Soul in Islamic Philosophy

In Islam, the nature of the soul is a central concern and is not dissimilar to the soul in Christianity and Judaism (understandable because the three developed side by side during the Middle Ages, rather harmoniously, too). Building on ancient and Neo-Platonist philosophers, medieval Islamic philosophers, mainly al-Kindî, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, developed an Islamic metaphysic of the soul by evaluating the concepts of intellect, soul, nafs, and body. Especially important is nafs, which literally means “self,” but can be translated “psyche” and “soul.” In building an Islamic theory of consciousness, the relationship between the soul and body is shaped by the unification of the soul with the body, the soul's effect on the body, the soul's independence, the state of the body, the separation of the soul after the body's death, and whether the soul preserves its individuality (Islamic Soul-Body, 2020).

Classical Islamic Philosophers

Avicenna has the soul in an accidental relation to a particular body, given that body's need for a central organizing and sustaining principle. “The soul itself is generated by the separate intelligences of the heavens and emanated by them upon the body” (Ivry, 2012).

Averroes focuses on the hierarchical structure of the soul, with each faculty sustained by a lower, more material, or less “spiritual,” faculty. Thus, the nutritive faculty is substrate for the sensory faculty, which is substrate for the common-sense faculty, which is substrate for the imaginative faculty, which is, finally, the substrate for the rational faculty. While consciousness per se is not a direct concern, it would be enriched at each level (Ivry, 2012).

Spiritual Light and the Soul

The Islamic scholar, teacher and classicist Hamza Yusuf describes the Islamic understanding of consciousness as “a spiritual light that God has placed into the human being.” It's not metaphor, he says, “It's a light, a spiritual light.” Noting that the term “consciousness” is relatively new and that “the pre-moderns would have had a very different view of things,” Yusuf explains that in a person's relationship with God, “the mirror of the soul has to be polished because the light cannot shine properly unless there is a polishing. Remembrance of God is how one polishes the soul.” He adds, "the human soul is considered 'aeviternal;' it has a beginning but no end" (Yusuf, 2023).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the Afterlife

Contemporary Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr presents a full flowering of the soul in the afterlife, similar to the Tibetan Book of the Dead or Hindu doctrines of the afterlife. In some sense, he says, development does not stop with death. “Something stops,” he says, “but the soul continues to develop” (Nasr, 2007).

According to Nasr, Islam identifies paradise with a garden, which includes sexuality as well as eating—these raise, not lower, the value of paradise, he says. “All of these are to cut the soul loose from attraction to the lower reflections of these realities and have the soul gaze upon the real reality itself. That's what paradise is. And even within paradise, there are levels. The highest paradise is called the paradise of the essence, in which every single concept and idea and limited form of existence is transcended beyond the paradisal estate in the ordinary sense.”

The state of the soul, Nasr says, is “meta cosmic,” a kind of merging without destruction of the individual. “It's what Meister Eckhart called ‘fusion without confusion’—a beautiful expression. It's like swimming in the ocean of divinity. To transcend that into divine unity is what you might call a bi-unity. By some great mystery, we are given the power to be conscious of our own nothingness in divinity” (Nasr, 2007).