Chapter 6 Self Psychology

“Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together,

(as one Unit of Creation) before We clove them asunder?

We made from water every living thing? Will they not then believe?”

Q 21:30 The Holy Qur’an (Ali, 1975, p. 828)

The Garden of Paradise, Fed by the River of Water: Fitra and Nafs

These next five chapters contain the psychological hermeneutic project of this dissertation.

The question which is examined in this chapter, in all epistemic humility, is what do the seven

sacred verses have to offer in the formulation of a self psychology, within the context of an

Integral Psychology of Islam? This examination serves as the foundational chapter for the next

four chapters, which discuss the socio-political and cultural contexts of the collective in which

the self is nurtured and inspired, followed by the transpersonal and feminine dimensions of the

self, which may remain unconscious. Hence, we begin with a theoretical formulation as a

framework for the hermeneutic project.

In Muhammad Asad’s classic work, Islam on the Crossroads, he emphasizes the unity of life

because it flows out of the Divine unity. Hence, for Asad, Islam is

simply a programme of life according to the rules of Nature which God has decreed upon His
creation, and its supreme achievement is the complete co-ordination of the spiritual and
material aspects of human life. In the teachings of Islam, both these aspects are not only
reconciled to each other in the sense that there is no inherent conflict between the bodily and
the moral existence of man, but in addition to this, the fact of their co-existence and actual
inseparability is insisted upon as the natural basis of life. (1934, p. 15)

It is in this context that Asad goes on to make the point that prayer in Islam comprises both

spiritual concentration as well as certain physical movements, “because the human life itself is of
such a dual composition, and because we are supposed to approach God through the sum total of

the faculties He has bestowed upon us” (1934, p. 16). It is hoped that this hermeneutic study will

approach the deepest layers of the psycho-spiritual meanings of al-Fatiha with all of the God-

given faculties of the hermeneutic circle with a view to discovering the most complete meaning

of the self in its relationship with the Transpersonal Self.

It is important to note at the outset that an Integral Psychology of Islam draws on the four

rivers in all four quadrants and the fountain at the center of the Gardens of Paradise. This chapter

aspires to examine just one of the five aspects of the central metaphor of al-janna within the

context of the essential seven sacred verses of the Qur’an, al-Fatiha. There exists an

interdependent relationship between all four quadrants and the fountain at the center. The

psychology of the self in Islam is not a stand-alone quadrant. It remains to be seen whether the

hermeneutic process will itself reveal an integral psychology of the self in Islam.

A working definition of the self

However, a well-rounded psychology of the self from an integral perspective must include

some working assumptions about the self as a dynamic force of existence. An Integral

Psychology of Islam might consider a composite of at least seven different definitions of the self:

(1) the self as a person with specifically human capacities as described by Christian Smith in

What is a Person?; (2) the self as a relationship between the personal self and the

Self/Transpersonal Self, as formulated by C. G. Jung as well as Assagioli in psychosynthesis; (3)

the self as a dynamic organism based on Maslow’s concept of the personality syndrome; (4) the

self as a complex of primary configurations and constituents which, as Heinz Kohut (1913 –

1981 CE) explained in Self Psychology and the Humanities, are molecular, organic and
psychological; (5) the self as part of an emotional family unit as was formulated by Murray

Bowen (1913 – 1990 CE) in his version of family systems theory, (6) the self as a dialogical self

as proposed by Hermans and Hermans-Konopka in Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and

Counter-Positioning in a Globalizing Society, and (7) the self as ecological.

Christian Smith is a professor of sociology and Director of the Center for Social Research at

the University of Notre Dame. His premise is that the self is an emergence of personhood with

the capacity for consciousness and unconsciousness:

Consciousness at a basic level means that humans can exist in a state of being that is sentient,
wakeful, alert, aware, attentive. Humans also possess what we might think of as involuntary
capacities. One is to live in part out of a state of unconscious being. Not all of the desires,
feelings, beliefs, dispositions, and goals that govern people’s affect and actions are
immediately accessible to their conscious inspection. Part of the normal human being’s
personality and motivational structure exists “below the surface” of awareness and
recognition - even if they are shaped by ongoing conscious processes. This we call the
unconscious, the depths of which in its influence on complex behavior appear to be extensive
among humans. (2010, p. 44)

Jung and Assagioli, as we have discussed, were both interested in the dynamic relationship

between the personal self and the Transpersonal Self. Jung used the concept of the persona,

while Assagioli was cognizant of the multiplicity of subpersonalities of the personal self.

Hillman’s reading of Jung’s concept of the personality in Re-Visioning Psychology is similar

in some ways to that of Assagioli’s concept of subpersonalities and the higher and lower

Unconscious:

In Jungian practice the words Shadow, Self, Ego, Anima, and the like refer to the structural
components of the personality. These basic structures are always imagined to be partial
personalities, and the interplay between them is imagined more as in fiction than in physics.
Rather than a field of forces, we are each a field of internal personal relationships, an interior
commune, a body politic. Psychodynamics becomes psychodramatics; our life is less the
resultant of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios. Moreover, these
components of personality, playing through their archetypal scenes, which we call our life
problems, receive personal pronouns. We speak familiarly of them: “She (the mother
complex) paralyzes me.” “He (the father complex) never stops driving me, he wants me
perfect.” And we wrestle with a concealed counterpersonality whom Jung named Shadow
 because we keep him in the dark; he must shadow our life with his surreptitious intentions.
Jung called all these figures “the little people.” Yet even in spite of this tongue-in-cheek kind
of naming, he recognized that they are more important in steering fate than is our usual “I.”
(1992, p. 22)

But one of Assagioli’s key contributions to a self psychology in Psychosynthesis was to

develop a therapeutic process of dis-identification from the attachment to these self-identities:

In cases where a patient is proceeding towards a subsequent spiritual psychosynthesis, we first

point out that there is a sense of self-identity: “I am my self,” but that this self-consciousness
is generally hazy, because of its many identifications. Therefore a process of dis-identification
is useful in order to become aware of the self-identity. The discussion of the subject with the
patient can well be halted at this point, postponing until a much later stage of the treatment the
question of the higher unconscious or superconscious and the spiritual Self. Only where
patients, when they first come to us, already have spiritual or religious problems do we enter
more thoroughly into this question at this early stage of therapy. (1987, p. 86)

Abraham Maslow’s theory of personality in the third edition of Motivation and Personality

suggests that the self is a holistic-dynamic organism with a hierarchy of needs that responds to its

environment, which he articulates in terms of a personality syndrome: “Our preliminary

definition of a personality syndrome is that it is a structured, organized complex of apparently

diverse specificities (behaviors, thoughts, impulses to action, perceptions, etc.) which, however,

when studied carefully and validly are found to have a common unity that may be phrased

variously as a similar dynamic meaning, expression, ‘flavor,’ function or purpose” (1987, p.

218). Maslow is careful to note that parts and symptoms of the syndrome are not only

interchangeable, but that the dynamic interactions within a syndrome can have a circular

determination whereby these parts and symptoms may exist in continual flux and continuously

affect each other.

Austrian-born American neurologist and psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut questioned the primacy

of Freud’s biological drive theory and developed a theory of self psychology based on the

tension between narcissism and self-worth within the context of relationships:

 It posits a primary self which, in a matrix of empathic selfobjects that is held to be as much a
prerequisite of psychological existence as oxygen is for biological life, experiences selfobject
greatness (assertiveness; ambitions), on the one hand, and selfobject perfection (idealization
of one’s goals; enthusiasm for one’s ideals), on the other. Drives are secondary phenomena.
They are disintegration products following the breakup of the primary complex psychological
configuration in consequence of (empathy) failures in the self-object matrix. Subsequent to
serious and prolonged or repetitive failures from the side of selfobjects, assertiveness becomes
exhibitionism; enthusiasm becomes voyeurism; and joy changes into depression and lethargy.
(Kohut & Strozuev, 1985. p. 74)

Murray Bowen, renowned American professor of psychiatry, studied the family system of

patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and first formulated a family systems theory which posits

the family as an emotional unit. His theory incorporated key concepts, outlined by one of his

mentees, Dr. Roberta Gilbert, in The Eight Concepts of Bowen Theory, which situates the

dynamics of the self as part of a family unit: (1) the nuclear family as an emotional system in

which “anxiety moves freely from person to person” (2006, p. 6); (2) varying levels of

differentiation which underscores the tension between the individual self and the family in the

formation of the basic or solid self away from the pseudo-self or functional-self; (3) the creation

of triangles in the family system to regulate the level and intensity of anxiety; (4) the emotional

cut off as a process of separation, isolation, withdrawal or denial of the importance of the family

system; (5) the family projection process, which is “how anxiety gets off-loaded to offspring” (p.

67); (6) the multigenerational transmission process which tracks intergenerational patterns of

behavior; (7) the importance of the sibling position, which Bowen adopted from the family

constellation research published in 1961 by Austrian-American psychologist Walter Toman; and

(8) the effect of the emotional process in society and societal regression on the individual and

family. Bowen also considered including a ninth concept but chose to exclude it:

Bowen briefly thought about a ninth. He called it ‘The Supernatural.’ He did not continue the
work, he said, because of the intense reactivity of the profession to it; and it never became a
part of the formal family systems theory. Did he leave that for others and future
generations?” (2006, p. 118)
Fortunately, the concept was already well developed by Jung and later, Assagioli in his model of

the self in psychosynthesis.

A more recent dialogical theory of the self has been posited by Hubert Hermans, renowned

Dutch psychologist and key figure in the field of narrative psychology, and his wife, Agnieszka

Hermans-Konopka, in their understanding of the self as part of a field of awareness in which the

central assumption is “that the self is extended in space and time” (2010, p. 2). This theory of the

self proposes that dialogical relationships exist not only between individuals, groups, and

cultures, but also between different I-positions within the dialogical self of the individual person.

Based on the ecological dialogue for this chapter (please see Appendix D), it is clear that the

principle of tawhid in Islam cannot exclude the self’s dialogical relationship with nature and

other beings in the environment, which is an essential principle of ecopsychology, as elaborated

so eloquently by Andy Fisher in Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life:

Indeed, much of the deep ecology literature is about experiencing the interrelatedness of all
things in wilderness settings - as when the nineteenth-century wilderness advocate John Muir
sensed trees and mountains shining with a kind of psychic aura, everything being luminously
present as an interdependent whole. The shift to such an “ecological” mode of consciousness,
in which one’s sense of reality lines up with the ecological givens, is held out by many deep
ecology supporters as a necessary step toward an “ecologically mature” society. The deep
ecology scholar Warwick Fox has in fact argued that what distinguishes deep ecology is
precisely this psychological dimension. Because ecological consciousness (or Self-realization,
as it is also called) involves transcending the more narrow, biographic, egoic, or personal
sense of self, he suggests that deep ecology has much in common with transpersonal
psychology, which takes spiritual (beyond-the-personal) experience as its subject matter. He
even proposes replacing the term deep ecology with transpersonal ecology –the idea being
that as one develops a sense of self that is both transpersonal and ecological, one will care for
the earth without being morally persuaded to do so because one will identify with it as Self. It
is thus through a process of psycho-spiritual growth that one will become motivated to
develop an ecocentric lifestyle and participate in actions such as the direct defence of
threatened wilderness areas. (2002, p. 18)

Although the self is ecological just by virtue of its reliance and dependence on natural life

support systems, it is also potentially deeply ecological. The composite of this definition of the
dialogical self and the other six theories correspond well with the concept of the imaginal self

which both contains and is contained within an imaginal field as I have proposed in chapter 2.

For purposes of this dissertation, the self functions within an imaginal field which also

inhabits the self. The self has the capacity for consciousness and unconsciousness. The self is

molecular, organic, dynamic, ecological, and psychological. The self is in relationship with a

Transpersonal Self and hence the self is also teleological as described by Jung - in the process of

individuation - or by Bowen - in the process of differentiation. The self is part of a family

system. The self is in a dynamic dialogical relationship with aspects of its self (persona or

subpersonalities) as well as with groups, cultures, and the environment ( i.e., all the worlds in the

imaginal field). These relationships between self and groups, environments and cultures will be

examined in chapters 7 and 8.

This chapter on the Garden of Paradise, fed by the river of water, aspires to build on the

transpersonal psychology elaborated in Frager’s Heart, Self and Soul, which uses the model of

Assagioli’s psychosynthesis to explain the Sufi system of the nafs. The key contributions to the

psychology of religion by Assagioli have been highlighted in the literature review. Within the

context of a psychology of the self, there are certain aspects of the psychosynthesis model, not

included by Frager, which merit further elaboration such as the concept of subpersonalities, their

formation and their relationship to the nafs, as well as the process of dis-identification from these

subpersonalities. In addition, several other dimensions of the self merit serious consideration if

we are to formulate an Integral Psychology of Islam: (1) an appreciation of a developmental

model of the self and the implications of neuroscience, (2) the significance of the relationship

between the individual and the family using a family systems approach such as the Bowenian

model, (3) the complexes which are constellated by relationships with parents, from a Jungian
perspective; and (4) the relationship of the individual to nature and the environment, within the

context of an eco-psychology in which the self is both influenced by nature and the

environment as well as held responsible for its stewardship.

The individual in al-Fatiha

An initial analysis of al-Fatiha clearly indicates that these verses are recited using the plural

pronoun suggesting perhaps at first glance that the revelation is focused entirely on the collective

transformation of a nomadic desert people and its relationship with the Divine. Nasr has claimed

in Ideals and Realities of Islam that the grammar of the seven sacred verses signifies that the

human species actually stands before the Divine in prayer, on behalf of itself and all other

species in Creation, which is an argument for an ecological self. Notwithstanding this ecological

perspective, there is no single verse in the opening chapter of the revelation, taken in its literal

translation, that specifically relates to the individual, unless, of course, we accept Bowen’s

premise that the self is always part of the emotional unit of the human nuclear or extended

family. But it is also true that we each begin life in a distinctly individual and unique manner.

Even twins, triplets,m and the like have a different birth order. And it is also true that we each

face death alone as a unique moment. Most importantly each of us experiences life uniquely as

stream of consciousness.

On deeper examination, one begins to see that there are also profound implications for the

individual within the context of the human being as a social being with the responsibility for

stewardship of all creation. As each individual recites these verses, there is also a direct

interdependent relationship between the Creator and the Creation of the human being for in Q
1:2, the revelation clearly proclaims “All Praise is due to Allah, the Sustainer of all the Worlds.”

Hence all sentient and nonsentient beings, in this world and in all other worlds, are sustained by

the Creator, a reality which is shared by each individual human being.

Tariq Ramadan takes the view, in Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity, that the

individual is essentially the building block of society, providing sources from the Qur’an and the

Sunna to make the case that Islam fully recognizes the individuality of the self:

Building a society requires that one has, beforehand, specified a conception of the individual
who constitutes this society. In this, Islam, as indeed have all the spiritualities and religions of
the world, has stressed three fundamental principles (which are as such aspirations): the
requirement of truth and transparency; the moral dimensions (ethics) and the priority of
values, and the imperative of respect of men and the norms of balance. Each human being has
to try to live, to feed himself and to give sense to that which makes up his humanity; to
acquire knowledge in order to draw near to what is truer; to give force to his values in order to
achieve good, to listen and participate in order to better respect. The appeal of the Prophet
(peace be upon him) to seek knowledge (“Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every
Muslim”); the Qur’anic requirement for one to get involved in the good vis-à-vis one’s person
and one’s society (“You ought to command good and forbid evil”); and finally all the
recommendations for fairness and kindness that we find in the Qur’an and the Sunna (“Speak
in the best manners”, “Do not forget to treat one another with generosity, goodness, and
kindness”) clearly leads us in this direction. It is, therefore, impossible to think [of] a society
without starting with the individual who should make it his business to reform his own being.

God changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves. (Qur’an 13: 11),
(2009, p. 35)

The above Qur’anic verse cited by Ramadan is one that intimates a potential psychology of

the self. We clearly have the capacity for personal transformation and we must also have some

human agency in order to undertake self-cultivation and personal development.

Key concepts of self psychology in Islam

Before we can embark on this hermeneutic exploration, there are ten key concepts in Islam

which are essential to understanding a psychology of the self. These concepts are the fitra

(primordial essence or the essential self), the nafs (various dimensions of neurosis, states of
consciousness or sub-personalities of the self), taqlid (emulation) and khalifa (stewardship or

personal responsibility), khayal (imagination of the mind) and himma (imagination of the heart),

niyyah (intention) and iradah (will), ‘aql (intellect) and nur (light). Much has been expounded

about the nafs by the sheikhs and teachers of various Sufi orders, but it is still a concept which

merits a psychological re-examination and articulation. Less is known about the Islamic concepts

of fitra, taqlid, khalifa, khayal, himma, niyyah, iradah, ‘aql, and nur. Without some grounding in

these concepts, a psychology of the self becomes limited to a theory of personality as opposed to

a dynamic theory about the formation and integration of character. At the same time, in

alignment with and inspired by the depth tradition of psychology, it is imperative that we

recognize the shadow or unconscious dimensions of each of these key concepts. The reality is

that many aspects of these key concepts, by the very nature of the unconscious, will remain in

shadow, clearly limiting the work to what chooses to reveal itself to consciousness.

Because my ancestors in the field of psychology have often formulated their theories based on

their client observations, this chapter on self psychology will take the liberty to offer some of the

researcher’s own insights into human behavior. These will be presented both in terms of the

self’s capacity to heal and grow as well as in the context of the self’s psychopathology, based on

my own clinical observations over the past decade as a wraparound family facilitator and

psychotherapist.
The Essential Self: Fitra

Self Psychology in Islam begins with the creation of the self. The essence of that creation is

that which is identified in Q 30:30 as the fitra, the primordial essence, which is present in all

human existence. Within the context of Assagioli’s model of psychosynthesis, fitra would

correspond to the Transpersonal Self, which is defined by Assagioli’s student and instructor of

psychosynthesis, Molly Young Brown in Unfolding Self: The Practice of Psychosynthesis as “the

source of identity and will that unites individual and universal” (2004, p. 212).

