Needs Within Bounds

The nafs has needs as well as wants, and the Sharīʿah acknowledges the needs. Food is needed — halal food is provided. Sleep is needed — a due measure of it is permitted. Intimacy with the opposite gender is needed — marriage makes it lawful, to be enjoyed within it. But the nafs is never satisfied with what is permitted; once the limits set by the Sharīʿah, its ḥudūd, are exceeded, a person is harmed by the excess. In food, the result is obesity; in sleep, laziness; in the pursuit of intimacy beyond its proper bounds, ruin.

To follow the nafs's unbridled desire past these limits is, in effect, to worship the nafs itself. In one hadith the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) teaches that under the seven heavens there is no deity so widely worshipped as hawā, desire itself — that everyone, in some measure, worships their own nafs, following its dictates and its cravings without a second thought. The nafs works so gently, so subtly, so appealingly, that it scarcely feels like a battle at all. Its pull can be gentle and beguiling: who truly wishes to stop eating food altogether? Ice cream, chocolate — a week without chocolate, it is said, leaves a person weak, because the nafs wants more of it, and then more again, never once satisfied. One of the more amusing sights at ḥajj is that of Australians overtaken by a craving for chocolate: discovering a supermarket stocking Cadbury, they buy it in quantity, sit down together and set it all out in front of them, eating it there and then, urging one another on — come on, have some — pure nafs at work. Halal is halal and ḥarām is ḥarām, and within the halal there is latitude to indulge; but to pass beyond the limits the Sharīʿah sets is to do an injustice to oneself, oppressing the pure rūḥ that lies beneath the clamour of this spoiled, ever-demanding nafs al-ammārah.