Supplement To the Article “The Quran and the Psychology of Human Behaviour – Nafs”
By
Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam
24 May 2022
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Understanding The Quran Has Very Little To Do
With Mastery Of The Arabic Language As Should Be Apparent From This Discussion.
As A Matter Of Fact, an Arab Reader Is Unlikely To Go Beyond the Dictionary
Meanings and Look For the Nuances That the Quran Brings To Every Subject
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This is a
supplement to the article: The Quran and the Psychology
of Human Behaviour - Nafs in which we
have seen in detail, with the help of the Ayats on the subject, how the
meaning corresponds closely with the modern concept of “cognitive self”. None
of the older words such as soul, conscience, consciousness, self, inner-self,
and innermost being is adequate by itself to describe it although collectively
they may come close to describing it. Nafs could not have had such a meaning
before the revelation of the Quran and we have not relied on the dictionary
meaning of the word. We methodically derived its meaning from the Quran from
the manner in which the word has been used in all the verses that contain the
word. The Quran necessarily used a word from the vocabulary of the 7th century
Arabic and gave it its own meaning which unsurprisingly is closest to the
modern concept of “cognitive self” and not to any of the older words which are
limited in their meaning and contain only a part of what Nafs means. We also
have seen that Nafs al-Lawwama is that part of the Nafs that causes
cognitive dissonance. The process of cognitive bias taking us on the path of
greater guidance or misguidance is also contained in several verses but
described in terms of what Allah does or as His unchanging laws of Human behaviour.
Every cognitive process is described and contained in the Quran. This is
another proof of the Quran’s ageless modernity despite the constraints of
having had to use the vocabulary of 7th century Arabic.
Nafs is not
soul at all because as we have seen, the Nafs dies, and has no existence
outside our living wakeful and conscious body.
Why then has it been widely translated as soul? Because, there is no
other word in the Quran, amenable to being translated as soul, and the believers
in a soul seem to have been desperately seeking any word in the Quran that
could be translated as soul. In common parlance, the word “Ruh” is used
to mean soul, but the word Ruh although it appears in several verses of the
Quran, it is impossible to force the meaning of soul on it even in a single
verse. So, what does this mean? It means that the Quran does not support the
concept of a soul and that we do not have a soul.
Why have
people believed in a soul then? Up to the 19th century, the theologians and the
philosophers lacking in accurate knowledge of our world, struggled with several
concepts, and argued without proof and even against what the scriptures say
clearly. For example, all the theologians and the philosophers (those who
believe in a life in the Hereafter) believed in an immortal soul. Since the body disintegrates, or a person may
be burnt to ashes in an accident or cremated, they had difficulty accepting
that we are resurrected in our body although the Quran says so categorically.
Even many Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and al-Farabi argued against
bodily resurrection and believed in an immaterial soul. The soul was therefore
what was left and required to live a life in the Hereafter and this must not
die and therefore must be immaterial or spirit.
It must also have all the characteristics that made us a unique person
and the capacity to see, feel, think and remember without the body, the brain,
the nervous system and the organs! What
an impossibility and yet even the so-called rational philosophers believed in
it! The Quran is categorical about resurrection in the body in complete detail
right up to our fingertips or fingerprints. It categorically rejects the idea
of a soul that survives our death or that it existed before our birth.
We know
now, how it is possible to resurrect without anything surviving our death using
stored information which the Quran clearly says is done. We know how the
physical body can be cloned. The genes in the egg fertilized by the sperm from
our father have resulted in our conception and have given us our sex, form and
body. The information is enough to recreate the body exactly as it was. What we
made of ourselves in our lifetime is all recorded as the Quran informs us
clearly. This information will be used to recreate our “Nafs” populate
our memory and to create our old patterns of thinking. We will be recreated
exactly as we were without doubt but this does not require an immortal “soul”.
The modern
man knows that if all his apps and data are backed up including the settings and
preferences and the data in the RAM, a lost computer or Smartphone can be
“recreated” by buying the same model and downloading all the backed-up apps and
the data. It would then be the same as if you never lost it. The analogy for
the resurrection is similar. All that is
required is accurate information. This is in complete agreement with science as
we know it today, except for the part about whether we will be resurrected,
which is clearly outside the domain of science.
To my
knowledge, no one else has covered this subject in this manner. Understanding
the Quran has very little to do with mastery of the Arabic language as should
be apparent from this discussion. As a matter of fact, an Arab reader is
unlikely to go beyond the dictionary meanings and look for the nuances that the
Quran brings to every subject. This the Quran does by precisely and
comprehensively defining every keyword it uses just as it has done with the
word Nafs. Understanding the Quran has more to do with practising the
discipline of methodically uncovering the precise meaning in the Quran of every
keyword used by it. Knowledge of the language could be an advantage,
disadvantage or of no consequence depending upon the reader. Only a person who
relies very little on his knowledge of the Arabic language and relies more on
methodically deriving the precise meaning the Quran is trying to convey will
understand it better.
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A
frequent contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Naseer Ahmed is an Engineering
graduate from IIT Kanpur and is an independent IT consultant after having
served in both the Public and Private sector in responsible positions for over
three decades. He has spent years studying Quran in-depth and made seminal
contributions to its interpretation.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/quran-psychology-human-behaviour-nafs/d/127079
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