Muhammad Asad’s translation of Q 30:30 seems particularly compelling for our reflection

and contemplation: “And so set thy face steadfastly towards the [one ever-true] faith, turning

away from all that is false, in accordance with the natural disposition which God has instilled

into man: [for,] not to allow any changes to corrupt what God has thus created – that is the

[purpose of the one] ever-true faith, but most people know it not” (Asad & Moustafa, 2003, p.

697).

This Qur’anic summons to align with one’s primordial essence or natural disposition is the

quintessence of the behavioral dimension of the upper right-quadrant in Wilber’s model of

integral psychology. Although it is true that in this quadrant Wilber may focus on the

evolutionary development of the organicity of the human being, Islam’s revelation takes the

approach that the very force which motivates the organicity of human behavior is this primordial

essence which has a transcendent dimension and which also connects us with the Creator and all

of creation. Hence in Islam, the organic dimension of the human being is the instrument which

embodies the fitra. In effect, it is this primordial beingness which underscores our humanness.

Indonesian scholar of Islam Etin Anwar, in her book, Gender and Self in Islam, describes

Ibn Sina’s Aristotelian theory of the organic self as having three faculties of the soul: the
vegetative soul, which is “the first entelechy of a natural body possessing organs in regard to

reproduction, growth, and nourishment”; the second faculty, which is “the entelechy of a natural

body, possessing organs so far as it perceives individuals and moves by volition”; and finally the

faculty of the human rational soul, which is the “entelechy of a natural body possessing organs

insofar as it acts by rational choice and rational deduction and insofar as it perceives universals”

(2006, p. 120). The human rational soul has the unique characteristic of being able to perform

good deeds and seek knowledge. Presumably it would be these three faculties of the soul that

form a human manifestation of the fitra.

Anwar does not fail to remind us - as she should - that Ibn Sina’s sexist ideas about female

psychology limited his understanding of the capacity of women to function fully as rational souls

because of his perceptions of their proclivity to be “controlled by sexual desire, easily deceived,

inclined to emotion and to disobey reason” (2006, p. 121). It is important to acknowledge the

pre-modern and modern conception of the self in Islam before we can proceed to a postmodern

perspective. The reality is that women were not (and in some places on the planet are still not)

considered equal to men by virtue of this example of a patriarchal definition presented by no less

than one of Islam’s greatest sages, imaginal psychotherapist and world renowned physician.

What this dissertation aspires to achieve is to redraw the inaccurate and misbegotten blueprint of

the human being to include womankind in the best way a male representative of the species is

capable of doing, lest we continue the erroneous thinking of the past.

As first mentioned in the literature review, Yasien Mohamed elaborates the concept of fitra in

Fitrah: The Islamic Concept of Human Nature. Since the Qur’an identifies the fitra as the innate

transcendent faculty, which Allah creates in humankind, it stands to reason for Mohamed that a

human being would also be endowed with the faculty of knowledge of the Divine: “Since
Allah’s fitrah is engraved upon the human soul, mankind is born in a state in which tawhid is

integral. Since tawhid is intrinsic to man’s fitrah, the prophets, peace be upon them, came to

remind man of it, and to guide him to that which is integral to his original nature” (1996, pp.16 -

17). But along with this inherent precognition of Divine Unity, Mohamed asserts that “man’s

true nature is one of intrinsic goodness, and so he is expected to conform to the Divine laws that

will guide him to good conduct” (p. 97).

However, despite this intrinsic goodness, humans are also “readily susceptible to evil stimuli”

(p. 102) and vulnerable to our natural inclinations and impulsive drives such as our lower nafs:

pride, jealousy, avarice, anger and aggression, including what we might refer to psychologically

as our defense mechanisms and negative complexes. For Mohamed, the psycho-spiritual

implications are that humans have the capacity to manage these drives and inclinations and

liberate ourselves from the influence of our carnal selves (nafs) by self-cultivation and

refinement through exercising free will (iradah) and intellect (‘aql) and by following the divine

commandments of the revelation. A distinction should be made here between the notion of free

will (iradah) as is proposed by Mohamed and the closely connected concept of intention

(niyyah), which is how in Islamic law, one’s actions are supposed to be judged. Hence, for the

human soul, there is clearly a capacity for both good and evil but goodness is intrinsic and can be

cultivated by surrendering to the Divine Will and evil can be both intrinsic by virtue of our nafs

and extrinsic as a result of negative external influences such as jinns and archetypes. What is

particularly salient with regards to the intrinsic goodness of humanity is that “the fitrah of man is

derived from the spiritual prototype of Nur Muhammad, the pre-existential light which issued

forth from the ultimate and absolute source – Allah” (p. 156). This primordial potentiality will

become essential to an imaginal, alchemical, and ecological hermeneutic of Q 1:6-7 of al-Fatiha

because there is now an intimate existential relationship established between one who surrenders

to the Divine Will and all those upon whom Allah has bestowed favors and blessings such as the

Prophets, Imams, saints, witnesses, and other enlightened souls.

In an important theological and philosophical reflection titled Paradise of Submission, a 13th

century Shi’a scholar of Islam, Nasir al-din Tusi (1201-1274 CE), explains the dynamic between

this natural disposition and the call to faith:

The summons (da’wat) and obligations which the rightful leaders impose [on human kind]
are directed at the good. In this world, the good initially fall away from their natural
constitution (fitrat), due to sinful behavior and iniquity. However by means of such a call and
charge - which, in relation to the souls of good people, is like an elixir which works its effect
on the substance of copper and turns it into pure gold - this sinful behavior is effaced from
their memory and they are returned to the original nature ”(2005, p. 55)

There is clearly a reference here to an alchemical process that returns the tainted copper of the

sinful human being to its original nature as gold. Hence, it is important to appreciate that the gold

is already at the core of the human being. It suffices for each personality to uncover this original

primordial essence. This represents a profound psychological difference from the notion of the

fallen human. The fall in Islam is not based on original sin. It is based on existential contingents

that devalue and cloud our original nature.

Tariq Ramadan, the renowned and controversial grandson of Hassan al-Banna, is a European-

trained authority on Islamic philosophy who emphasizes in Western Muslims and the Future of

Islam the centrality of fitra to the Islamic understanding of human nature within the context of an

original testimony and a covenant with the Divine: “It teaches us that in the heart and

consciousness of each individual there exists an essential and profound intuitive awareness and

recognition of the presence of the Transcendent” (2004, p. 16). Ramadan explains how this

notion of fitra is an aspect of the original testimony and covenant within the context of shari’a:
 Just as the shahada is the expression, in the here and now, of individual faithfulness to the
original covenant by means of a testimony that is a ‘return to oneself’ (a return to the fitra, to
the original breath breathed into us by God), so the Sharia is an expression of individual and
collective faithfulness, in time, for those who are trying in awareness to draw near to the
ideal of the Source that is God. (p. 32)

In the imaginal dialogue with the Laughing Buddha (please see Appendix D), there is a

reference to the fitra as it relates to the Buddha nature: “The Path calls us to whatever it is we

have to do which aligns with our Buddha nature, or fitra. When we are aligned to the Path which

calls us to our Buddha nature, we are on a Straight Path. We never know where the Path is going

to lead along the way.” This idea is confirmed in Douglas Duckworth’s work titled Mipam on

Buddha-nature: The Ground of the Nyingma Tradition. He cites Jamgon Mipam (1846 – 1912

CE), a Tibetan Buddhist scholar in the Nyingma tradition, who asserted that “Buddha- nature

contains an intrinsic cognitive presence” (2008, p. 95). The author claims that “the primordial

endowment of the qualities of the Buddha in sentient beings is a central part of Mipam’s

presentation of Buddha-nature” (2008, p. 97). Sallie B. King, in her examination of the concept

in Buddha Nature, asserts that in East Asian Buddhism, the theory claims that all sentient beings

possess the Buddha nature:

When one asks how the promise of future Buddhahood is realized, what the present
mechanism for this future achievement is, the answer is that insofar as we ‘possess’ the
Buddha nature, we already are Buddhalike, we already possess the attributes of a Buddha -
wisdom and compassion. (1991, pp. 1-2)

Like the fitra, the endowment of Buddha nature speaks to the primordial essence of the self.

For those Muslims who may see no relevance to the imaginal dialogue with the Laughing

Buddha and this comparison of the fitra to Buddha nature, it is well to reference the essay on

“Buddha in the Qur’an?” by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, a contemporary Sunni American theologian,

in a recent anthology titled Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism. Yusuf cites various
sources suggesting that there is a potential relationship between the Buddha and Khidr (or al-

Khadir), the imaginal archetypal figure who was a teacher to Moses and Ibn ‘Arabi:

It is also possible to interpret the figure of al-Khadir as a supra-historical archetype, or a

particular mode of spiritual guidance - antinomian and enigmatic, radically transcending
human modes of comprehension, and even “normal” modes of prophetic guidance. Thus,
rather than simply seeking to establish a historical connection or identification between al-
Khadir and the Buddha, one might also see the Buddha as one manifestation of the spiritual
archetype articulated by the Qur’anic al-Khadir. This point of view is substantiated by the
remarkable parallels one sees between the two figures. (2010, p. 119)

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s interpretation of the verse on fitra in What’s Right with Islam is

What’s Right with America connects the notion of the immutable nature of God (fitrah) with

human conscience:

The idea of this verse is that any person who listens to his or her heart and conscience would
recognize that God is One, that humanity is one family, that humans should be free and
should treat each other fairly and with justice.

Muslims therefore call their faith din al-fitrah, “natural religiousness,” meaning the goodness
that flows out of human nature, action that we regard as self-evidently right and ethical, a gift
of God to all humans, a piety that we are born into before our parents shaped us into their
socially accepted beliefs. Those who practice what their hearts tell them are therefore
practicing the right religion for them at the moment. (2005, p. 16)

Imam Rauf cites the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of

Independence, and compares the core definition of Islam as the din al-fitrah with the cardinal

self-evident moral truths of the declaration: “That all Men are created equal, that they are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and

the Pursuit of Happiness” (2005, p. 83). What Imam Feisal fails to say is that the notion of

individual human rights was absent in the Qur’an as was the notion of Liberty, understood as

personal human freedom - with the exception that the Qur’an does advocate the freeing of slaves.

What the Qur’an does imply very clearly about freedom of conscience in Q 2:256 is that there is
to be no compulsion in religion. Nevertheless, what is salient here is that the Qur’an in one single

verse refers to the fitra as a natural endowment or disposition.

Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, builds a

very eloquent and convincing case in Islam and The Challenge of Human Rights that along with

the moral responsibilities and duties that inhere with the fitra of the individual, there is also a

human and individual civil right. However, by Sachedina’s own account, most traditional

Muslim religious scholars in the majoritarian Sunni tradition of Islam are not willing to concede

to a hermeneutic that establishes such rights as inherent to the individual because that would

pose a challenge to both God’s Will as expressed in the Qur’an, which supersedes any human

right, and unity in the social order, which requires acceptance of the sacred laws embodied in the

shari’a:

In the Islamic tradition group rights are based on the notion of religious duty to obey God, the
Prophet, and those invested with authority. Obedience to the rulers is conceived as a major
source of communal unity and its integrity as a religious body. Individual rights are
consequently subsumed under the ideological concerns of the preservation of the political
unity of the community. Such ideological considerations lead to unavoidable differences in
evaluations about human conditions that are sometimes responsible for coercion and
repressive politics in the Muslim world. Authoritarian politics in Muslim societies are at the
root of disagreements based on variable interpretations of Islamic revelation about individual
moral agency in the context of collective restraints in place in Muslim societies. These
restraints, as interpreted by the ulema with their commitment to “group salvation,” require
individual members to assess their own claims to human rights in the interest of group rights
as part of their faith, which requires them to conform to the divine commandments. (2009, p.
182)

For the most part, these objections come from the religious leaders of the Asharite theological

school in stark contrast to the Mutazilite rationalist school. This appears to be the reason why the

Muslim world did not sign on to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and instead

proposed its own Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990, proposed by the 57

members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 42 years later. The CDHRI does not
protect freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of association or the requirement of

free consent to marriage, the right to a fair trial, prisoners’ rights, minority rights, the right to a

nationality, suffrage and other rights such as social security, trade unions, strikes, or participation

in cultural life. Despite these objections, it is fair to say that there is a relationship between the

rights of an individual based on the notion of fitra and the capacity of the self to function

effectively and fully in the world.

One can witness for oneself how ineffectively the Cairo declaration has been enforced by

watching the footage of a 26-year-old Iranian girl, Neda Soltan, being shot in broad daylight by

security forces on June 20, 2009 at an opposition rally to protest the outcome of the presidential

elections in Tehran. We have also recently witnessed video footage of an Egyptian woman being

beaten and dragged by the military at Tahrir Square in Cairo in December 18, 2011. The carnage

in Syria, as this dissertation unfolds, is another striking reminder that even in a secular political

system such as the one functioning today in Syria, the notion of individual rights amongst the

majority Muslim population seems to be an alien proposition - some would say a purely Western

import. Just as tragically, the rights of minorities remain unprotected, as attested by the search

for political asylum by the Christians of Iraq and the Copts of Egypt. Churches in Nigeria were

bombed on Christmas day, 2011. The other minority group that Muslim regimes will not tolerate

is homosexuals.

In his seminal study, Homosexuality in Islam, Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, a gay Muslim

professor of religious studies, now at Emory University, draws an important link between

homosexuality and fitra. He references the Qur’an to identify four levels of personality: these

four layers of personality are “outer appearance, inward disposition, genetic pattern, and inner

conscience” (Q 82: 6-8, Q 17:82-83, Q 23:13-14 and Q 30:30).

This fourth level is identified as inner conscience:

This Qur’anic verse indicates the fourth layer of personality, which is one’s inner conscience,
nestled subtly within one’s outer appearance, and accessible only through one’s inward
disposition. This is the part of our personality in which our true humanity lies. It is our
original nature or fitra, the deep core of our being that touches on the spirit and stays aware of
the presence of God. Our outer form may grow and decay and our inward disposition may
become refined or lapse into rawness, but our inner conscience remains fresh if our awareness
is not distracted from it. Set your face to the moral challenge [din] in a pure way, according
to the original nature [fitra] upon which God based humanity, for there is no changing the
creation of God Q. 30:30). We were created to be aware of God’s presence (through all of
God’s qualities, majestic and awe-inspiring qualities as well as beautiful and love-invoking
qualities), and nobody is excluded from this original nature that is never lost. This fitra
provides us with our conscience; it is the seat of intention and sincerity by which actions will
be judged for their moral worth, as the Prophet is reported to have taught: ‘Surely actions are
by intentions and each will get that for which they intend.’

Sexual acts, too, should be judged by the intention with which they are performed, an
intention formed within the heart of sincerity and fully colored by the filter of inward
disposition before being expressed through the physicality of apparent action. Sexual
orientation is latent within each individual, emerging in complex interactions between the
genetic tabi’a and early childhood shakila. Current research is pushing slowly but steadily
toward the conclusion that sexual orientation is largely inherent. (2010, p. 48)

By tabi’a is meant physiological constitution and by shakila is meant innate disposition.

Relying on the notion of fitra, Kugle’s work is based on a fresh hermeneutic of the few verses in

the Qur’an which have been interpreted by traditional scholars to mean the form of

homosexuality as it manifests itself in the contemporary era. Kugle makes a compelling case that

the Qur’anic references to incidents that have been interpreted as homosexual acts were in fact

male rape and homosexual conduct between men with a heterosexual orientation, in which event

these acts were based on choice not sexual orientation. Kugle challenges us to consider how

homosexuality can actually fulfill the Divine Will by seeking our soul partner or mate (zawj):

The Qu’ran encourages pairing, urging Muslims to see erotic desire and mating instincts as
good, as a path toward moral responsibility and spiritual maturity. It is as if by finding a
partner (or partners), we act in harmony with our original nature in which we were created
(fitra). Such universal verses are often gender neutral. They use terms, like nafs or zawj, that
do not clearly depict one human gender as opposed to the other. In this sense, the universal
Qur’anic verses apply to same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. (2010, p. 194)
 Clearly, without an appreciation for and protection of individual rights in the Dar al-Islam,

the potential for a healthy psychology of the self is limited. What may constitute a contemporary

psychology of the self among some members of the adult urban populations of Iran, Afghanistan,

Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, and Bahrain is a wide spectrum of victim psychology,

post-traumatic stress disorders, and dependent personality disorders.

Imam Feisal’s earlier reference to beliefs shaped by our parents, and perhaps even behaviors

or practices which express such beliefs, is based on the Prophet’s use of the term fitra in a

famous hadith, which Murata and Chittick claim in The Vision of Islam, to encapsulate the

Islamic understanding of the word: “Every child is born according to fitra. Then its parents make

it into a Christian, a Jew, or a Zoroastrian” (1994, p. 138). Although this prophetic tradition

may easily be misconstrued, within the modern context, as incendiary, the point seems to be that

all human beings are born with a primordial essence which connects us to the Creator and which

instills us from the moment of the soul’s first conscious impulse with an awareness of the

Transcendent Unity. Hence the human connection with the Transpersonal Self originates

inherently in utero or perhaps even at the moment of conception. But this hadith also suggests

that all religious beliefs, including those of Islam, are culture-bound forms that can envelop and

perhaps even temporarily obscure the most proximate relationship between the human and the

Divine. More importantly, there is an unqualified admission that parents have a lot to do with the

personal growth and development of the child.

