What is the Self? (Part 1)
Part 1: The Human Soul, its Original Beauty (fitra), and its Corruption
Osama:
In our previous conversation, you spoke about the nature of true love, and how it relates to the purpose of life. Discourse about love is often associated with the self, the heart and the soul, all of which are terms that I have wondered about. So I thought that our next conversation should revolve around those concepts. Let’s start with the self. What is the self?
Hamza:
The “self” is that thing within us that makes us alive. It makes us who we are and it gives us our identity.
The “self” is the “I”. It is the “I” that we speak of when we say things like, “I feel happy,” or, “I love you,” or, “I want to eat chocolate pudding.”
This “I” that is saying all of these things is my “self” and that is who I am.
Scholars like Imam al-Ghazali (Allah be pleased with him) have observed that one of the strangest things is that despite the “self” being so close to us — I mean, it is who we are! — despite its closeness, its true nature is eludes us.
One of the reasons why its true nature alludes us is because it cannot be seen with the eye, nor can you do an experiment to observe it directly. (You can, however, do experiments to observe it indirectly and from this comes the field of modern psychiatry.)
This “self”, this “I”, is what the Quran and Sunna refer to as the human soul (Ar. ruh).
Osama:
What is the true nature of the soul?
Hamza:
Growing up, one of my favourite books was The Lives of Man by the saintly scholar of eastern Yemen, Shaykh Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad (d. 1720). Mostafa al-Badawi has a beautiful translation of this book into English. The book describes the five lives of all human beings.
I was sitting with my children recently and told them that we all have five lives. They were surprised! Like most of us, they thought that we only have two: our life of in this world and our life after death in the next world.
But Shaykh Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddan explains in his book that we have more than just those two lives. He says we have five!
I think that understanding these five lives will help us understand the answer to your question about the true nature of the soul.
Osama:
Yes, that sounds like a great idea!
Hamza:
So let’s begin with the first life. Our first life isn’t this life that we are living right now. This is our second life. Before this life that we are living right now we had another life.
That life — our first life — was our existence in the universe of the souls, which in Arabic is called the ‘alam al-arwah. Allah Most High mentions this world of souls-without-bodies in the Quran:
(And remember the time) when your Lord brought forth the offspring of the children of Adam from their loins and made them testify against themselves: He said, “Am I not your Lord?” and they replied, “Yes, indeed, we testify.” (Quran, 7:172)
In this life before our earthly life, Allah brought all of us into existence as pure souls. (Souls are the same as spirits.) We were souls without bodies.
Osama:
(And remember the time) when your Lord said to the angels, “Indeed, I will create a mortal out of dried clay that comes from dark mud. When I have fashioned him and breathed My spirit into him, then fall down prostrate to him.” (Quran, 15:28-29)
Your description of the universe of souls, reminds me of this verse.
Were our bodies not created first - so too there must have been a universe of bodies - and then our souls?
Also, what is meant by Allah breathing His Soul into the body of Adam?
Hamza:
No. First, Allah created our souls. Then He created our bodies. And then he placed the souls into those bodies.
The verse that you have quoted above describes how Allah Most High With created the body of our father Adam (may Allah give him peace) out of clay and then ensouled it with a soul that He had already created before the creation of the body.
The translation of the verse that you have cited says that Allah Most High says that He “breathed His soul” into our father Adam (may Allah give him peace). Now, we know that Allah Most High doesn’t breathe and He doesn’t have a soul. Hence your question about the meaning of this verse.
Let’s start with the breathing. Many verses and hadiths metaphorically refer to the ensoulment of bodies as “breathing the soul into the body”. This is a metaphor in which putting the life-giving immaterial soul into the lifeless shell of a body is likened to blowing vaporous air into something solid that then suddenly begins to moves. So there is no actual breathing. The breathing is a metaphor.
Now that we understand what “breathing” means, let’s look at the meaning of “My spirit”. The spirit that the verse is referring to is the spirit of our father Adam that existed before the body (He is placing this spirit into the body that He has created). Allah Most High refers to our father Adam’s soul as “His” soul to indicate that the soul is something special that belongs to Him alone and that came into existence through His direct command without any intervening apparent cause. So the ascription of the soul to Allah Most High doesn’t mean that He has a soul. Rather, it means that the soul that He created is something special. This is a common rhetorical technique in the ancient Arabic language.
