The Beast Within

One well-known film, The Golden Compass, pictured something of this in its own idiom: a person as two linked beings, the human and the spirit, the rūḥ taking the form of an animal companion that exists outside the body, yet remains bound to it so closely that the two can never be separated — wherever one goes, the other goes; the two sleep side by side; harm to either is felt at once by both; and the death of one brings the death of the other. The particular animal varied with the character of the person it belonged to — a guard might have a watchdog forever at his side, and other characters some gentler creature, a bird or a rabbit. It is a fascinating enough image in its own right, though the reality is different again: what lies unseen within a person is no small, gentle creature — not a rabbit — but something far larger, a many-headed thing, seven-headed, twelve-headed, a dragon constantly fed and constantly growing, each head a different disease of the nafs: envy, ḥasad; miserliness, bukhl; greed, ḥirṣ; malice, ḥaqd — all straining constantly against restraint, attacking and keeping a person under its control, with Shayṭān as its keeper, waiting for the moment of surrender, bent in the end on nothing less than destruction. Yet the instant refuge is sought in Allah, above all within ṣalāh, and above all in prostration, that very being begins instead to weep.