In The Other in the Light of the One, Reza Shah-Kazemi offers a similar, more eloquent,

analysis on the universality of the Qur’anic revelation in the context of interfaith dialogue:

The ‘impossibility’ of altering the essential state of the fitra should be noted here. The
meaning of the inalterability of God’s creation is tied firmly to the immutability of the fitra.
The underlying and inalienable spiritual substance of the soul subsists whatever religion is
 superimposed upon it. It ‘in-forms’ the soul in a more fundamental way than any ‘formal’
religious affiliation. All forms of confessional religion are seen here as so many
superimpositions on the basic spiritual ‘infrastructure’ of the soul – that innate faith, that pre-
personal knowledge of supernal realities, that ‘breath’ of God – which is ingrained in the
deepest substance of the human soul. (p. 150)

James Hillman perhaps captured an external aspect of this innate image of the fitra with his

acorn theory in The Soul’s Code: “Despite early injury and all the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune, we bear from the start the image of a definite individual character with some

enduring traits” (1996, p. 4). The archetypal psychology of Hillman is in alignment with Islam

in that it requires that we give some consideration to a psychological theory “that grants primary

psychological reality to the call of fate” (1996, p. 5). Jean Houston articulates a similar notion

using the Aristotelian concept of entelechy in The Search for The Beloved: “What happens in

sacred psychology is the tapping into the entelechy of the self, the level most directly related to

the Divine Self” (1987, p. 31). This may well be the same form of Aristotelian thinking about

entelechy as that adopted by Ibn Sina in his discussion of the entelechy of the three faculties of

the self.

Contemporary American-Iranian psychotherapist and scholar of Islam, Laleh Bakhtiar, who

has written extensively on Islam and one of the few women to have translated the Qur’an into

English, offers a sound Sufi definition of the fitra in the first volume of her three volume corpus

titled God’s Will Be Done: Traditional Psychoethics and Personality Paradigm:

The self is born with a natural disposition to meet physiological and psychoethical needs of
the self. Psychoethical needs, which are part of the self’s natural disposition, are positive
aspects of the “self.” These form the mirror of the self. The nurturing process clouds, distorts,
and darkens this mirror, thereby distancing the self from its true nature. Change is effected
through methods known as “polishing” or “purifying” the mirror of self so that it can once
again reflect the positive aspects of nature with which it was naturally disposed. (1993, p. 38)
In offering her own personality paradigm drawn from the traditional texts of Al-Ghazzali,

Nasir al-Din Tusi, and Avicenna, Bakhtiar posits a physiological component to the fitra:
 A natural disposition may be the result of natural and physical make-up by which the self
is endowed at birth with what is known as temperament. Temperament arises from the
combination of elemental qualities of hot-wet, hot-dry, cold-wet, and cold-dry which
develop depending on the constellation of birth, the geographic location of the parents at
the time of the intercourse which leads to conception, of a mother during the time of
pregnancy, the food that each eats, and the air that each breathes. Even though
temperament is natural, it can be changed, regulated, or neutralized as a disposition or
psychological structure through the centering process. (1993, p. 39)

Psychologically, there is also an argument to be made that it is the fitra - as this primordial

essence - that Shah-Kazemi calls the “substance of the soul” (which Jung refers to as the

transcendent function) which informs our conscience. It is in fact the retrieval of the fitra which

permits us to refine our nafs and cultivate our conscience. Hence the essential self, fitra, serves

as the catalyst to alchemical transformations through spiritual practices such as prayer and

meditation which re-connect us with our individual Primordial Essence. Fitra is in effect the

Immanence of Allah hardwired within us and “closer than our jugular vein.” Hence it is also the

seat of self-forgiveness. The concept of self-forgiveness will be elaborated later in the chapter.

But it is clearly the essential self, fitra, which connects us with all of creation and so from an

ecological perspective, the pantheistic experiences of the mystics are inevitable.

Hameed Ali, a Kuwaiti born-American integral theorist, writing under the pen name, A. H.

Almaas, is founder of the Diamond approach of spiritual psychology, which he has developed

over the past three decades, using an integration of ideas from Sufism, the Gurdjieff work, and

various Eastern traditions. Without using the language of the Qur’an, Hameed Ali elucidates

what has been described in the literature on integral psychology as Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy

which differentiated the quality of pre-personal consciousness from the higher evolved levels of

transpersonal consciousness. He captures the essence of the essential self, fitra, in the newborn

infant in his prescription for the transformation of narcissism to self-realization in The Point of

Existence:
 Even though the self of the early infant must exist in a state of wholeness similar to that of
self-realization, we do not assume that the infant’s experience is the same as that of the self-
realized adult; in fact, this is most unlikely because, as we will discuss further, the infant has
not gone through the developmental stages necessary for conceptual discrimination. However,
it is safe to assume that the infant lives initially in a condition that we will term “primary self-
realization,” since in the absence of significant disturbances there must be some awareness
unmediated by memory, images, or ideas. We can assume that experience is not yet
conceptualized, the self is not yet self-reflective, and the consciousness is not yet divided by
defensiveness. Even if there is some contraction in the body or nervous system as a result of
less than optimal conditions, or, say, a difficult birth, the infant’s experience - at least at times
of rest and satisfaction - must be that of simply being. The actual self, the experiencing
consciousness, must be abiding in its true nature, since it is simply and spontaneously being,
with its innocence intact. (2001, p. 37)

It would seem fair to assert that the structures of personality which overlay the fitra emerge as

a result of the human experience, if not prenatally, then at least from early infancy. It is clear

from the recent research in prenatal psychology, that the unborn child is not immune to external

influences such as the emotional condition of the mother (and her relationships during the

pregnancy) or to the perilous effects of alcohol and tobacco. There is also some consensus in the

field of bio-ethical medicine in Dar al-Islam that the fetus is ensouled at 120 days after

conception. Hence, a legal case for termination of pregnancy before 120 days is in some quarters

considered within the bounds of ethical conduct in Islam. So, we really are, to use a cliché,

spiritual beings having a human experience from the moment of ensoulment.

The interpretation of the concept of fitra by one of the dream figures in my third dream, the

48th Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims, in The Memoirs of the Aga Khan is both

ecological and cosmological:

Islamic doctrine goes even farther than the other great religions for it proclaims the
presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state in all
existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule,
every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God. But men and
women, being more highly developed, are immensely more advanced than the infinite
number of other beings known to us. (Khan, 1954, p. 177)
 Based on this interpretation, one might argue that all of creation is imbued with the Divine

presence. Hence the experience of a fragmented world or universe may well be illusory for those

of us at lower levels of consciousness, especially since all the worlds are sustained by the One

Allah and all of humanity was created from a single soul.

In the field of psychology, the notion of unconditional positive regard which is the first

principle of Rogerian humanistic psychology is an acknowledgement of the fitra. In contrast, the

shadow dimension of fitra is its complete denial. The notion of original sin might be considered

as the shadow dimension of the primordial essence with which all human beings are endowed

according to Islam. The notion of original sin, which speaks of the fall of Adam and Eve from

the Garden of Eden, can also create a sense of distance and alienation between the human and the

Divine because it forecloses the original connection to the Divine Unity. It tends only to perceive

the Transcendent face of God to the exclusion of Divine Immanence.

Nafs: Neuroses, Subpersonalities, Complexes

However, it would seem that the divine imprimatur of the essential self, fitra, also clearly

constellates its own opposite, as Ali Shariati so carefully points out in an essay in On the

Sociology of Islam titled “Anthropology: The Creation of Man and the Contradiction of God and

Iblis, or Spirit and Clay.” Shariati examines this tension between the Spirit of God and putrid

clay which makes up the combination of opposites of the human being, out of which tension,

struggle and motion arises, resulting in a perfecting synthesis between what Pascal called the two

infinities:

In one direction lies the highest of the high - perfection, beauty, truth, power, awareness,
absolute and infinite will - higher and greater than anything that might be imagined, beyond
all that is lowly, banal, contemptible, commonplace, and petty - this is the hereafter. In the
other direction lies the lowest of the low - defect, ugliness, falsity, weakness, ignorance,
 absolute bondage, an infinite decline - viler, uglier and more egoistic than anything that might
be imagined - this is the world. (1979, p. 91)

In Jungian terms, the light of the fitra also constellates its own shadow through the emergence

of neuroses, subpersonalities and complexes, the nafs. In The Psychology of Sufism, Dr. Javad

Nurbakhsh, renowned Sheikh of the Nimatullahi order of Sufism, describes the ten attributes of

the tyrannical nafs ammara as being “ignorance, anger, rancor, tyranny, arrogance, spite, envy,

avarice, infidelity and hypocrisy; hence it is the center of all defilement and evil” (1992, p. 52).

Note that sexual desire and promiscuity are not in this list but Nurbakhsh does earlier cite

Tarifat-e Jorjani: “The commanding nafs encourages one toward corporeal nature and

encourages sensual pleasures and lust. It drags the heart down and is the refuge for evil and the

source of a blameworthy temperament” (p. 51).

The two stages of the nafs that are specifically relevant to the Garden of Paradise fed by the

river of water are the nafs ammara (the commanding or tyrannical nafs) and the nafs lawwama

(the regretful or reproachful nafs). Within the context of psychosynthesis, adopted by Frager in

Heart, Self and Soul, these two stages of the nafs are best represented by the concept of the

Lower Unconscious. The other stages of the nafs which flow from the Higher Unconscious

occupy the Garden fed by the river of wine, which is discussed in chapter 9. The move from the

tyrannical nafs to the regretful nafs is characterized by the moral development of conscience by

the influence of the higher unconscious. The shift in consciousness from one stage of nafs to the

next stage of nafs reflects a change in behavior and conduct as the individual begins to recognize

the consequences of his or her actions on themselves, on their parents and siblings, peers and

others in their circle of influence. The most heart-breaking observation for a clinician is when it

comes to light that despite all the supports and interventions provided by the mental health

system, a youth cannot make the shift from one stage of nafs to the next, because of their organic
limitations or mental illness, or because they have no choice but to return to a chaotic family

system which results in regression to previous patterns of conduct.

But is there then a relationship between the fitra and the expression, identity, and potentiality

of the self? Does Islam even have a viable theory of personality if Malik Badri is calling out for

one in The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists? In the context of Islam as a weltanschauung, what

is it that then drives human behavior? How does Islam understand psychopathology? Is the Sufi

system of nafs really sufficient to explain the presence of psychological disorders based solely on

impulsive drives and baser instincts?

Ebrahim Moosa in his analysis of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination suggests that

Muslims still lack a well developed theory of the self and personality: “Our knowledge of how

the self is culturally conceived in Islamicate societies and how it has served as a historical index

of personal and social transformation is still in its infancy” (2005, p. 213). However, Moosa

later cites Marshall Hodgson (1922 – 1968 CE), once the brilliant scholar of Islamic history at

the University of Chicago, who made the case that the very term Islam “refers to the inner

spiritual posture of an individual person of goodwill” (p. 222). So evidently, one cannot discount

the notion of an individual self in Islam and the Sufi system of nafs clearly points to the potential

for individual perfection of the self through personal self-cultivation and self-refinement, even if

the process may sometimes be undertaken in the collective milieu of a Sufi Order.

In Heart, Self and Soul, Frager makes the following strong assertion about the tyrannical nafs

ammara : “perhaps the worst characteristic of this level is the addiction to praise and adulation,

which in many ways is a more difficult and more dangerous addiction than drugs and alcohol and

is often far more deeply rooted in the psyche” (1999, p. 53). This is clearly a reference to the

Axis II diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is very difficult to treat

psychologically and requires therapeutic interventions from 4 to 5 days a week over an extended

period of time (years).

Regrettably, there is no D.W. Winnicott (1896 – 1971 CE) in the Dar al-Islam to postulate

theories on child development and to write about the baby as a person as he does in The Child,

the Family and the Outside World: “The story of a human being does not start at five years or

two, or at six months, but starts at birth - and before birth if you like; and each baby is from the

start a person, and needs to be known by someone. No one can get to know a baby as well as the

baby’s own mother” (1987, p. 86). Contemporary child psychology and early childhood

education promotes the importance of early childhood mirroring and “good enough” mothering,

which includes love, physical touch, nurturing, and recognition to build self-esteem. In my view,

this can only reinforce the connection with the fitra and promote what contemporary

psychologists would consider healthy attachment.

The work of psychotherapist, Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept comes to mind. She

researched how the Yequana Indians in the jungles of Venezuela raise their children by

maintaining constant physical contact with their infants and children though their entire work

day and through all their social activities. She notes that through this constant contact with the

infant, the energy field of the infant becomes one with the caregiver, and excess energy can be

discharged for both of them by the caregiver’s activities. The infant remains relaxed and free of

accumulating tension, as the child’s extra energy flows into the caregiver. Hence, in observing

the sexual activities of the Yequana Indians in contrast to her fellow citizens who are often

deprived of such early infant contact with the mother, Liedloff makes the following observations

about the relationship between the style of early infant caregiving and sexuality:
 In adulthood, excess energy is similarly concentrated by sexual foreplay and released by
orgasm. Thus the sexual act serves two distinct purposes, the one reproductive, the other as
restorer of a comfortable energy level.

In people whose deprivations have left them to live in a state of tension among the aspects of
their personalities, orgasm often releases only a superficial part of the energy tied up in their
permanently tensed muscles. This incomplete release of the excess energy creates a fairly
chronic state of dissatisfaction which manifests itself in bad temper, nervousness, or
promiscuity.

To make matters worse for the deprived adult, his (or her) need for the physical expressions of
sex is mixed with the need left over from infancy for nonsexual physical contact. In general,
this latter need is not recognized in our society and any wish for contact is construed as
sexual. So the taboos against sex are also applied to all the comforting nonsexual forms of
contact. (1985, p. 153)

What this suggests is that with secure parent-child attachments, it is possible to prevent such

cravings for praise and adulation if the children we raise receive the appropriate level of

nurturance and attention from their prenatal life to the first 5 years of life. This understanding of

the importance of secure parent-child attachments is also corroborated by the work of

neuroscientist, Daniel Siegel. A clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of

Medicine, Siegel observes in his book Mindsight that “securely attached children developed

good bodily regulation, attunement to others, emotional balance, response flexibility, fear

modulation, empathy and insight, and moral awareness (The ninth function, intuition, has not

been studied yet). From the viewpoint of interpersonal neurobiology, this strongly suggests that

secure parent-child interactions promote the growth of the integrative fibers of the middle

prefrontal region of the child’s brain” (2011, p. 170). It is the contention of this researcher that

when children are deprived of such secure and constant attachments the tyrannical nafs begin to

emerge as a result of the formation of a defense mechanism or a subpersonality. Bakhtiar

describes this process as the formation of negative traits: “Negative traits develop through

contact with one’s environment - parents, family, friends, schooling, work and so forth. These
traits are directly related to the way a person lives and thinks and are reinforced by one’s words

and deeds and concealed if negative resulting from the lack of nurturing guidance. Penetrating

through the self, traits become the origin and cause of human actions” (1993, pp. 39-40).

Of course, no one is immune to the powerful forces of primary and secondary narcissism.

Freud, Kohut, and Kernberg all considered narcissism as a stage in normal development. As a

child psychiatrist, Winnicott made a striking observation too about childhood sexuality, which

could again be misconstrued as unhealthy narcissism: “Infants periodically have various kinds of

orgy (not only feeding orgies), and these orgies are natural, and very important to them. Their

excretory processes are particularly exciting to them, and the sexual parts of their bodies even

more so, at appropriate moments, as they grow. It is of course easy to see the boy’s erection, and

difficult to know what the little girl baby feels sexually” (1987, p. 100).

Within the context of this discussion on the lower nafs, I am reminded of two of my first

therapy patients: the first one was a sexualized nine-year-old girl who had experienced sexual

abuse and the second was a six-year-old boy who was referred by his school for stealing. In the

first case, if I had used the concept of the tyrannical nafs to formulate the reasons for the

sexualized behavior, I would have been holding a victim responsible for her symptoms of sexual

abuse. Our therapeutic breakthrough occurred when she made a transference move by seeing me

as the father she never met, while I was washing her hands after completing our finger painting

play therapy. Clearly she had not experienced a healthy attachment in her early childhood with a

caring father figure. Her mother was an alcoholic who was often vagrant, so my client was raised

by her grandmother. What is important for our consideration here is that there are etiological

causes for the formation of the tyrannical nafs, which seem to escape attention in the literature on
the psychology of Sufism. Short of calling it a denial of the etiology, it is surprising indeed that

the formation of the nafs are not given due diligence in traditional Sufi literature.

In the second case, if I had categorized the young boy’s stealing as an expression of the self-

gratification of his nafs ammara, I would have completely missed the fact that my young client

was responding to the recent divorce of his parents. The treatment for this behavior was not a

didactic approach to moralize, berate, or shame him for his theft but the slow unconscious work

of sand tray therapy in which my client was able to work out the forces with which he was

struggling and which were causing him to make a cry for help. Both his divorced parents came in

separately to the outpatient clinic to learn why his behavior was changing. Both parents had the

unique opportunity to join their son on separate occasions to learn how to play with him in sand

tray therapy. His father had never played with his son and did not know how. The therapy was

even more successful when the son offered to teach the father how to play with him. His mother

was so thrilled with the success of sand tray therapy, that she went out and bought him his own

sand tray to play with at home. Underlying these interventions was the need to repair the

relationship between the child and each of his parents. His stealing was a symptom of a loss of

love not a manifestation of greed. From the perspective of Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of

needs, this was a case of an unfulfilled need for safety where a young boy felt abandoned by both

his parents. What it says about the lower nafs is that they can be formed as a result of a denial or

a frustration of an individual’s basic needs. This is particularly true for children, as they are not

in a position to accept personal responsibility for meeting all of their own physiological and

safety needs. Heaven forbid this youngster was not raised in a society where there is no access to

appropriate early therapeutic interventions, and where amputation of a hand is the consequence

for theft, which we will discuss further in the next chapter on shari’a penal codes. Clearly, this
was not a case where a harsh deterrent would have necessarily prevented a theft of a dollar or

two at school.

