Psychology in medieval Islam

Islamic psychology or ʿIlm al-Nafs (Arabic,علم النفس), the science of the Nafs ("self" or "psyche"), refers to the medical and philosophical study of the psyche from an Islamic perspective and addresses topics in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and psychiatry as well as psychosomatic medicine.

Concepts from medieval Islamic thought have been reexamined by Muslim psychologists and scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the writings of Muslim scholars, the term Nafs (self or soul) was used to denote individual personality and the term fitrah for human nature. Nafs encompassed a broad range of faculties including the qalb (heart), the ruh (spirit), the aql (intellect) and irada (will). Muslim scholarship was strongly influenced by Greek and Indian philosophy as well as by the study of scripture, drawing particularly from Galen' understanding of the four humors of the body.

In medieval Islamic medicine in particular, the study of mental illness was a speciality of its own, and was variously known as al-‘ilaj al-nafs (approximately "curing/treatment of the ideas/soul/vegetative mind),al-tibb al-ruhani ("the healing of the spirit," or "spiritual health") and tibb al-qalb ("healing of the heart/self," or "mental medicine").

The Classical Arabic term for the mentally ill was "majnoon" which is derived from the term "Jenna", which means "covered". It was originally thought that mentally ill individuals could not differentiate between the real and the unreal. However, due to their nuanced nature treatment on the mentally ill could not be generalized as it was in medieval Europe This term was gradually redefined among the educated, and was defined by Avicenna as "one who suffers from a condition in which reality is replaced with fantasy".

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