The soul of our father Adam (upon him be peace) was “breathed” into his fully-formed body. Our souls are “breathed” into our fetuses. In a famous hadith, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) told us that an angel visits us forty days after conception in our mother’s wombs to “breathe” (i.e., insert) our pre-existing souls into our developing bodies. (Some narrations say that this happens 120 days after conception, but the version in Sahih Muslim that says 40 days is the more authentic one in light of various scientific discoveries that we can perhaps talk about in another conversation.)
Osama:
Shaykh Hamza, before you move on to describing the second life of man, can you briefly explain the concept of the fitra and how it relates to the soul?
Hamza:
Every soul, when it is first “breathed” into a body, has an original and healthy form which predisposes it to recognize the existence of God, our need to worship Him, and our need to follow His messengers. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) called this original state the “fitra” and he said that every child is born on the fitra, and his parents then make him into a Christian or a Jew or a Magian. (Bukhari and Muslim)
The fitra is this original and healthy form upon which Allah Most High created all of us. Allah Most High describes this original and healthy form in the Quran as the “finest form” (ahsan taqwim):
We surely created man in the finest form and then reduced him to the lowest of the low. (Quran, 95:4-5)
This “finest form” contains the potential of the human being to love and worship Allah Most High. As the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) explained in the hadith that I have just cited, this original form can be spoiled and corrupted by external influences. In this verse, Allah Most High expresses this by saying that a human being who has been created in the finest form can fall to turn into the “lowest of the low”.
This fitra, or “finest form” is both the outward and in the inward form. Outwardly, Allah Most High made the human form the best of all forms. This is something that we know and perceive. If a human being looked like a frog, we wouldn’t consider him beautiful because he doesn’t have the “finest form” of a human being.
As an aside, this perception of ours is real—human beings really do have the most beautiful form. They really are more beautiful than frogs, rats, and cockroaches! (Smile.) Materialists often say that this is human bias: if humans had been frogs, they would have considered frogs to have the most beautiful form. There are two problems with this claim. The first is that it assumes that frogs think that other frogs are more beautiful than human beings. There is no evidence for this assumption. How do we know that frogs don’t, for example, recognize that human beings are more beautiful than them? The only way for a materialist to know this would for him to become a frog and see what human beings look like from a frog-perspective. (Smile.)
But let’s assume that frogs do, indeed, believe that other frogs are more beautiful than human beings. Even if that were, theoretically, to be the case, it wouldn’t prove that the frogs are right. There are many things that frogs believe about the world that we disagree with because we acknowledge that our perception of the universe is superior to the frogs’ perceptions of the universe, and the perception that we are more beautiful than frogs is no different.
From a philosophical perspective, would say that this is the case because we know through introspection that our judgments correspond to reality. Anyone who denies that and says instead that our judgments are relative (as the materialists are doing here) shoots himself in his own foot because by asserting that all judgments are relative, he is making a non-relative judgment, which he himself has denied to himself. This deserves to be unpacked in greater detail, but perhaps we can save that for another discussion.
I think what’s relevant to our discussion here that from a religious perspective, we would say that Allah Most High has privileged the human perspective over the perspectives of other animals because the human soul that is on the fitra has the ability to perceive realities that animals without that soul cannot.
And that takes us to the inward aspect of the “finest form” that is mentioned in the verse that I have just cited. That inward aspect of the “finest form”, the original and healthy form on which Allah Most High created the human soul, the form which predisposes us to recognize the existence of God and the purpose of our life on earth, that form is what Allah Most High called the fitra.
This fitra has a form. It looks like something. You can actually see it.
Osama:
How can someone see another’s inward form, or their fitra?
Hamza:
We see others’ outward forms with our physical eyesight. In Arabic, this is called basar. And we see others’ inward forms with our spiritual insight. In Arabic, this is called basira. (This spiritual insight is what inspires the name of this website: “Basira Education”.)
Your parents have an inward form, and you can see it with your spiritual insight. You know the kind of people they are. When they smile, you can see through their smile to who they are inside.