Different forms of play therapy were successful for both these young children, and in both

cases, it was important not to see their behaviors as inherent in their personalities, or even the

formation of a negative trait, but rather as a result of external environmental factors that caused

neurotic behaviors as defense mechanisms and, without early therapeutic intervention, as

emerging subpersonalities.

Having worked with at risk children for the past decade with a population ranging from 3 to

18 years old, my observation as a mental health clinician, and now as a licensed psychotherapist,

is that most maladaptive behaviors are as a result of a deficit in a positive sense of self, or what

Abraham Maslow categorized in the third edition of Motivation and Personality as the need for

self-esteem: “Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth,

strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary in the world” (1987, p. 21). The

current literature on early childhood education promotes the notion of supporting a positive self-

concept for children. In Who Am I in the Lives of Children? Christensen, Feeney, Moravcik, and

Nolte define self-concept as “perceptions of one’s physical self, social and cognitive qualities,

and competence” (2010, p. 179). Self-concept is highly influenced by the mirroring provided by

significant figures such as family members, peers, and other important adults in the child’s life.

Consistent messages from these figures that they are valued and competent help children to

develop a sense of self-esteem if they are to successfully establish their identities by their early

teens. The lack of encouragement and positive reinforcement from parents at an early age is what

creates conditions for a high need for attention and praise at a later stage of development, as
Frager has mentioned in his remarks about the addiction to praise and adulation. Often the

deprivation of attention becomes the need for attention at any cost, including negative attention.

In Foundations of Early Childhood Education, Janet Gonzalez-Mena cites the pioneering

work of Stanley Coopersmith, The Antecedents of Self-Esteem, in identifying the four dimensions

of self-esteem: (1) virtue, which establishes a moral code; (2) power, which affirms one’s ability

to get needs met and be oneself; (3) significance, which is the feeling of being loved and cared

for; and (4) competence, which drives the ability to be successful in a life domain of one’s

choosing. But she also makes the point that the influence of adults as role models is critical:

“Although there are an increasing number of books and articles on how to raise children’s self-

esteem, some neglect to say how much the degree of adult self-esteem influences that of the

child. Adults with low self-esteem provide poor models for children and set poor examples”

(2008, p. 161).

As Maslow observed in the second edition of Motivation and Personality, in which he

expounds on his theory of the hierarchy of needs, we must hold parents responsible for the

maladaptive behaviors and traits of children who are deprived of their basic physical and

emotional needs:

The central role of the parents and the normal family set up are indisputable. Quarreling,
physical assault, separation divorce, or death within the family may be particularly terrifying.
Also parental outbursts of rage or threats of punishment directed to the child, calling him
names, speaking to him harshly, handling him roughly, or actual physical punishment
sometimes elicit such total panic and terror that we must assume more is involved than the
physical pain alone. While it is true that in some children this terror may represent also a fear
of loss of parental love, it can also occur in completely rejected children, who seem to cling to
the hating parents more for sheer safety and protection than because of a hope of love. (1970,
p. 40)

Taslima Nasrin, the Bengali novelist, provides a glimpse of what she experienced as a child

raised in a Muslim family. This anecdote is not meant to generalize or universalize child-rearing
practices in Dar al-Islam, but one can empathize with Nasrin’s loss of faith after the kind of

violent treatment she describes in her autobiography, Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood:

Now, it seemed, I was not going to be spared in the evenings, either. If I nodded off while
reading from the Koran, or missed a word, Ma would box my ears, punch me in the back, or
give me a tight slap. She was convinced my heart was not in the pursuit of religious studies.
All I could think of was the mundane world - games, music, dance. Ma said clearly I would
have to spend all eternity in hell. (1998, p. 117)

In my role as a wraparound family facilitator for a strengths-based, team-based and needs-

driven, community mental health program, parents have to be continually reminded to focus on

the strengths of their children and to attend to their basic physical and emotional needs, including

the need for physical affection and touch. For the most part, untrained parents with their own

self-esteem issues lack an awareness of who their children really are and what strengths they

have. They are encouraged by all members of the team to find their children doing something

good and to provide recognition and positive verbal reinforcements for positive behaviors. It is

when the child is unseen and underestimated by his or her parents that these children suffer from

low self-esteem and lack self-confidence. In effect, we have to focus on building ego-strengths

for both children and parents, and that requires appreciation, praise and recognition for every

positive change in behavior. In other words, we need to seriously examine the causes of the

various forms of tyrannical nafs ammara, which in the case of children, are so often caused by

the lack of responsible parenting and nurturing, in order to be able to treat them in

psychotherapy. Without early therapeutic intervention, these tyrannical nafs can continue into

adulthood and cause intractable emotional and psychological problems.

The same is true of one of my favorite former clients. He was a foster child aged 5, who was

being adopted by a wonderful caring family. As a lead clinician for the wraparound team, I had

to formulate a treatment plan to address this little boy’s violent tantrums. He was constantly
having tantrums, to the point that he physically attacked his foster Dad. This little boy had been

physically and emotionally neglected and abused as a child and had survived a string of foster

placements until he was placed in our community mental health program. His tantrums and his

hoarding behaviors were based on the lack of nurturing as an infant and child, and not because of

his nafs ammara, which may well have been exacerbated by irresponsible and negligent

parenting. His treatment plan included loving and safe nurturing by his foster-adopt parents and

the implementation of a token economy for all the good things he did every day. It was a tangible

way for him to earn praise, appreciation, and recognition. Gradually, over time, the hoarding and

tantrums stopped and the fitra of this abused child shone through like a brilliant star as he

advanced along the spectrum of the nafs ammara.

As of yet, in Dar al-Islam, there is no Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952 CE), the renowned

Italian pediatrician who founded the Montessori system of childhood education. In Theories of

Childhood, Carol Garhart Mooney reports that because Montessori was the first Italian woman to

graduate as a doctor of medicine, she was initially restricted to treating patients in insane

asylums. As a pediatrician, Montessori, later in her career, identified the importance of adults

and the educational environment for success in children’s education: “She was a brilliant woman

and an astute observer. Soon, she determined that the problems existed not in the children, but in

the adults, in their approaches and in the environments provided” (2000, p. 22). In Dar al-Islam,

there is as yet no Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980 CE) renowned in the field for his theory of cognitive

development (although Muslim thinkers have written extensively on cognition) or a psychosocial

theorist like Erik Erikson (1902 - 1994 CE) to postulate a developmental psychology even

though the Qur’an clearly states in Q 71:14 “He has created you by various stages.” The

translators of the Qur’an use various terms such as “diverse stages” and “successive stages.” This
verse has traditionally been interpreted as the fetal stages of the human embryo, but clearly there

is room for an interpretation of psychological evolution and life span development, especially

since the subsequent verse uses the simile of the creation of the seven heavens, one atop another.

The various phases of spiritual development have been discussed at length in the literature

review, and will be examined further in chapter 9, on the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of

wine.

In Ethics and Spiritual Growth, Musawi Lari from Qom, Iran writes three pages on the

development of personality in Islamic thought, observing the development of the individual as

one who grows and develops with every movement that it makes:

During the childhood years, the field of imagination is expansive, but the intellect is weak and
closer to the world of the senses than to the world of the spirit. However, gradually there is a
movement from the simple to the complex as he undertakes bigger tasks. Imagination then
mingles with facts and draws closer to thought and intellection. As a result of this movement,
his maturity and constructive abilities constantly increase. (Musawi, p. 1997, p. 96)

Musawi Lari asserts that Islam’s intention is to develop an integrated personality which

optimizes its fullest potential on the physical and spiritual planes, while seeking overall balance

and equilibrium. But from the lack of any attention in his work to the importance of parenting a

child from its prenatal life through adolescence, it would appear that this aspect of spiritual

growth and moral development is not considered significantly foundational to the development

and growth of the personality. For Musawi Lari, faith and intellect alone suffice for the

development of personality. Perhaps, responsible and effective parenting is a given in the Islamic

way of life because of a strong attachment to family values, but clearly there are individuals in

the security forces in Iran who are willing to kill unarmed civilians; there are homosexuals who

are tortured and killed; and there are women who are raped, then accused of adultery and stoned

to death in public. Islam, as a faith, clearly cannot be held responsible for human
psychopathology, but what Dar al-Islam can and must do is to develop an understanding of

emotional and psychological disorders which is not limited to religious and spiritual praxis for its

diagnosis and treatment. However, any such effort may be impeded by the lack of a well-

developed regime for the human and civil rights of the individual. Surely, a psychology of self

without a sense of self or personhood can only make for emotional fusion within an

undifferentiated family ego mass, as Murray Bowen (1913 - 1990 CE), the renowned family

therapist, suggested in Family Therapy in Clinical Practice:

According to the family theory, children grow up to achieve varying levels of differentiations
of self from the undifferentiated family ego mass. Some achieve almost complete
differentiation of self and become clearly defined individuals with well-defined ego-
boundaries. This is equivalent to our concept of the mature person. These individuals are
contained emotional units. Once differentiated from their parental families, they can be
emotionally close to members of their own families or to any person without fusing into new
emotional oneness. (2004, p. 108)

Granted that there is a Euro-American culture-bound assumption about the development of

the mature person in Bowen’s thinking, but the point which needs our consideration about the

Sufi system of tyrannical nafs and the regretful nafs is that the individual is a part of a family

system and that early childhood experiences caused both by deficient parenting and even

overindulgence by parents and caregivers can have a profound impact on the psychology of the

personality and the formation of character. Having worked with at risk youth on probation, it is

clear that most of them do not have a responsible adult to mentor and guide them. Hence, when

they end up in the Juvenile detention system, there is little or no remorse for their violations.

Even with attempts at counseling and therapy, to support the adolescent to move to the stage of

the regretful nafs often requires punitive consequences such as detention or referrals to boot

camp. Many of these children have cognitive impairments that preclude good judgment and
insight. Others have untreated mental illnesses, many of them organic in nature, that present on

the surface as unconstrained, aggressive and impulsive behaviors.

We can no longer discount the discoveries of neuroscience. Although all humans struggle

with the tyrannical nafs which present as primary and secondary narcissism, it is also clear that

various neurobiological disorders can not only exacerbate our nafs, but in certain cases the

disorder can make it impossible to work through these nafs. This is the case with classic autism,

in which a person treats another person as an object because of a lack of empathy. These

individuals with the lowest levels of empathy quotient, which Simon Baron-Cohen, the Director

of Autism Research Center at Cambridge University has described in The Science of Evil as

“Zero-Positive,” do not cause harm. In contrast the “Zero-Negative” individuals, such as

aggressive teenagers and others who actually enjoy seeing other people suffer and experience no

fear or remorse, also show “lots of evidence of abnormalities in the empathy circuitry” (2011, p.

84). The research in neuroscience is also showing that the inability to self-regulate aggression

can be caused by abnormalities in our neuro-circuitry:

So reactive aggression could be overreactive because your amygdala is overactive (e.g.,

because of depression and anxiety, or due to prolonged exposure to early stress, or for
genetic reasons) and/or if your prefrontal cortex is underactive (such that a person cannot
inhibit reactive aggression). Once again, we see that abnormalities in key regions in the
empathy circuit can produce reduced or even zero degrees of empathy. (p. 86)
Baron-Cohen makes a very sound case for the proposition that all of us “lie somewhere on an

empathy spectrum from high to low” (p. 148) and the challenge for his profession is to determine

where an individual falls on this spectrum based on an array of genetic, hormonal, neural, and

environmental factors. So what may appear as primary or secondary narcissism may in fact have

to do with where one is on the empathy spectrum.

Recently a teenage girl on juvenile probation and her mother were unaware that her

impulsivity, distractibility, procrastination, school truancy, and even reckless sexual promiscuity
were caused by neurological symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Her father

was incarcerated and there had been lapses in responsible parenting and depressive symptoms

caused by grief at the loss of her father and possible sexual abuse by her mother’s boyfriend. She

was also unaware that the attraction to alcohol and cannabis were a result of the need to self-

medicate to manage some of these symptoms. All of the above behaviors could easily have been

ascribed purely to the narcissistic presentation of her tyrannical nafs, despite the fact that she

came from a well-regarded caring family in the local community. Clearly, without understanding

the etiology of these symptoms and how to manage them pharmacologically and through EMDR

therapy, she would still be struggling with the darkest forces of her primary and secondary

narcissism. She certainly would have fallen very low on the empathy scale. She was able to turn

her life around when her mother gave up her relationship with her boyfriend and focused her

attention singularly on her two daughters. Our client’s fitra was retrieved when she started to

volunteer at the animal shelter and was allowed by her Mom to have a puppy. Her subsequent

sobriety helped her to become a straight “A” student. I would not have called this struggling

against or overcoming her tyrannical nafs or her regretful nafs. That work was done in

psychotherapy and in writing a new narrative about her life. But in all these pharmacological and

psychological interventions, coupled with her engagement in community activities at the animal

shelter and playing on a soccer team, as Roberto Assagioli would have recommended, there was

an embrace of her nafs, which had clearly not been in her conscious awareness and then a

gradual dis-identification. Hence these were shadow aspects that had to come to consciousness

through niyyah (intention) and ‘aql (intellect).

The work of managing these symptoms would not have been successful if she had been

cajoled by her parents or a member of the clergy to heed the call of jihad against her lower nafs.
The language of jihad itself results in a psychology of being at war with one’s self, which can

only exacerbate one’s neurotic symptoms. Even if the softer language of “struggle” against the

lower nafs is used, it sets up a split between and amongst the multiplicity of selves within the

individual. This splitting may well be a violation of the concept of oneness, tawhid, within the

context of the integral nature of the individual. This kind of psychological split would explain

how a Sufi Sheikh of the Nimatullahi order declined an invitation extended to him in Northern

California to attend Sufi dances, known as the dances of Universal Peace. These were dances

that were designed by the Ruhaniyyat order of Sufism to connect us to our hearts and to each

other. He was convinced that this was just a dance circle to foster sensuality and sexuality and

had nothing to do with Sufism.

The whole question of embracing the shadow as opposed to struggling with her negative traits

would only have reinforced her already damaged self-esteem as a teenager failing in many life

domains, which were all impacted by an untreated, mismanaged neurobiological disorder and

psychological disorder caused by her family constellation. Renowned Jungian psychoanalyst,

Robert Johnson, in his book, Owning Your Own Shadow, reminds us of C. G. Jung’s

conceptualization of the shadow: “This is one of Jung’s greatest insights: that the ego and the

shadow come from the same source and exactly balance each other. To make light is to make

shadow; one cannot exist without the other” (1993, p. 17). Whether one agrees with Jung and

Johnson or not, what is instructive here is the attitude with which we hold our negative traits and

symptoms. They were formed and internalized over time in response to external stimuli in utero,

since birth and early childhood as a defense mechanism. We can be compassionate with

ourselves for using whatever responses we had at our disposal but more importantly we need not

go to battle with ourselves over our prenatal psychology and family heritage.
 Hypocrisy is one of the ten attributes of the nafs ammara identified by Nurbakhsh. From the

perspective of Psychosynthesis and the theory of sub-personalities proposed by Assagioli, the

notion that one is being hypocritical would be regarded as a lack of integration and congruence

of the sub-personalities. Hence the word hypocrisy is not a useful term from a psychological

perspective because this tends to ossify the structures of the personality rather than to liberate it

from its misalignments and incongruence of the subpersonalities.

Assagioli used the term dis-identification to describe the process by which we can reduce the

identification or over-identification with any particular subpersonality. As a drug-taking, alcohol-

drinking, caffeine and nicotine consuming Muslim, I could well have been charged with

hypocrisy for performing my prayers and meditation while engaging in a host of self-destructive

behaviors. What was needed was a re-alignment and dis-identification of my conscientious

extraverted subpersonality which relied on these habits to connect with others so that I could

learn how to network socially without the crutch of intoxicants and stimulants. No amount of

lecturing from my mother and others was effective in making this transformation. I quit smoking

cigarettes at least three times, and always talked about minimizing my alcohol and cannabis

consumption. But for this transformation to finally occur, I needed the power of intention to shift

my subpersonality system internally and the exercise of will to find alternative ways to cultivate

my social network and at the same time manage my symptoms of ADHD. Of course, that

intention shifted the kinds of individuals with whom I sought to network, but it did not stop me

from going to a bar or a dance hall. I no longer had to resort to drinking alcohol to network with

others who needed my old crutches, but I was able to empathize with them for responsibly

managing their anxiety with socially acceptable coping skills.

 The embrace of the shadow is not the language of the Sufis. In The Psychology of Sufism,

Nurbakhsh urges resistance and combat of the nafs although, as Frager points out, “Sheikh

Nurbakhsh, who is also a psychiatrist, makes the important point that the tyrannical nafs should

never be destroyed; it is to be transformed into good qualities and actions. To destroy the

tyrannical self is to destroy ourselves” (1992, pp. 61-62). Yet Nurbakhsh also identifies the nafs

as an expression of Divine Wrath: “From the Sufi point of view, Satan is none other than the

amalgam of the attributes of the nafs which arise from the realm of Wrath. In other words, Satan

is the manifestation of God’s Wrath” (1992, p. 35).

