Nafs

Nafs (نَفْس) is an Arabic word occurring in the Qur'an and means self, psyche ego or soul. In the Quran, the word is used in both the individualistic (e.g. verse 2:48) and collective sense (verse 4:1), indicating that although humanity is united in possessing the qualities of a "soul/nafs/consciousness" they are individually responsible for exercising the agencies of their "free will" that it provides them.

Much of the popular literature on nafs, however, is focused on the Sufi conceptions of the term. According to the Sufi philosophies, the nafs in its unrefined state is "the ego", which they consider to be the lowest dimension of a person's inward existence - his animal and satanic nature.Nafs is an important concept in the Islamic tradition, especially within Sufism and the discipline of gnosis (irfan) in Shia Islam.

The triliteral root nūn fā sīn (ن ف س) occurs 298 times in the Quran, in four derived forms:

The noun nafs has important instances in the Quran such as the following: "O you who have believed, upon you is [responsibility for] yourselves..." The major theme of the word nafs as used in the Quran is to instill a sense of individual responsibility through a strong emphasis on the choices made by the individual (as in 5:105), while at the same time reminding humanity of its common origins (verse 4:1).

The Quran affords much importance to the 'nafs' of an individual, highlighting the agency of 'free will' and intelligence, without which neither responsibility nor accountability can exist. The Quran does not attribute to the 'nafs/self' any inherent properties of 'good' or 'evil', but instead conveys the idea that it is something which has to be nurtured and self-regulated, so that it can progress into becoming 'good' (or conversely, 'evil') through its thoughts and actions. The Quranic conception of the 'nafs' therefore has an extremely modernistic undertone, much like Nietzsche's conception of "Übermensch" or 'Superman', as suggested by Muhammad Iqbal, a prominent Muslim scholar and philosopher, who went as far as to accuse Nietzsche of borrowing the term from Islamic thought. Iqbal stated: "It is probable that Nietzsche borrowed it (Übermensch) from the literature of Islam or of the East and degraded it by his materialism."

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