second sense. The nafs in “do not follow the nafs” and “train your nafs” is this one. The ruh, by contrast, is the life God gave to the human being, whose nature only He knows: “Say: the ruh is of the command of my Lord” (Surah al-Isra 17:85). The heart is the center of the human being that turns toward God, and the whole labor of Sufism is for the cleansing of the heart. The intellect is the faculty that tells right from wrong. Knowing this distinction gives the reader one relief: when a Sufi text speaks badly of the nafs, it is not speaking badly of the human being, but of one side within him.

Is the Nafs an Enemy?

Sufi books often call the nafs an enemy. The phrase is true, but open to misunderstanding. The nafs is not something that comes from outside a person; it is part of him, and God created it with a purpose. Without the nafs a person would not want to eat, would not marry, would not work, would not protect himself. The problem is not that the nafs exists, but that it is left to itself. This is why Sufism teaches training the nafs, not destroying it. The masters explain this with a comparison they use often: the nafs is like a riding animal. If the rider trains it, it carries him to his destination; if he does not, the animal drags the rider wherever it wants.

The Prophet gave the measure of this training: “The strong man is not the one who throws his opponent in wrestling. The strong man is the one who controls himself when he is angry” (Bukhari, Adab 76; Muslim, Birr 107). Here the nafs is not killed; it is reined in. A trained nafs begins to blame itself, and then finds peace in obedience to God. This last state is what the Quran calls “the soul at peace”. The beginning and the end of this road stay within the human being; at every stage the nafs remains a created servant and never stops being the servant of its Lord.

Why Knowing the Nafs Matters

There is a saying repeated often in Sufism: “Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.” The hadith scholars have said that this is not a saying of the Prophet, but they have accepted its meaning as sound. The meaning is this: the more a person recognizes his own weakness, his need and his createdness, the better he understands the power and the richness of his Lord. The person who does not know his nafs does not see his own fault, and the one who does not see his fault does not mend it. This is why every Sufi scholar from al-Muhasibi to al-Ghazali began with knowing the nafs.

The other articles on this site describe the road of that knowing. The seven states the nafs passes through are gathered in the article on the stages of the soul. The first stage, the nafs al-ammara, and the stage the Quran praises, the nafs al-mutma’inna, each have their own article. The method that carries the nafs from one state to the next is in the article on tazkiyat al-nafs.

Sources

• Quran, Al Imran 3:185; an-Nisa 4:29; Yusuf 12:53; al-Isra 17:85; al-Qiyama 75:2; al-Fajr 89:27; ash-Shams 91:7-10
• Bukhari, Sahih, Adab 76; Muslim, Sahih, Birr 107
• Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, “Kitab Sharh Aja’ib al-Qalb” (The Book of the Marvels of the Heart)
• Abu al-Qasim al-Qushayri, al-Risala al-Qushayriyya
• Süleyman Uludağ, “Nefis”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 32
• Elmalılı M. Hamdi Yazır, Hak Dini Kur’an Dili, commentary on Surah ash-Shams