It is this tension between the lower nafs and the essential self, fitra, which may explain the

split between body and soul, as well as between the feminine and masculine in many quarters of

Dar al-Islam. For many Muslim traditional jurists, the body was a source of impurity. Some

would say that any form of personal auto-erotic sexual stimulation was impure. Clinical social

worker and research associate at the University of Michigan, Amal Killawi asserts in an essay on

sexuality and sexual dysfunctions, for a new text on Counseling Muslims: Handbook of Mental

Health Issues and Interventions, edited by Ahmed and Amer, that

historically, individual masturbation has been strongly discouraged and constituted by most
Islamic scholars as a transgression of God’s boundaries for sex. Other scholars allowed it
with some conditions: that individuals are unmarried and fear that they will have sex if they
do not masturbate, and that it is releasing sexual tension rather than fulfilling sexual desire.
(2012, p. 338)

In certain cultures in Dar al-Islam, physical touch or eye contact between a man and a woman

are prohibited in public. Women have also been held responsible for fanning the flames of

desire: hence the call for gender segregation in order to proactively neutralize our sexual nafs.

In Sexuality in Islam, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, professor of Islamic sociology at the University

of Tunis, laments the status of gender relations, specifically in Arabo-Muslim society, as he

explicates the various categories of zina (fornication and adultery) which can include hearing the

harmonious voice of a woman or admiring a woman from a distance:

Yet, in a sense does not the whole Arabo-Muslim society suffer more or less consciously from
a ‘blindness’ imposed by the law of the inexorable separation of the sexes? After all, in
practice, a good half of society spends its time hiding itself from the other half, while trying to
imagine it or surprise it! Voyeurism is a refuge and a compensation. Arabic poetry became a
hymn to the eyes and a symphony of the gaze. Love may be born from a description, a
portrait. Fantasy and reality overstimulated one another. Can one ever become blind to others?

Thus rigid, hermetic frontiers define femininity and masculinity by laying down strict rules
governing status and role. It might be well expected that any ambiguity on the matter would
have disappeared from Muslim society. However, that would be to ignore human reality.
Moreover, there is a great problem of “travesty” in Arabo-Muslim life. The masculine woman
and the effeminate man are accursed. (2004, pp. 39-40)

This may well explain the absence of a well-formulated psychology of the self. If every

physiological aspect of the self is to be disciplined by fasting and abstinence, for example, or by

social regulation, why would a Muslim male want to understand how a woman functions at the

physical, mental, and emotional levels, especially if wives are merely considered as property

(tilth) based on current patriarchal interpretations of Q 2:222-223? Asma Barlas, Director of the

Center for the study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, reflects on these two

verses in her incisive analysis, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal

Interpretations of the Qur’an and confirms this widely held attitude of male gender domination

in Dar al-Islam: “From these Ayat many Muslims infer that a wife is her husband’s sexual

property and that he has the right to have sex with her as and when he pleases (without her

consent). They also take the reference to menstruation to mean that women themselves are

unclean” (2002, p. 161). Women have long been oppressed for their natural menstrual cycles, as

a source of impurity and a curse. Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes in her autobiography, Infidel: “When we

were menstruating, we weren’t allowed even to pray or to touch the Qur’an. All the girls felt

guilty for bleeding every month. It was proof that we were less worthy than men” (2008, p. 112).
If the premise was that the natural cycle of the body is the source of one’s spiritual degeneration,

why ever pay attention to the way the female human brain functions?

In stark contrast to these pre-modern and even modern paradigms of sexuality in Dar al-

Islam, Lionel Corbett’s essay “Seduction, Psychotherapy, and the Alchemical Glutinum Mundi”

in an anthology on the Alchemy of Desire titled Fire in the Stone, captures the spirit of an

embrace of the shadow with a depth psychological perspective of our tyrannical nafs as they

relate to sexual desire:

Overtly sexual relationships are often being driven by something deeper, more fundamental.
This is to do with the need to be held together as a cohesive personality, so that we do not
easily fall apart with unbearable anxiety and depression, so that we can maintain reasonable
self-esteem, and so that we can withstand the usual fluctuations of life’s successes and failures
with reasonable equanimity, without excessive inflation or despair. I believe that the elusive
bonding agent which is required here is what the alchemists referred to as the glutinum mundi.
Where I am definitely Jungian, here, is my belief that this mysterious compound is a
“secretion” of the Self. It is secreted maximally between people; the Self influences the field
in which we live, as it were “magnetically” drawing people to us to provide certain
experiences. This glue is an important component of the attraction which we have for others
and which they have for us. In therapy, when the Self is constellated within the therapeutic
relationship, the glue flows freely. This glue is, I believe, the psychological matrix which
allows the coniunctio to develop. (Corbett & Marlan, Ed., 1997, p, 127)

The one system of integral psychology which begins to address these deeper psychological

structures in the formation of the nafs is the one offered by Hameed Ali in his interpretation of

the Enneagram, which was first introduced to California by Chilean psychiatrist Claudio

Naranjo, as discussed in the literature review. What distinguishes Hameed Ali’s interpretation is

his focus on the Enneagram as a system of becoming conscious of the nine different types of

egoic delusions which obscure the nine holy ideas comprising nine facets of unity. We can take

this to mean a reconnection with the primordial essence, which Ali also calls Living Daylight:

“We call it this because if one’s perception is subtle enough to visually see the substance of

one’s consciousness, it actually looks like daylight, and it is felt as an alive consciousness. It is
experienced as something that everything is made of. It is a universal sense of presence in that it

pervades everything and is everywhere” (Almaas, 2002, p. 33). Even so, in Facets of Unity: The

Enneagram of Holy Ideas, Ali, still writing as A. H. Almaas, does not ignore the importance of

the holding environment, an object relations term used by Winnicott to explain the importance of

a safe and good holding environment in infancy in order to develop a sense of basic trust: ‘The

holding becomes integrated into the depths of consciousness, and the result is a sense of basic

trust in reality. The child’s sense of basic trust will begin in relationship to mother and the

holding environment, and will extend to the world and the whole universe. This will allow the

child to grow and develop to its full potential” (p. 41). He then fully elaborates how deficiencies

in the holding environment result in the formation of these delusions. He does not call them the

lower nafs and never uses this Sufi terminology:

The Enneagram maps the various ways the ego develops to deal with the absence, disruptions,
ruptures, and discontinuities of holding. The reaction for Point One is to try to make the
holding happen by improving oneself. For Point Two, it is to deny the need for holding, but,
nonetheless, be manipulating and seducing the environment to provide it. For Point Three, it
is to deny the need for it but pretend to oneself, “I can do it on my own. I know how reality
can be and how I’m going to develop and I’ll make it happen.” For Point Four, the loss or
absence of holding is counteracted by denying that there is a disconnection from Being, while
at the same time trying to make the environment be holding through attempting to control it
and oneself. For Point Five, the reaction is to not deal with the actual sense of loss and not
feel the impingement directly through withdrawing and isolating oneself, avoiding the whole
situation. For Point Six, the strategy is to be more in touch with the fear and distrust, being
defensive and paranoid about the environment. For Point Seven, it is by planning how to
make it good, and fantasizing what it will feel like, rather than feeling the pain of the loss of
holding. For Point Eight, it is to get angry about the loss of holding and to fight the
environment to get it back, to try to get justice, and to get revenge for the hurt. For Point Nine,
the reaction is to smooth the whole thing over and act as though everything is fine, living
one’s life in a mechanical and dead way. This is how the nine ennea-types develop: out of
reaction to the loss of basic trust. (pp. 44-45)

Out of these deficiencies in holding, Ali posits the development of a real self, which he

considers as the essential self, and a false self which is egoic: “The more we are identified with

the false self, the personality, the more we are identified with the absence of basic trust. In order
to develop basic trust, and consequently more contact and identification with Being, we need to

experience the lack of holding imprinted on our souls” (Almaas, 2002, p. 45). This is a depth

psychological approach which requires that we fully acknowledge the wounding, which does not

contradict Assagioli’s concept of dis-identification from the subpersonalities. In psychosynthesis,

the appropriate approach is to first bring the subpersonality to consciousness before the process

of dis-identification occurs.

Emulation: Taqlid

The concept of taqlid refers to the emulation of the moral conduct and behaviors of the

Prophets, Imams, saints, and witnesses of the faith of Islam, since these figures such as

Muhammad and Jesus, Mary and Khadija, ‘Ali and Rabi’a, all represent the concept of the

perfection of humanity, the insan al-kamil. Hence the importance of the sunna for the Sunni

tradition of Islam. Within the context of a transpersonal psychology such as Assagioli’s

psychosynthesis, these figures represent the External Unifying Center which acts to integrate the

subpersonalities of the nafs. Malik Badri endorses this general principle in his work

Contemplation: An Islamic Psychospiritual Study:

In the same way that bad example is a great handicap, good example and companionship
make one of the most important factors affecting the profundity of the believer’s
contemplation. It is for this reason that a disciple or murid can benefit from his association
and identification with a worshipper who has reached the level of the tranquil soul (al-nafs al-
mutma’innah) in the person of his spiritual master (shaykh). Indeed, the spiritual influence of
the companionship of a sage can dramatically change the worldview of his disciple and
increase his Islamic meditative ability. (2007, p. 85)

This is a principle that is exemplified in the exoteric tradition by following the guidance from

all the verses relating to the prophets in the Qur’an, from Adam to Jesus, and the prophetic

traditions and sayings of the Prophet of Islam. The shadow dimension of emulation is that it can
obscure the authenticity of religious experience by the formation of an obedient religious

subpersonality that is willing to kill in the name of Islam. This is in stark contrast to a disciple

who learns to emulate the exemplary behaviors of a spiritual teacher or guide. In Slave of Allah,

Katherine Donahue’s brilliant anthropological analysis of Zacarias Moussaoui, the terrorist

defendant who was thought to be the twentieth hijacker involved in 9/11, she examines the

notion of unconditional obedience by being a servant or slave of God, ‘abd Allah, which was one

of the multiple names he gave himself. ‘Abd Allah is a distorted expression of the principle of

submission in Islam because it stands the risk of becoming an issue of religious identity and not

religious experience. This self-confessed terrorist was not about to submit to the American legal

system of justice: “Yet Moussaoui was willing to submit to Osama Bin Laden, and in particular

Allah. This submission is an important part of his identity” (2007, p. 51). When one emulates the

exemplary behaviors of an insan al-kamil, the figure acts as an external unifying center for the

integration of personality. But when one follows the commands of a religious figure without

question, the figure acts only as a reinforcement of a religious subpersonality, and hence any

potential integration of the personality is disrupted. As Donahue correctly notes, what attracted

Moussaoui to his faith was the armor of a religious identity underwritten by a sense of belonging,

mission and purpose: “Moussaoui turned to Islamic fundamentalism because it offered more than

insurance against unemployment. It offered a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a

mission. It offered an Islam without borders” (p. 137). It is sad but true that taqlid has also

created conflicts between Muslims as we have seen with the Taliban in Afghanistan and

Pakistan. They are convinced that their emulation of the prophetic example is without

compromise, and they have been prepared to kill men and women for violating their rigid and

extreme interpretation of the Prophet’s sunna.

Stewardship, personal responsibility: Khalifa

The connotation of the term khalifa has often been restricted to the religious and political

succession to the Prophet of Islam. Hence we find the notion of Caliph. But in actual fact, the

word itself means vice-gerent or deputy of Allah. However, the essential aspect of this vice-

gerency and deputization is the principle of stewardship of Allah’s creation, which requires

personal responsibility. Humankind is considered in Islam as the crown of Allah’s creation, not

least because of the presence of the fitra in its highest expression as the Transpersonal Self.

Hence the notion of fitra has far-reaching consequences for the responsibility of stewardship of

the planet and all of the species in Creation. Obviously, with the advent of space travel, that

stewardship extends beyond Planet Earth. But there is also clearly the inner meaning of

stewardship, and that is the responsibility for seeing the presence of fitra in all things. This then

becomes part of understanding the architecture of the unity of Being. Ibn ‘Arabi has referred to

this unity of being as the wahdat al-wajud.

It is also my hypothesis that khalifa, from an esoteric perspective, also speaks to the

responsibility of stewardship of our imaginal fields. Hence, we are also responsible for setting

the boundaries for the exploration of our inner and outer imaginal fields such as self-censoring

for pornography or disengaging from sociopathic activities like ecocide and harm to self and

others.

The shadow dimension of khalifa is the need for power and control over fellow humans, other

species, and the environment, all of which can lead to mass exploitation and political oppression,

as we are witnessing around the planet. But one cannot ignore that these tendencies for power

and control evolve as a result of ineffective parenting or as a result of a loss of a sense of

belonging. Children who are raised by absent parents and family members are ripe for gang

recruitment. It is here that they find a sense of family and belonging. It is also here that their

survival depends on power and control.

Imagination of the Mind: Khayal

Khayal represents the world of imagination. The human project seems futile if there is no

place for the faculty of imagination. Whether it is represented in the dreams and fantasies of our

children and young adults or whether it is represented in the ambitions and aspirations of our

leaders and thinkers, writers, artists and engineers, imagination is the key to our future and our

survival as a species.

Imagination is a faculty that appears early in infancy. Psychologist and philosopher, Alison

Gopnik, mind-bending author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about

Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life has conducted research to show that imagination has

organic implications and is often more accessible to babies than to adults:

Babies’ brains seem to have special qualities that make them especially well suited for
imagination and learning. Babies’ brains are actually more highly connected than adult brains;
more neural pathways are available to babies than adults. As we grow older and experience
more, our brains “prune out” the weaker, less used pathways and strengthen the ones that that
are used more often. If you looked at a map of the baby’s brain it would look like old Paris,
with lots of winding, interconnected little streets. In the adult brain those little streets have
been replaced by fewer but more efficient neural boulevards, capable of much more traffic.
Young brains are also much more plastic and flexible - they change much more easily. But
they are much less efficient; they don’t work as quickly or as effectively. (2009, pp. 11-12)

As we have been reminded in the biblical teachings, where there is no vision, the people will

perish. To imagine a psychology of the self without the faculty of khayal is to reduce the

potentiality of human being-ness to a strictly material physical organic existence and yet,

imagination relies for its existence, on the neural activity of the brain. Clearly, imagination of the
mind has a role to play in all aspects of human behavior and conduct, ingenuity and creativity. In

Islam, the ability to read the signs of Allah in creation, symbolized by the ayats of the Qur’an,

requires imagination. How we imagine God, our imago Dei, takes khayal. To undertake a

hermeneutics of the Qur’an, the dreams, voices and whispers of Allah, the Creator, takes khayal.

In working at the psychological level, we invite our clients and patients to dream of what could

be or how things could be different. It takes khayal to re-invent ourselves. It takes khayal to

achieve recovery from addictions.

The shadow dimension of khayal is the potential for distorted imagination, xenophobic

paranoia and illusions such as the resurrection of the Caliphate in Islam and delusions of

grandeur that lead to nightmares such as 9/11 and the political and religious dictatorship of

messianic figures who envision only one way of living to the exclusion of all other possibilities

and alternative lifestyles. The distorted dimension of khayal can also perpetuate the myth of the

superiority of one religious faith over another tradition, or one interpretation of Islam as the only

correct representation of the Truth.

Imagination of the Heart: Himma

All the dreams and imagination in the world are of little consequence to the individual if

there is no aptitude or faculty to manifest or materialize them. Himma is the term used to

describe resolve and concentration, the imagination of the heart, qalb, needed to bring khayal to

creative fruition. Psychologically, himma can take the form of symbols, metaphors or

affirmations. In this work, the Gardens of Paradise serve as a himma, the symbol or metaphor

which drives the formulation of an Integral Psychology of Islam. It connects the world of

imagination to the world of creative manifestation. In the context of community mental health,

we ask our clients to create a mission statement or a symbol which anchors the family’s vision

for itself. Himma calls for an embodiment of the imagination in order to ground it from the level

of fantasy. It is himma that inspires the pilgrim to undertake the umra (the lesser pilgrimage) or

the hajj (the annual pilgrimage that Muslims aspire to attend at least once in their lives) to

ground the reality of the single soul of the human community. It becomes challenging to embody

anything if we have already established a delusional chasm between the body and the mind or the

spirit. The related concept of qalb as the spiritual and immaculate heart will be discussed in

chapter 9 in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of wine.

The shadow dimension of himma is lack of courage, pessimism, and concrete, black-and-

white thinking about rules and regulations to order society and the human experience. In this

case, we act out a belief or creedal system which we have been conditioned to accept from

childhood without ever questioning its validity or relevance.

Intention: Niyyah

It was in the graduate program in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica that

I fully discovered the power of intention (niyyah). In my view, the power of intention is deeply

rooted in a connection to that dimension of fitra that expresses our entelechy. It is the acorn to

oak tree theory which Hillman used to symbolize the teleological dimension of the self. In Islam,

the trajectory of any action is entirely dependent on its niyyah. According to the Qur’anic ethos,

this is how our deeds and actions will be assessed on the Day of Resurrection. Laleh Bakhtiar’s

presentation and commentary of Al-Ghazzali’s traditional psychology in Al-Ghazzali: His

Psychology of the Greater Struggle asserts that for this Muslim philosopher and sage, “Intention

needs to precede every act in order to have possible spiritual rewards” (Bakhtiar & Shazzoli,

2002, p. 103). Is the intention of the purposeful action for the benefit of the highest good or does

it consider the highest ethical practice? At the same time, niyyah is often the germination of

khayal because we often do not see the big picture. The oak tree is often not seen as within the

reach of the acorn. Sometimes niyyah is the first step of himma.

When working with at risk youth, we always invite our clients to identify their needs in

contrast to their wants. Very often, it is when they recognize a particular need that an intention

comes into view. The most gratifying moment is to review the clients’ treatment plan and to

discover after 6 months that somehow once the need was identified and the intention clarified,

the niyyah was executed with grace and ease. This may explain why the niyyah is so deeply

rooted in the entelechy of the fitra.