Insha’Allah when you get married, you will see this with your wife, too. When you spend time with her and become her friend, both of you, being so close and intimate, will come to see each other’s inward form.
You don’t see this inward form with the eye. You see it with the soul. That’s where your spiritual insight, your basira, resides.
You can see with your soul that some people have very beautiful arwah (Arabic for “souls”), and the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) conveyed this meaning with a du‘a he would make when looking at the mirror:
O Allah! Just as you have beautified my “khalq” (outward form), so beautify my “khuluq” (inward form, i.e., character) (Ahmad)
Notice how he is saying that we have an outward form—our khalq—and an inward form—our khuluq (i.e., our character). Both khalq and khuluq come from the Arabic word that means creation.
The word fitra also carries the meaning of creation. Allah Most High describes Himself in the Quran as the Fatir, or the Originator, of the heavens and the earth. Just like the word khuluq, the word fitra also carries the meaning of the inward form upon which the human being has been created. The use of these words to describe our soul suggests that the soul can, in fact, be seen.
We can see other people’s souls. We can see the beauty in beautiful souls, and we can see the ugliness of ugly souls. Another word for that beauty of soul or that ugliness of soul is “character”. Our “character” is the inward form of our soul.
Osama:
You’ve described how the fitra, the original and healthy form of the soul is beautiful. And you’ve alluded at various points in your explanations that that original form can become corrupted and become ugly. Can you tell us more about that?
Hamza:
Let’s revisit the verse that I cited above.
We surely created man in the finest form and then reduced him to the lowest of the low. (Quran, 95:4-5)
I’ve described the “finest form” in my answers to your previous questions. What you are now asking about is the meaning of the end of this verse. You are asking what it means for the “finest form” to be reduced to the “lowest of the low”.
Now, when I described the “finest form”, I explained that it refers to both our outward form and our inward form.
The reduction of this “finest form” to the “lowest of the low”, however, only refers to our inward form. If it referred to our outward form, it would mean that we were created with the beautiful form of human beings and then reduced to the form of frogs (for example). That’s not what the verse is saying.
Rather, what the verse is saying is that Allah Most High gave human beings their finest inward form — our fitra — and then, because of the bad choices that human beings made, this finest form became corrupted and, with some people, it became the “lowest of the low”.
Serial killers, people who commit heinous crimes like shooting children in schools, these are examples of people whose original and healthy inward form has become corrupted so that it becomes the “lowest of the low”.
The gruesome and merciless killings that are committed by members of ISIS are also the result of a corrupted inward form.
The inward form of the soul becomes corrupted when the soul moves away from humbling itself to the divine command — the Sacred Law (shari‘ah) — and instead pursues power, control, and dominance over other human beings. Someone whose soul is corrupted in this way will bully other people, put them down, dominate them, and manipulate them for their own selfish interests. That is what serial killers do, and that is what members of ISIS also do. ISIS is an outward religious form that conceals a corrupt inward form that is far from the religious form of Islam, the fitra.
The soul of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) was beautiful and the souls of genuinely religious people are beautiful. The souls of people like the ones described above are ugly. [Editor’s Note: The beauty of the soul and its consummate manifestation in the soul of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) is the subject of the next conversation which will, insha’allah, be released shortly.]
Osama:
Onto the second life - what is this life all about?
Hamza:
Our second life begins with the ensoulment of our developing fetuses in the wombs of our mothers. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said,
The material from which each person is created is gathered in his mother’s womb as a drop of sperm for forty days, then as a blood clot for [or, in some narrations, “during”] the same period, then as a lump of flesh for [or, in some narrations, “during”] the same period. Then an angel is sent, which breathes the spirit into him, and is then commanded with four matters: to record his sustenance, his death, his deeds, and whether he is saved or damned. (Bukhari and Muslim)
This hadith is transmitted in conflicting ways. Some narrations explain that these developments happen over a period of 40 days. Others explain that they happen over a period of 120 days. (I’ve drawn attention to that in the translation above.) The narration that says that this development happens over a period of 40 days is stronger in view of modern scientific discoveries. But as I mentioned above, we can return to that in another conversation.
After this initial 40 day period, the angel breathes our soul — which had already been created and which existed upon the fitra — into the fetus and then the fetus becomes alive. This is when it is considered a human being. Medically, this is when it starts to move and behave as though it is alive.
