The Semantic Field of the Nafs

So the fiṭrah nature is that a child is in submission to God. As the nafs begins to develop, the first nafs shows up. And nafs here is a very important word in the Islamic tradition, and a little of the semantic field of nafs is worth going through. The root word is, again, nafasa. It is in Hebrew also: nefesh. Nefesh is breath, or spirit. And, interestingly enough, psyche in Greek has the same meaning. Spirit; nefesh; to breathe: it is related to breath.

Nafs has, at its base root, two meanings: nafisa and nafusa. All one does is change a vowelling. One of them means to be precious, and the other means to be niggardly. So right there, in the Arabic language, there is a concept embedded in the idea of self: that we have two aspects to our nature. One is the bestial, and the other is the angelic. One is the selfless, and the other is the niggardly. One is the one that wants to give, and the other is the one that wants to hold on. And this is the human dichotomy.

At the next level, going to the next root, which is naffasa, where a shaddah is put over it — the same root, though — naffasa means to help somebody, to relieve them of their constriction. In other words, to give them breath; to help them; to expand somebody who is constricted. But go to the next root, nāfasa, and it means to undermine somebody else, to compete against them. So it is right there in the language: the human being has these two opposing qualities.

For the child, at the first level, this can be seen already. One is that the child will smile, and the mother's heart melts. Watch people's faces when they are looking at a baby: when the baby smiles, they all start kind of melting. Why? Because it is like a gift from that baby. But then it starts screaming: I want… So right there in the baby we begin to see the emergence of the dual nature, and we see it through childhood. Anyone with a five-year-old and a three-year-old can see them moving between these two states: this amazing state of wanting to give, wanting to share, and then this other state of wanting to hold on — not going to share. Negation, affirmation. The world is negation; the next world is affirmation. Negating the world, affirming God. This is the human being. We are negators and affirmers. But if we get it wrong — what we should be negating and affirming — we go into trouble.