The shadow dimension of niyyah is the disavowal of human agency and the abdication of the

human creative impulse. But it is also true that the lack of motivation can result from depressive
symptoms that have as much to do with challenging family dynamics to organic causes that

deplete physical energy and the desire to thrive and flourish.

Personal Will: Iradah

In Islam, iradah is cultivated through the act of fasting for 30 days during the month of

Ramadan. Psychologically, this process is about the development of the executive function. It is

the kind of rigorous training that is provided in the military with physical drills and exercises that

build stamina and endurance. Unfortunately, this is the function that is the least well developed

in our at risk youth. The ability to complete a project and to endure the rigors of the journey is

essential to the formation of strong and noble character. It is how responsibility is developed.

The power of personal will (iradah) is described by Assagioli (1974) in The Act of Will. As

was mentioned in the literature review, Assagioli breaks down the different aspects of the will

into (1) the strong will, (2) the skillful will, (3) the good will and (4) the Transpersonal will.

Strength is only one aspect of will, and when dissociated from the others, it can often be

ineffectual and even harmful to oneself and others. The cultivation of a “good will” fosters the

most virtuous or benign actions. Assagioli speaks to the importance of the Transpersonal Will

which is the will of the Transpersonal Self.

Molly Young Brown, who studied with Assagioli, defines the Transpersonal Self in her book

The Unfolding Self as “the source of identity and will that unites the individual and the universal”

(2004, p. 212). As the primordial essence, the fitra is the door to the Transpersonal Self. Brown

also defines the Transpersonal Will as “The will of Self - a unifying, synergistic force that brings

the individual’s life into harmony with universal principles” (p. 212). There is a relationship

between the personal will of the essential self or fitra, and the will of the Transpersonal Self. In
Islam, the Transpersonal Will is self-disclosed in the Qur’an. When alignment is spontaneously

experienced between the personal will and the Transpersonal Will, then Muslims of all

persuasions think of this as being on the Straight Path.

Assagioli also examined the various qualities of the will:

1. Energy – Dynamic Power – Intensity

2. Mastery – Control – Discipline
3. Concentration – One-Pointedness – Attention – Focus
4. Determination – Decisiveness – Resoluteness – Promptness
5. Persistence – Endurance – Patience
6. Initiative – Courage – Daring
7. Organization – Integration – Synthesis

The shadow dimension of iradah is manipulation and connivance as well as holding others

completely accountable for our own failure to thrive. But it is also true that a lack of skill sets

and knowledge about how to achieve one’s dreams can result in a poorly developed personal

will. It is impossible to craft a nice piece of furniture, no matter how fertile our imaginations and

how noble our intentions, if we don’t have the necessary skills and tools to do the woodwork and

to put all the pieces together. The challenge for children with maladaptive behaviors is the

impatience they have around learning new skill sets and to be consistently practicing these skills.

They need a mentor or coach to emulate (taqlid). Without a caring role model to inspire and

motivate our youth, even dormant skills and natural talents can remain undiscovered and

foreclose any hope of self-actualization.

The shadow dimension of the concept of iradah from the perspective of a woman who is

expected to follow a misogynistic interpretation of Islam is well articulated by Hirsi Ali in

Infidel: “If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In

Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women,

never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the world islam:
submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside

your mind” (2008, p. 94). Hirsi Ali’s iradah as well as himma were both activated in defying her

oppression and challenging her oppressors as a Muslim woman. Despite her own apostasy, her

noble intention, niyyah, is to continue to minister to Muslim women and to bring their oppression

and victimhood to consciousness.

It is important to note that Assagioli’s conception of personal will is distinct from the notion

of free will intimated by Yasien Mohamed in Fitrah: The Islamic Concept of Human Nature.

Mohamed does not provide a complete picture of the personal will or free will: “The concept of

fitrah, on the other hand, posits a model of man with free-will; ‘aql and iradah are God-given

components of man’s phenomenal constitution and enable him to make conscious decisions and

to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, and make decisions, for which he is both

responsible and accountable” (1996, p. 159). From the perspective of depth psychology,

Mohamed’s concept of free will does not consider the power of the unconscious to inspire or

thwart whatever conscious motivations we think we may have. Neither can we will our self into

an understanding of the ontological reality.

In contrast, Assagioli’s model of psychosynthesis is based on the influence of the higher and

lower unconscious on the development of the self, so he is very careful to note: “From a certain

point of view, the activity in the unconscious can be said to go on spontaneously from our point

of view, and without our conscious co-operation” (1974, p. 59). The moment we begin to assert a

notion of free will, we call into question all the other psychological factors, including the

unconscious, which impact our capacity to freely make choices and decisions. There is no

question that every moment of choice has its own consequence and we must accept some

responsibility for these choices. But we also have to accept that even our perception of these
choices is limited by our level of awareness. It is no exaggeration to say that as part of my

clinical observations, most at risk youth actually are not consciously aware of or have not

consciously considered the alternative choices that are available to them. Hence, the

development of the intellect has as much to do with the kinds of choices we make and that

capacity cannot ignore the fact of the neuro-biological development of the brain.

Intellect: ‘Aql

The faculty of intellection and information-processing in Islam, ‘aql is not limited to the

scope of merely rational thought although clearly higher and more complex levels of cognitive

functioning and even abstraction are needed to grasp not only the nature of external realities

through science but also the more elevated interior states of the nafs through our spiritual

evolution. The faculty of intellection includes the capacity for discernment and ethical praxis in

one’s conduct both in interpersonal and interspecies relationships and also in terms of

functioning effectively and appropriately in the collective environment within one’s own

tradition or within the diversity and pluralism of the globalizing world we now live in.

From the perspective of neurobiology, our faculty of intellection is limited, incapacitated or

elevated by our ability to self-regulate emotion. Daniel J. Siegel examines this dynamic in The

Developing Mind:

If emotions influence the flow of states of mind that dominate so many of our mental
processes, how do we keep them in some form of balance? The mind’s ability to regulate
emotional processes is essentially the ability of the brain to modulate the flow of arousal and
activation throughout its circuits. Primary emotional processes, categorical emotions,
affective expression, and mood can each be regulated by the brain. “Emotion regulation”
refers to the general ability of the mind to alter the various components of emotional
processing. The self-organization of the mind in many ways is determined by the self-
regulation of emotional states. How we experience the world, relate to others, and find
meaning in life are dependent upon how we have come to regulate our emotions.” (1999, p.
245)
 Clearly, the idea that we have the capacity to make rational life affirming decisions using our

intellect has to be considered within the wider context of the development and integration of our

brain. The brain is fully developed at about the age of 26 years. A teenager under the influence of

an illicit substance may not be able to make a rational decision, but the highly educated

Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, and William Jefferson Clinton, former President of the Unites

States, can also have difficulty making rational decisions, even when sober. Why is that? Siegel

takes his research a step further in Mindsight by looking at the relationship between the right and

left hemisphere of the brain:

For millions of years, our left brain and right brain have had separate but complementary
functions. The right side develops early and is the realm of imagery, holistic thinking,
nonverbal language, autobiographical memory, and a host of other processes. Our left brain
develops later in life and is responsible for logic, spoken and written language, linearity, lists,
and literal thinking. If the linkage between the sides is blocked, one side may dominate, and
we can lose the creativity, richness, and complexity that results from both sides working
together. Harnessing the power of neuroplasticity to integrate the brain can give us a newly
coherent sense of our life story and deeper insights into the nonverbal world of ourselves and
others. (2011, p. 72).

On the other hand, Alison Gopnik reminds us in The Philosophical Baby that consciousness

and the capacity for awareness is with us from infancy. In examining the nature of consciousness

and attention, Gopnik makes the distinction between the awareness of babies and adults: “Babies

also seem less subject to certain kinds of unconsciousness than we are. Less of their experience

is familiar, expert, and automatic, and so they have fewer habituated unconscious behaviors.

While they inhibit distractions less well, more of the field of consciousness will be available to

them. This also suggests that they are more conscious than we are” (2009, p. 125).

Constantly to assert that human beings have the agency of free will and the intellect, as many

imams, clerics, and mullahs so often do, ignores the complexity of the human being and the

relationship between neuroscience and the human mind. This unwillingness to explore the
complexity of human nature relegates ideas about human behavior, morality, and ethics in Dar

al-Islam to a paradigm in which stick figures defiantly disobey the sacred laws and the Will of

Allah. For this category of people, hellfire is the awaited consequence meted out by a Just God.

In psychological terms, one needs to be able to understand the full range of the

phenomenology of human experience to function at our best with our family members and

beloved ones. In the case of our profession, we need to be able to assess our clients to the best of

our ability based on our own brain development and personal integration, our gender or age

limitations and our intellectual or psycho-spiritual evolution.

If, as Muslim psychologists and psychotherapists, for example, we cannot accept the realm of

angels and jinns or other archetypal and spiritual forces when assessing Muslim clients who live

in these imaginal fields, or if we have a limited familiarity with the latest discoveries in

neuroscience and pharmacology, or if we do not make an assessment of the history and culture of

the family and understand family dynamics, our deepest appreciation of the plight of our clients

can only be constricted. The same would clearly also apply to non-Muslim therapists, but the

point being made here is that the field of psychotherapy in Dar al-Islam must consider other

epistemologies and different transpersonal forms of knowing.

I am reminded of a mother and teenage son of Indian ancestry from Fiji. The mother was

convinced that a curse had been placed on her son, who was presenting with symptoms of early

onset schizophrenia. It was known that the teen’s father, from whom his mother was divorced,

also was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The mother asked the wraparound team if we could

arrange for an exorcism by a Muslim Sheikh, even though she was not a Muslim. She clearly

knew the power of traditional healers in Fiji. Unfortunately, this plea was considered by the

clinical supervisor as inappropriate for the wraparound program, which also relied on evidence-
based practices. The question remains: is it possible to treat auditory and visual hallucinations

through an exorcism of evil jinns if the notion of the imaginal realm does not fit conventional

conceptions of reality?

The shadow dimension of ‘aql is in the kind of linear thinking that relies solely on empirical

data for all its truth claims, necessarily resulting in denial of all the other worlds and imaginal

realms. An obsessive-compulsive fixation on a set of prescribed sacred laws to guide all human

behaviors is an extreme example of the shadow dimension of ‘aql. The idea that a client may be

undergoing a spiritual emergency instead of a psychotic break is another example of the shadow

aspects of ‘aql. But even more important, in our tradition of depth psychology the complete

denial of the unconscious can only lead to a flattened perspective on the reality and imaginal

fields which our clients dwell in and the imaginal fields which dwell in them.

Light: Nur

The word nur in Arabic means Light. There are multiple layers of meaning ad infinitum for

this word. Suffice it to say that it points to the wisdom of Sophia or the sakina in Arabic and

shekina in Hebrew which means the Feminine Light. So, even as we wonder at the effectiveness

of young school children learning in their madrassas to recite the Qur’an by rote, we cannot

underestimate the potential for the transmission of nur through the light of the words of the

Qur’an to the primordial essence and young hearts and minds of these children. In The

Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik refers to this phenomenon as lantern consciousness:

“Lantern consciousness – that vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday - is often one part of

some kinds of religious or aesthetic experience” (2009, p. 129). Gopnik makes the distinction

between the wide lantern consciousness of childhood and the narrow spotlight consciousness of
adult attention, which is more focused. Nur will be an important term for our examination of the

transpersonal dimension of the Integral Psychology of Islam in chapter 9, where we will treat the

Prophet’s ascension on al-Buraq, the winged steed, symbolizing another dimension of nur which

is Grace. Chapter 10 will also discuss the central fountain in the Gardens of Paradise as a symbol

of the feminine nur of Allah. For purposes of the Gardens of Paradise fed by the river of water

and the river of milk, nur connotes the sacred words of the Qur’anic revelation, the mystery of

Divine Grace, and our lantern consciousness as it relates to the process of perfection and self-

cultivation of the human being.

But a related term to nur is taqwa, which has been translated as fear of God or God-

consciousness. Taqwa is an apprehension, even at the most fundamental level, of the Divine

reality, which in itself is a gift of nur. Without nur, there is no taqwa. With nur comes the

emergence of moral conscience, the nafs lawamma. In Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s

Reform in Islam, Amina Wadud, the renowned feminist reformer and professor of Islamic

Studies, highlights the moral implications of taqwa: “At the spiritual level, taqwa establishes

moral character based in personal and social practice that reflect moral self-constraint and self-

sacrifice. Moral self-constraint forms the foundation of all human interactions, inclusive of the

family and extended to public policy” (2008, p. 41).

To illuminate the relationship between nur and taqwa, I recall working, several years ago,

with a Punjabi Sikh teenager who was removed from her single mother for physical aggression

as a result of intergenerational issues. She was placed in a foster home, and the wraparound team

was contracted to provide re-unification services. The teenage girl was failing her classes and

was struggling with issues of acculturation. We began our very first family meeting by inviting

the family, if they were comfortable, to recite from their sacred scripture, The Guru Granth
Sahib. The teenager and her non-English-speaking mother were both surprised to have their faith

tradition and their indigenous culture acknowledged and accepted by a diverse team made up of

different ethnicities. We discovered that the teenager enjoyed reading these scriptures in private,

and it was not long before she was making amends with her mother and successfully turning her

academic life around. She became the steward or khalifa of her own imaginal field and began the

process of self-integration by the emulation, taqlid, of her child and behavioral specialist who

supported her to discern the highest values of her culture of origin as well as the culture of her

new homeland. There was no pharmacological intervention. Our behavioral interventions helped

the teenager to achieve a level of self-acceptance that resulted in personal excellence, but

perhaps it was the light, nur, from her frequent reading of the Sikh sacred scriptures that was

instrumental in reducing her symptoms of dysthymic disorder and inspiring the emergence of

God consciousness, taqwa.

The shadow dimension of light, nur is the realm of the jinns, Iblis and other satanic archetypal

forces which draw us away from the Light to our darkest places of human cruelty and to a denial

and defiance of our original and essential nature, the fitra. But this aspect of the self can also not

be ignored, especially when we consider the disorganization or disintegration of the self in some

form of mental illness.

These ten key concepts create the essential psychological architecture to begin the

hermeneutic project. Each of the verses of al-Fatiha will be examined for its psychological

content. Then, we will explore additional insights that arise out of the alchemical, imaginal, and

ecological dialogues. As a hermeneutic enterprise, and as a practitioner of the faith of Islam, I

will offer my own understanding of the seven sacred verses as they relate to a psychological
hermeneutic, as opposed to a literal translation or strictly theological interpretation of the words

as other translators have proposed.

Q 1:1 bismillâh ir-rahmân ir-rahîm

In the Name of Allah, the Infinitely Compassionate, the Infinitely Merciful

We begin with the name of Allah, the Arabic name for God. As has been discussed by C. G.

Jung, although we may invoke the name of Allah, each of us carries a unique Imago Dei. Even

though we are blessed with the revelation of the One and the attributes of the One which are self-

disclosed in the Qur’an, for the most part, as religious believers, we still continue to harbor our

own Imago Dei based on our khayal, the stories we have read, the verses of scripture we have

memorized and contemplated, events and encounters in our own imaginal field and experiences

of the Divine. Divine intervention was the only way to explain an event like the exquisite nature

of my grandmother’s transition to the Gardens of Paradise.

However, Islam is not shy about asserting its theo-centric weltanschauung, another expression

for taqwa. Every Muslim begins the day with an invocation of the basmala, the first verse of the

Qur’an. Nur is present in that moment. Many Muslims begin important actions and projects with

the basmala and it is the universal grace spoken at mealtimes by millions of Muslim families.

Taken as a metaphor, it is the first key to entry to the Gardens of Paradise. This would be true, no

matter how limited, quaint, distorted, or intimate the notion we hold of the Imago Dei. Clearly it

is an image that expands over the lifespan from childhood to old age. It is also subject to our own

intellectual and psycho-spiritual evolution. We may no longer believe in the God of our

childhood. If we are living through a human catastrophe, we may harbor doubts about the claims
of Divine benevolence. And even the skeptics and the most devoted of believers amongst us may

hold an image of a God we ourselves do not believe in.

Recently, in a discussion about homosexuality on a listserv of over 400 Muslim

psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health practitioners world-wide, a

candidate for a postdoctoral practicum was wondering whether she should accept an offer to

work in an Atlanta-based counseling center which treated gay and lesbian clients. She hesitated

to accept the offer because she was firm in the opinion that homosexuality was haram (i.e;

forbidden) in Islam. She was concerned that she might be enabling clients in the practice of

behaviors which she understood to be categorically condemned by her religion. There were

varying opinions offered, but the one which jolted me the most was this one: “Allah hates

homosexuals…!” This particular clinician clearly had a very different Imago Dei, from the

Infinitely Compassionate and Infinitely Merciful Deity to whom we all subscribe as an article of

faith. These two attributes of Allah, rahman and rahim, are the most repeated words in Qur’anic

diction in Dar al-Islam. What is essential to note here is that there is great diversity of

perceptions on the Imago of Allah, despite the Deity’s clear self-disclosure.

The Qur’anic verse, which follows Q 30:30, connects the concept of fitra with prayer and

singular worship. Asad’s and Moustafa’s rendition of Q 30:31 is noteworthy: “[Turn, then, away

from all that is false,] turning unto Him [alone]; and remain conscious of Him, and be constant in

prayer, and be not among those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him” (2003, p. 697).