Then, after its nine-month term in the womb, it comes out of the womb as a human being into this world.
This marks the beginning of our second life, namely, the life of this world, this life that we are living right now.
Osama:
And this second life that begins in the womb of our mothers ends with our deaths.
Hamza:
Yes, that’s right.
A point to note, however, is that the soul that is separated at our death is not the same soul that was breathed into us because during our second life, we changed our souls through the choices that we made. We either kept it on the fitra, upon its original disposition, or we corrupted it. It is this soul that we take into our third life. (Since this soul is who we are — our “self” — another way of saying this is that this is how we enter our third life.)
Our third life begins with our deaths. This is our life of the grave. This life takes place in an intermediate realm (Ar. barzakh) that lies between this life and our life after resurrection on Judgment Day. In this third life, we are waiting to be resurrected.
The kind of life that we experience in this third life depends on what we did to our souls (or in other words, to our “selves”) in our second life. In our third life, our souls either enter into an abode of pleasure and reward in which they continue to know and worship Allah Most High as they did in this life (but this worship is not like the worship of this second life that we are living now — in this life that we are living now, we worship Allah Most High in order to to His pleasure; in our third life in the grave, if we worship Allah Most High, it will be a source of pleasure and intimacy of closeness to Allah Most High), or they enter into an abode of pain and torment, in which they are distant from Allah Most High. The former is the soul that was on the fitra. The latter is the soul that was corrupted.
You’ll notice that the first life was pure soul and that the second life was a soul-body in balance. In the third life, the body disintegrates (some bodies, such as the bodies of prophets, martyrs, and some of the righteous, don’t disintegrate). But even though the body disintegrates, the soul is still connected to it somehow, and the soul retains some kind of connection to the place where it was buried. It is aware of us and hears us when we visit the grave and when we give it salams. The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) taught us to give salams to the dead when we visit their graves. Scholars explain that giving salams would have no meaning unless the souls could hear us. When we visit the graves of people who have died, we are actually visiting them. We are visiting them while they are in their third life.
But even though the soul retains a connection to the body, this third life is soul-dominant because the soul is not in the body as it was when it was in its second life, it cannot move the body as it did when it was in its second life, and body actually disintegrates (with the exceptions that I have mentioned above).
Osama:
I presume that our fourth life takes place on the Day of Judgement, and the fifth in Paradise or Hell.
Hamza:
Yes, that is correct.
Our fourth life begins with our resurrection when the trumpet is blown for the second time. This is the beginning of the Day of Judgement. In this fourth life, our body and soul are reunited again so that we are back in a soul-body balance, as we were in our second lives. But again, the souls that are reunited with the bodies in this life are the way they were when we died: either on the fitra, or on a corrupted form. That imprint that we leave on our souls through the choices that we make in our second lives will remain with us for eternity.
This fourth life comprises many different events — resurrection, the gathering of all human beings on a huge flat plain, waiting for judgment to begin, the greatest intercession of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), taking our record of deeds either with our right or left hands, the scales on which our deeds will be weighed, the questioning, and the bridge over the Hellfire (Allah be our refuge). You can read about these in book that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation: The Lives of Man.
From there, each one of us will enter either Paradise (may that be our final abode) or Hellfire (Allah be our refuge). Believers who enter Hellfire will eventually come out of it to enter Paradise. Disbelievers will remain in it forever. The everlasting lives of human beings in Paradise or Hell are their fifth and final lives.
So there we go, these are the five lives.
Osama:
In summary, the five lives you have described are:
1. Our first life: before conception in the universe of the souls (alam al-arwah);
2. Our second life: from the womb of our mothers till our deaths in the lower world (al-dunya);
3. Our third life: from our deaths till the Day of Judgement in the inter-world (al-barzakh);
4. Our fourth life: the Day of Judgement (yawm al-qiyamah);
5. Our fifth life: the Garden (al-jannah) or the Fire (jahannam).
JazakAllah Khairan Shaykh Hamza for summarizing these for us. In the process, I have learned about the “self” and the “soul”.
[Watch out for the second part of this conversation, which will continue to explore the question, “What is the Self” through an exploration of Islam, modern psychiatry, and trauma.]