Perhaps, then, there is a relationship between fitra and al-Fatiha which is the essential aspect of

Islam’s canonical prayer. There is a hint here that acts of worship can preserve or return us to our

primordial essence.
 The Qur’an reminds us in Q 50:16 that Allah is closer to us than our jugular vein. The

implication of this Qur’anic verse need not be taken literally, but clearly these veins represent the

life-giving function, connecting the brain and the heart. The life force within each of us connects

us with our original transcendent nature, fitra. If fitra represents the primordial essence of Allah,

then clearly the primordial essence also contains the two most important attributes of Divine

Grace: infinite compassion and infinite mercy. What is important to note about the two words

rahman and rahim is that each of these words represents the feminine and the masculine

principles. Relying on a sound prophetic tradition Sachiko Murata makes this assertion in The

Tao of Islam: “The Arabic word for womb (rahim) derives from the same root as the words

mercy (rahma) and All-Merciful (rahman). The mother’s womb is the locus of God’s life-giving

mercy” (1992, p. 182). The word love does not specifically appear in the seven sacred verses, yet

it remains hidden (batin) in the intercourse between the feminine and masculine principles.

Hence the very first verse of the Qur’an invokes the Divine Love. Fitra not only constellates the

Divine Love with which we are all born but it also implies that fitra embodies the feminine and

masculine principle.

This potentiality may help to explain that in the realm of human manifestation, human beings,

whether we are born male or female, are born with both masculine and feminine attributes as the

reality of our primordial and natural dispositions. Physiologically, we carry the genes of both our

fathers and mothers. This is an essential insight in to the psychology of self in Islam. It

invalidates any inequity between the genders, but it also implies the validation that each human

being can be endowed with any form of sexual orientation: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual,

and asexual. If we fully appreciate the nature of the essential self, fitra, we are essentially
spiritual beings with a unique combination of both masculine and feminine psychological

dimensions.

Jung’s perspective in The Undiscovered Self affirms Islam’s conception of this dynamic

relationship between the microcosm of the human and the macrocosm of the Divine:

The helpful medieval view that man is a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in
miniature, has long since dropped away from him, although the very existence of his world-
embracing and world-conditioning psyche might have taught him better. Not only is the
image of the macrocosm imprinted upon him as a psychic being, but he also creates this
image of himself on an ever-widening scale. He bears this cosmic “correspondence” within
him by virtue of his reflecting consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the
hereditary, archetypal nature of his instincts which bind him to his environment. But his
instincts not only attach him to the macrocosm; they also, in a sense, tear him apart, because
his desires pull him in different directions. (1958, p. 61)

One of the most profound psychological implications for the notion of fitra is the fact that we

are all capable of self-forgiveness because we carry the Divine Love and Grace of rahman and

rahim within us. This was a concept that disturbed me when I first learned about Joan

Borysenko’s work on self-forgiveness at the University of Santa Monica. It sounded heretical

that human beings had the power to forgive ourselves. In Fire in the Soul, Borysenko suggests

that “applied to ourselves, forgiveness requires a thorough consideration of any hurtful acts we

may have consciously or unconsciously committed, coupled with any necessary restitution”

(1994, p. 128). Clearly, within the context of Islam, this capacity for forgiveness of self and

others derives from the multiple capacities of the fitra and yet there is no mention of self-

forgiveness in the literature on the psychology of Islam.

The very first verse of Al-Fatiha has profound implications for the psychology of self in Islam

because it pulsates with the revelation of the human capacity for compassion, mercy, forgiveness

of self, love, and grace. If we are to consider the two attributes of the Buddha-nature, these

would include not only compassion but also wisdom. And in doing so, it establishes two very
important principles: (1) the reality of human agency, not based primarily on human reason or

free will as the Mu’tazilites have argued, but on profound life-affirming capacities with which

we are all endowed, regardless of the cognitive development of our intellects; and (2) the

capacity for co-creative action by virtue of this dynamic relationship between the immanent and

the transcendent within the self. Our intimate connection with the One establishes a reason to

trust life, to cultivate our self-confidence as well as to inspire profound humility because we are

not alone in our thoughts and our actions, and we cannot, from an Islamic perspective, ever claim

complete autonomy from the One.

In my own experience as a researcher in this inquiry, the discovery of the meaning of fitra as

the core of who I am as an individual has been the most profound gratification of my need for

intrinsic self-esteem.

Q 1:2 al-hamdulillâhi rabb il-âlamîn

All praise is due to Allah, the Sustainer of all the worlds

This verse of al-Fatiha is often known as al-Hamd (the praise) by virtue of the call for praise

to God. This is in itself the first act of worship in Islam. It is fundamentally a verse about the

psychology of gratitude, but it has enormous implications for the psychology of the self. In

particular it serves as an antidote to various forms of self-inflation and narcissism. But it also

reminds us of the connection with the primordial essence of all existence and its many universes

constellated by the invocation of the Sustainer of all the worlds. Hence any alienation from the

ontological reality of the Divine Unity is one that can be veiled from us by our own limited

cognitive and spiritual perceptions of our own individual existence, our own imaginal realms.

Self-knowledge thus becomes the necessary project of the human enterprise if we are serious
about uncovering and living at deeper and deeper levels of the ontological reality. The praise we

offer to the Divine thus contains gratitude for all of the abundance of our experiences, both

positive and negative. This allows for an integration of the various stages of the lifespan through

‘aql, our mental, proprioceptive, and intellectual faculties, with which we conduct our everyday

mundane existence, and our evolving appreciation for the different veils of existence. In the case

of the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of water, the project of self-knowledge is

fundamentally the scope of the integration of our personality, and the formation of our character.

But the psychology of gratitude also brings us into the present moment. It fosters the potential

for what former psychotherapist Thomas Moore calls, in his book of the same title, The Re-

Enchantment of Everyday Life:

The re-enchantment of our personal lives may very well feel like going back to Eden: taking a
job that delights our heart, being in or out of a marriage according to the heart’s deep desire,
living where the spirit of place soothes our tired body and emotions, following through on our
eccentric interests and mad inclinations. Many times I’ve seen people suffer the most
tormenting agonies, only because they won’t allow themselves to enter the garden they can
see at a distance but for some undefinable reason is closed to them. In some cases, there
comes a day when the obstacles don’t seem so remarkable, and calmly and easily they stroll
through its entrance. (1996, p. xviii)

The imaginal dialogue with the Laughing Buddha (please see Appendix D) evokes this

distinct quality of being in the moment, from one space of now-ness and newness to the next

space of now-ness and newness. It calls for a quality of presence to every instance of existence.

How else can we pay the fullest attention to all the blessings and abundance of each day?

Gratitude is often captured in our gratitude journals at the end of each day. But that is quite

different from living each moment in gratitude, which is tantamount to being in constant prayer,

as the Asad’s interpretation of Q 30:31 invokes, and as the Sufis would have us be. As easy as

this sounds, it does in fact take enormous self-discipline to live in the now, but at the same time,
it raises our level of consciousness to the sheer elegance of the Universe, humbling our existence

within it.

Another profound psychological implication for this verse is that it serves as a constant check

against our self-inflation and narcissism. How the individual succumbs to narcissism through our

social and cultural paradigms will be discussed further in chapters 7 and 8. Suffice it here to say

that if we recognize that in fact all praise is due to Allah, we may ask the question: then what

relevance does our own self-esteem have to our existence, unless of course we accept the

immanence of Allah as being at the core of who we are? As with all other disorders, our

narcissism is on a spectrum. As Heinz Kohut would have us understand, narcissism is a form of

developmental arrest. In The Point of Existence, Almaas explains Kohut’s theory of the nuclear

self as the core self to which he assigns a specific content: “This content is primarily determined

by two poles: ambitions and ideals. He views this psychic structure, the ‘bipolar self,’ as the

essence of the self” (1996, p. 78). Ali then explains how Kohut’s theory is helpful in

understanding the source and development of narcissism:

Simply stated, Kohut’s notion is that the most significant developmental accomplishment of
the healthy self is that it develops, or develops with, a center, which becomes its most
important sector. The center is the bipolar self that develops from the original primitive center
in early childhood, the nuclear self. Narcissistic health is a result of establishing a cohesive,
realistic, and enduring bipolar self, and narcissistic disturbance is due to difficulties in its
development and structure. (p. 80)

But then Almaas takes exception to Kohut’s definition because although it helps us to

understand and treat narcissistic pathology, it confines our consideration of self to dysfunctional

areas. This approach can only serve to exacerbate the situation by excluding the very elements of

the self which could help to heal the narcissistic wounding: “As we use psychological theory to

support our work on self-realization, it is important to avoid the error of defining the human
beings only from the perspective of pathology” (1996, p. 81). In my view, it is the fitra which

has the innate capacity for self-healing and even self-forgiveness, and this is an aspect of the core

self which is missing in Kohut’s theory. Where Kohut’s definition is useful is that it identifies a

spectrum of narcissism - from a healthy narcissism, where, from the perspective of an Integral

Psychology of Islam, an individual is in touch with their primordial essence and recognizes it as

a Divine gift - to narcissistic disturbances which attach the individual to an investment in a

particular form of self-representation or persona or subpersonality. Ali cautions us not to identify

ourselves with actions based on ambitions and ideals because they disconnect the self from its

innate dynamism:

From this perspective, to live according to ambitions and ideals is the very essence of the
narcissistic condition; this is a manifestation of the self that is not being itself. Self-centered
individuals are typically ambitious, and extreme ambition is usually considered narcissistic.
Ambition has never been considered a true spiritual quality; it is acceptable in modern
society primarily because of the increasing materialism of the time. (p. 81)

What is essential in our consideration for a hermeneutic of this verse is that one can, in all

humility, extend all our praises to the Divine, because we cannot truthfully claim to know all the

causes for our successes, moments of elation and episodes of well-being. We can still maintain

our self-esteem based on the existence of our intimate relationship with the Divine by virtue of

our retrieval, re-connection or deepening connection to the fitra. We can also acknowledge that

within the moment to moment act of gratitude, we are in a beloved relationship with the One,

who sustains all worlds.

If we can truly recognize the One as the Sustainer of all the worlds, we can also begin to

empathize with all existences within our own imaginal fields, whether we are engaged in

relationships with sentient beings and with nature or with imaginal figures in our waking state or

whether we are engaged with dream figures in our dream states. It is because our individual
existence is interdependent on so many other facets of existence that we can claim to experience

any material or spiritual successes at all. This then is the beginning of the recognition of the

ecological self and the imaginal self. There can be no room for domination of one gender over

another or one species over another, because domination itself is a manifestation of narcissism,

the very state of consciousness which this verse is designed to manage or treat psychologically.

As Amina Wadud so eloquently asserts in Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam:

We live in a complex universe. Within each person is an essence (dhat) reflecting our union
with the cosmic design and the harmony in all creation. We can acknowledge this
transcendent reality, in ourselves and all others - and act upon it - or we can ignore it, to
emphasize our superiority over others, rather than relational reciprocity. (2008, p. 31)

The dhat which Wadud refers to here is the fitra which we have elaborated earlier.

We need only to remember the multiplicity of forces including our neural pathways which

aligned to cause a particular moment of elation. This is equally true of the multiplicity of forces

which may have aligned to cause our moments of despair and disjunction. The polarity of the

experiential world is one for which we can also express our gratitude, for without night there is

no day, and elation or despair can manifest at any time, as we have witnessed so often in the past

decade on our television screens.

Q 1:3 ar-rahmân ir-rahîm

The Infinitely Compassionate, the Infinitely Merciful

There must be a reason why these words are repeated twice in al-Fatiha. Perhaps it is to

prompt us to contemplate the deeper meaning of these two words. There is clearly a connection

with the fitra. But there is also a relationship between the Divine Unity and the principle of

compassion, as Shah-Kazemi explains in My Mercy encompasses all:

 IF THE CONCEPT OF UNITY dominates the mind, it is the principle of compassion that
governs the heart of Islam. Compassion is to oneness what radiance is to the sun: it is through
compassion that the oneness of God brilliantly shines forth and reveals its fundamental nature.
Since compassion stems from oneness, it not only radiates, it also integrates; it exerts a
merciful attraction upon all outward multiplicity: “My Mercy encompasses all things”
(7:156).

On the human plane, “compassion” - the capacity to feel and be “with” (com) the other in
their “suffering” (passio) - expresses not just human sentiment but also spiritual presentiment;
compassion arises first and foremost out of one’s innate sense of the interconnectedness of all
human beings. Speaking to the whole of humanity, the Koran declares: “Your creation, and
your resurrection, is but as a single soul” (31:28). The boundaries separating oneself from all
others are rendered transparent in the light of the intrinsic oneness of humanity. And this unity
of humanity is itself a reflection of the oneness of God. (2007, pp. 3-4)

From a psychological perspective, and in the context of a psychology of self, this is a

reminder of the unity of humankind and the unity of being. Any experience of fragmentation and

alienation is thus necessarily as a result of the veils of perception or impairments in cognition or

in consequence of personal, environmental and socio-political trauma.

As the alchemical transference dialogue in Appendix D for this chapter shows, my own sense

of alienation and fragmentation was based on a racially charged atmosphere, a gender-segregated

environment at one of the finest private boarding schools in Kenya, in which boys (who might

well have been grieving the loss of their own family lives) would resort to aggression, cruelty,

and victimization, and an adult teacher would resort to ridiculing and shaming his own student.

My own sense of disconnection and confusion - so typical for Erikson’s stage of identity versus

role confusion for adolescence - resulted in a profuse fantasy life with sexual imagery based on

the Hollywood movies of the era and access to soft pornographic literature. This was a defense

mechanism to manage my anxieties and trauma. It may have clearly resulted in exacerbating my

neurosis, or lower nafs, by inadvertently creating a pattern of sexual objectification of women in

my imagination, as a way to assuage the psychological pain - with what little self-pleasure I was

able to create in my internal imaginal field. This was most likely due to a constriction of pleasure
in my outer imaginal field. The lack of a sense of belonging or a sense of community

constellated dreams of freedom, symbolized by a distorted American surfer culture presented in

Frankie Avalon movies filmed in Malibu, California. But in my moments of despair, I wondered

if the God I prayed to was really listening to my prayers, even though I recited them, at the time,

in a language that was devoid of any deep meaning for me. Was it God who was responsible for

the injustices of racial segregation or was it humanity’s responsibility to bring down the walls of

separation?

And yet, one still wonders how it is that Muslims have killed more Muslims than non-

Muslims in the decade since 9/11. Can we please begin to understand the alienation and trauma

these Muslims have experienced by living at the mercy of vicious dictatorships, fully aligned

with the Western powers, to create an intentional fragmentation of an entire region populated by

Muslims, in order to exploit the oil wealth of these nations?

What the verses do not explain is that the lack of compassion perpetrated by groups of people

on other groups of people, including women and children, can also exacerbate the collective

neurosis. A psychology of the self which ignores the pain and suffering caused by degrading

environmental and socio-political factors cannot begin to empathize with the pathological

consequences of the human condition. There seems to be an inherent lack of empathy in most

psychologies of the self, even in the Sufi descriptive system of the lower nafs (for my taste), and

for the ways in which the underprivileged and marginalized elements of human societies have

learned to cope with impossible conditions just to survive. The prophet of Islam, who urged us to

tend to the poor and the sick, would surely have had some questions about such an incomplete

psychology. It is the etiology of these lower nafs that seem to be taken as a given without a fuller

examination of the forces that motivate those who present with ignorance, anger, rancor, tyranny,
arrogance, spite, envy, avarice, infidelity, and hypocrisy. Al-Fatiha calls for compassion and

mercy. Life is imbued with the Grace of ontological reality, if we can but have a taste of it. But

to do this, surely we can begin by proactively offering our own love, compassion, mercy, and

grace. This is surely what Sidi, the sheikh of the Shadhiliyya Sufis, means by asking us to “be al-

Fatiha.” This is the quintessential meaning of human agency. We must retrieve our fitra and

walk in alignment with our highest purposes.

Q 1:4 mâliki yawm id-dîn

The Sovereign of the Day of Resurrection

This verse has traditionally been translated as the Lord or Master of the Day of Judgment. The

word Lord already creates a gender bias to the translation. The word malik can also be translated

in a gender-neutral way. My preference for translating malik is the word Sovereign. The actual

words yawm id-din literally mean the day of religion. The concept of the last day reminds us of

our mortality, the temporality of this life and the eternal trajectory of the soul. We evoke the life-

giving forces of Love, Compassion, Mercy, and Grace in the first three verses. Does it follow

then that the Creator is a harsh, judgmental entity, who, as the Force of Omnipotence and

Omniscience, will make the final call for our entry into the gates of Paradise or the Hell of

eternal regret based on any incomplete witness of our guardian angels? My imago Dei is no

longer the image of a severe, finger-pointing Qadi who understands nothing about human

behavior and motivations. I cannot imagine that this is how we will be judged on such a Day of

Judgment. Will there not be an empathic, compassionate, and merciful Radiance which will

instantly know and love us for how we met the challenges and struggles of our lives and assess

us for our flaws and imperfections, obsessions and compulsions, our shadow, nafs, forgetfulness

and unconsciousness, passions and fixations, for the purpose of perfecting our souls to their

fullest potential? Hence I have translated this verse as the Sovereign of the Day of Resurrection.

If as a licensed psychotherapist, I can empathize with consistent violators of the Juvenile

justice system, and look for ways to empower my clients to reconnect with their primordial

essence, why would the day of religion not be a day of resurrection for all of us, unless we have a

very limited notion of our encounter with the all powerful Radiance of the Divine Unity on that

final day. We may even ask whether the Gardens of Paradise are our final destination or just a
transit stop for us to replenish our souls and refresh our spirits before we continue onwards to

even higher levels of consciousness.

Robert Emmons explores these ultimate questions in The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns.

He sees an important link between spirituality and personality theory:

Ignoring spirituality in personality theory and research will not make it disappear. Personality
theory and research cannot take place in a theological black hole. To stay silent on spiritual
matters is to take the position that they are unimportant for understanding individuality,
although there is ample evidence to argue against this position. Religion and spirituality have
more relevancy for personality than most personality psychologists are comfortable in
admitting. Personality psychologists cannot afford to be parochial in outlook; the health and
vitality of the discipline depends on interdisciplinary outreach. (2003, p. 14)

Emmons sees these questions of ultimate concern as one of the most profound motivators of

human behavior because we engage life more deeply when we have the end and purpose in sight.

This is clearly the experience of many who are involved in managing a terminal illness. One

becomes more aware of the enduring values of life as our priorities change.

Our understanding of the end and purpose of life inspires our khayal and our himma. The

imagination of the Gardens of Paradise is itself an act of khayal. The imminence of death often

inspires our himma. I stand witness to my formerly irascible 90-year-old father working hard to

organize his affairs to leave my sister and me an inheritance while frequently offering his

blessings for our health, well being, prosperity, and longevity. This transformation can clearly

occur as part of the natural aging process, but I have the sense that my father has had his private

thoughts about the end of life as he has endured the loss of all his brothers, the loss of my

mother, and the loss of his very few friends. It would seem that the archetypal dimension of the

Day of Resurrection and the Gardens of Paradise also act as an external unifying center which

integrates the personality. As Emmons notes, “ultimate concerns strike at the heart of who a

person is; they are all-consuming and self-defining” (2003, p. 96). Hence, the invocation of the
Day of Resurrection is not just about philosophical introspection on life beyond the grave but

about coming to terms with the purpose of life. It is about what we need to do to achieve some

serenity with our sense of ourselves as we approach this day, knowing that life is not fully within

our egoic control and that in every moment our allotted life span is expiring. In fact, what

transpires is a profound level of surrender, because we come face to face with the reality that

ultimately we have very little say over the final moments of our life. The most we can do is to

prepare for that hour by maintaining our sense of balance or equanimity, and maintaining our

health so as to mediate ill-health in old age. Is it possible that this act of surrender itself jump

starts the remaining integration of personality?

From a developmental perspective, James Hillman captures the force of this archetypal

moment of surrender in his book on aging, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life: “The

transition in meaning of ‘inmost nature’ from structures of physiology to structures of character

makes more livable sense of later years. Yet gerontology continues to focus on the biology of

aging, and so does not come to honest terms with the character of the elderly. A science of aging

that starts in the physiology of change rather than in its significance for the individual is not

speaking to the aging person” (1999, p. 55).

C. G. Jung in a recent rendition of his most intimate exercises of active imagination draws the

psychological significance of death to life in The Red Book: Liber Novus:

We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to
end. You are not forced to live eternally, but you can also die, since there is a will in you for
both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today’s men need a large slice of
death, since too much incorrectness lives in them. What stays in balance is correct, what
disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is
incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the
completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since
dying increases life. If I plunge into death encompassing the world, then my buds break open.
How much our life needs death!
 Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look
out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure,
and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold
death, since it teaches me how to live. (Jung & Shamdasani, 2009, pp. 274-275)

The Day of Resurrection is invoked up to seventeen times daily in the life of a Muslim. While

this may serve to balance the tension of the opposites as Jung may have us believe, it may also be

the source of neurosis and existential angst for many Muslims because it is a constant reminder

of the uncertainty of life. Abdellah Hammoudi, a Moroccan professor of Anthropology at

Princeton University, speaks compellingly of this angst in a personal memoir of his pilgrimage to

Mecca in A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage:

That anguish faded over the past few years, but I felt it return in Medina and culminated in
Mecca. I couldn’t rid myself of the sense of imminent punishment, of a plague, that would
suddenly arise and defeat me. This fear tortured me, because it was more than just a
representation. It paralyzed me, gave me shudders. Sometimes the phantasm came over me in
the middle of a prostration. (Hammoudi, 2006, pp. 173-174)

Can life be trusted if the Angel of Death can call on any us at any time, as it does and will? It

is what keeps Muslims focused on a life hereafter at the expense of the life of this world. It is

what may also explain the lack of an environmental conscience by denigrating this life as a

transitory illusion. The Gardens of Paradise await us in the future. The present is fleeting and

terminal. For some Muslims, the Day of Resurrection is what inspires the cultivation of an

ecological self. For others, the development of an ecological self is meaningless because it may

also be taken as an idolatrous love for the world and this life. In the Garden of Paradise, fed by

the River of Wine, we will encounter the Sufi notion of “die before you die” which takes us to a

different level of consciousness about the potentiality of personal resurrection in this life time.

Q 1:5 iyyâka na`budu wa iyyâka nasta`în

Thee alone we worship and from Thee alone we seek for help

The concept of worship in Islam is not restricted to prayer and meditation. As Muhammad

Asad explains most eloquently, if we can forgive him the hyperbole of his intense faith, religious

fervor and conviction, in Islam on the Crossroads,

The conception of “worship” in Islam is different from that of any other religion. Here
worship is not restricted to the purely devotional practices, as for examples prayers and
fasting, but it extends over the whole of man’s practical life as well. If the object of our life as
a whole is the worship of God, then we necessarily must regard this life, in the totality of all
its aspects, as one complex moral responsibility. Thus all our actions, even the seemingly
trivial ones, must be performed as acts of worship, that is, performed consciously as
constituting a part of God’s universal plan. Such a state of things is, for the mean of average
capability, a distant ideal; but is it not a purpose of religion to bring ideals into real existence?
(1934, p. 27)

We have noted earlier in the literature review, Shahrastani’s interpretation of this verse is that

the freedom of sincere worship is the only domain of human agency, that is, that the only

freedom of will that a human individual can enjoy is the freedom to worship and to seek for help,

which then becomes our point of departure for co-creative action. This is also where nur meets

taqwa.

It is thus in the sphere of human activity or to be more precise, human co-creativity, that the

ten key concepts of the psychology of self have profound significance. If we can see the retrieval

of the essential self, fitra, the transmutation of the subpersonalities and complexes, nafs, the

practice of emulation, taqlid, to integrate the personality, the mission of stewardship, khalifa to

act in full consciousness of the interdependence of all species and nature as well as the self-

conservation and self-cultivation of our unique and individual imaginal fields, the purity and

nobility of our intention, niyyah, the constancy and determination of our personal will, iradah,

the alignment to the fitra of our imagination of the mind and heart, khayal and himma, the

application of intellect, ‘aql, to our life’s mission and the invocation of the Light, the Grace of
nur, then we are able to integrate all the faculties and determinants necessary for an actualization

of the self.

However, one can well imagine how this sense of the singular worship of Allah can become a

matter of religious identity in contrast to a sincere invitation to a religious experience based on

the ethical way in which live our daily lives. The transference dialogue with Moses, the teenage

version of Jalaledin, is very instructive (Please see Appendix D). Clearly, Moses did not even

know the meaning of the prayers he was reciting in Arabic. He just knew that the worldview

presented by the neocolonialist expatriate community and the worldview presented by the

liberated African population had nothing which attracted his heart and mind. He was struggling

with issues of identity. This religious identity was based on a mythical notion of an expanse of

land between Morocco and Iran, which supposedly held values of social justice and human

dignity. His research project only helped him to deal with his own alienation by conjuring a

fantasy land where truth and equity somehow prevailed. Almost two decades later, when I was

able to visit these same countries, my disappointment was palpable. I was still searching for a

religious identity even in middle adulthood. This is the psychological trap which most religious

fundamentalists of any faith fall into. We attach ourselves to a religious subpersonality as a way

to manage our existential angst and navigate the world based on our various truth claims.

Although I had a mentor in my early 20s who often talked about the “religious experience” as

opposed to devotion to a particular path of Islam, I was never fully satisfied with his answers. I

was, by then, reciting my prayers in English (for which I received express permission from the

49th Imam), but they were still more of a ritual enactment rather than the language of intimate

communication between the human and the Divine. My impulses were clearly noble and my

heart was in the right place, but I was not having a profound religious experience, as has been the
case with the soul of the work of this dissertation, which is an ideal example of a co-creative

event. This is a moment when Light, nur, and God-consciousness, taqwa, are in a dynamic

relationship, moving the work of the soul and the soul of the work forward.

What is pertinent here to Maslow’s theory of human motivation and its hierarchy of needs is

that the prayer of Islam, and hence its psychology, does not place the physiological and safety

needs, the need for belonging and love, and the need for self-esteem before the need for self-

actualization, at the level of the essential self, fitra, and self-transcendence. On the contrary, this

verse suggests that, at least as adults, none of the other needs can be satisfactorily met without

prioritizing the relationship with the Divine. Furthermore, since life is precarious, one does not

wait to achieve the lower needs on the hierarchy before one answers the call of Transcendence.

That is not what Bilal did. He was one of the first slaves ever to be freed in Dar al-Islam. He

answered the call to the Straight Path before meeting any of his own physiological needs and

risked his safety, endured torture, and was willing to sacrifice his own life by standing on his

convictions. His sense of esteem came from the relationship with the Divine, his personal

intellectual integrity and conviction in his faith. The Prophet of Islam had clearly modeled this

kind of personal integrity for him and others. So, while Maslow’s theory may be valid in

practical and developmental terms about prioritizing the hierarchy of needs from physical to

emotional needs, from mental and then to spiritual needs for a diverse society, the hierarchy he

proposes does not fully align with the notion of taqwa or God consciousness, the theo-centric

weltanschauung of Islam, because as the fifth verse asserts: “Thee alone we worship and Thee

alone we seek for help” - implying that all our human needs are met by virtue of the intimate

relationship with the One. Although the prayer, salat, is rarely fully consciously offered in

childhood, the intention, niyyah, of the prayer is one which any child can learn. For the ardent
believer in Islam, frustration of the need for self-transcendence is the cause for a deeper neurosis

than frustration of the gratification of any other lower needs, as Sheikh Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal

ar-Rifai asserts in his exegesis of this verse in Music of the Soul: “I need to sit with You face to

face because if I don’t I could not live in this world” (Rifa’I, 1997, p. 50).

This verse is also a quintessential expression of the faith of Islam. It inspires an attitude of

surrender but within the context of a dynamic relationship of co-creation and stewardship. The

connotation here of surrender is not one of the resignation or fatalism of the Jabariyya who

embraced the doctrine of predestination. Although Islam has often been defined as an act of

submission to the Will of Allah, the co-creative interpretation proposed by Shahrastani and

others suggests what Wadud calls engaged surrender in Inside the Gender Jihad:

I prefer to use Islam as “engaged surrender.” Although subtle, the distinction between
submission and surrender is significant. I understand the word submission as involuntary,
coerced externally and limited to a prescribed set of duties. Many Muslims actually confess
that a Muslim must submit to their understandings of a prescribed set of required duties as if
there is no choice. Submission is enforcement situated completely outside of the one who
submits. However, if such a coercive construction really existed, then the extensive and
continual failure of Muslims to submit - as evident throughout Muslim history and in the
present - would be impossible. Islam would be universally sanctified and religiously
exemplary. Muslims disobey Allah’s will obviously because they can exercise choice.

In this respect, engaged surrender emphasizes the requisite role of human agency. It is
conscious recognition of choice and exercising that choice as an agent, not a puppet. (2008, p.
23)

From this attitude of islam as engaged surrender, the trajectory of personal development

results in faith, iman and moral excellence, ihsan. With a deepening of faith comes a greater

receptivity to the Divine revelation, which is itself an act of worship. Taqwa and iman are not

static states of consciousness. As James Fowler suggests in his seminal work Stages of Faith:

The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, there is a developmental

process that the believer undergoes in the first three stages of faith, from an intuitive-projective
faith (most typical of a children of 3 to 7 years old) to the mythic literal faith of school age

children to a synthetic-conventional faith which begins in adolescence and plateaus in early

adulthood. These stages would reflect the levels of faith developed in the Gardens of Paradise

fed by the river of water and the river of milk. The next three stages of faith would begin the

developmental phase of the Gardens of Paradise fed by the river of honey and the river of wine

as these represent the inner aspects of faith beginning with the fourth stage, an individuative-

reflective faith, which Fowler describes as a dymythologizing stage in early to middle adulthood

which “typically translates symbols into conceptual meanings” (1995, p. 182) in a move from the

zahir to the batin, initiating the spiritual and psychological journey inwards. Stage 5 is the

conjunctive faith which opens to the voices of one’s deeper self and is alive to paradox. Fowler

suggests that this stage is unusual before mid-life. Fowler’s sixth stage is the universalizing faith

that begins the journey to self-transcendence and removal of the mask of religious identity. As

we grow in iman and open our hearts to nur, we grow in taqwa. It is important to note here that

islam as an attitude of engaged surrender is merely the initial stage in a developmental process

that aspires to deeper levels of consciousness and transpersonal communion. A parallel process

to the development of the self is often the dis-identification with the outer forms of the faith. It is

this transition that often causes psycho-spiritual distress and emotional disturbance as we enter

levels of unknowing and uncertainty, and as the higher unconscious and archetypal forces begin

to break through to the psyche. We have only to think of the verses of Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi to

know that higher states of consciousness can be attained which do not rely on religious or

cultural identity, but which in fact transcends these states in the garden of Paradise fed by the

river of wine. Rumi’s famous tale of Moses and the Shepherd in The Mathnawi: The Spiritual
Couplets, translated by E.H. Whinfield, reminds us that at the transpersonal level, these

distinctions between the forms of worship ultimately disappear for the One:

In the men of Hind the usages of Hind are praiseworthy,

In the men of Sind those of Sind.
I am not purified by their praises.
Tis they who become pure and shining thereby.
I regard not the outside and the words,
I regard the inside and the state of the heart
I look at the heart if it be humble,
Though the words may be the reverse of humble.
Because the heart is substance, and words accidents,
Accidents are only the means, substance is the final cause.
How long will they dwell on words and superficialities?
A burning heart is what I want; consort with burning! (Rumi, 2002, p. 87)

Q 1:6 ihdinâ s-sirât al-mustaqîm

Please guide us to the Straight Path

[of self-cultivation to the Gardens of Paradise]

This verse is critical to the relationship between the creation and the Creator, if it is sincerely

taken to mean an ecological prayer on behalf of all humankind and all other existents and species

in Creation. The quality of the relationship is based on the notion of guidance. The forms of this

guidance are clearly unique to each species. The ecological dialogue (Please see Appendix D)

with Qaswa, the Prophet’s camel, the Spider and the Dove that saved the Prophet’s life, and the

birds which circum-aviated the Ka’ba, demonstrate that each kind of world receives guidance in

its own way. In Islam, this guidance is accessed by the human species in two ways, according to

the model of psychoethics proposed by Bakhtiar:

The self has access to the language of the Signs through two kinds of guidance: takwini -
universal to all of nature - and tashri’i - special guidance for human consciousness alone.
Learning to read the Signs on the horizon and within the self is a task undertaken by the only
one who consciously submits to the Will of God. Committed to the completion of the
perfection of nature in its mode of operation, the self seeks Divine Assistance. (1993, pp. 18-
19)
Bakhtiar later clarifies that what is meant by takwini is the signs of guidance found in nature,

which are discerned innately or instinctively. For example, birds know how to weave their nests

instinctively through takwini, while tashri’i is the guidance found through the study of the

revelation to humankind. She then further clarifies that takwini is the guidance received by

reason. The two concepts represent the nature and nurture polarity. On this basis, one could

conclude that if humankind had never received a revelation, it would not have been able to

achieve the highest level of moral evolution, even though it may have been able to achieve a

certain level of material well-being.

In my view, the concepts of ‘aql and nur equally serve to explain the faculties needed for

humanity’s psycho-spiritual evolution. Takwini and tashri’i would be considered as aspects of

‘aql and nur as ‘aql represents the full range of human intellect and nur also represents the light

of Allah through the revelation. Both these concepts have a profound bearing on moral and

ethical action in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of water.

More importantly, as noted by Mawlana Azad in his Tarjuman al-Quran, it is Divine

guidance which moves us from the state of Islam - as a surrender to the Divine Will based on a

creedal or belief system - to the religious experience of ‘iman (the stages of faith) to ‘ihsan (the

stages of certainty). Al-Ghazzali himself acknowledges the role of nur in his own illumination in

The Confessions of Al Ghazzali: “I owed my deliverance, not to a concatenation of proofs and

arguments, but to the light which God caused to penetrate into my heart - the light illuminates the

threshold of all knowledge. To suppose that certitude can only be based upon formal arguments

is to limit the boundless mercy of God” (Ghatzali & Field, 2010, pp. 18-19).

So, Islam affords this guidance through the wisdom of the 6,666 verses of the Qur’an, but as

Azad suggests, this was not so that we could create yet another community of exclusivism. And
as can be observed from my transference dialogue (Please see Appendix D), exclusivism can be

a manifestation of unresolved issues of religious identity, which in itself is supported by an over-

identified subpersonality. This brings us then to the prayer for guidance to the Straight Path.

Some translations ask for guidance “on” the Straight Path, or on the Right Path, as if the

practitioners are already on the path merely by embracing Islamic practices and wish for

guidance to stay on the path. The majority of Muslims identify the five pillars of Islam and the

shari’a with the Straight Path. The five pillars are the widely accepted norm for ortho-praxis in

Islam. It is supposed that strict adherence to a methodology that includes an affirmation of faith,

regular daily prayers (five for the majority and three for the Shi’a), a commitment to fast during

the month of Ramadan and to pay the alms-tax regularly, and a commitment to participate at

least once in a lifetime on the annual pilgrimage, is a safe guarantor of salvation in this life and

the next. Psychologically, we may ask what exactly is achieved by this methodology or religious

practice.

By following this praxis, we have clearly established a relationship with the Divine in

confessing the shahada and performing the salat. Through an affirmation of faith and the

practice of regular prayers, we have developed a sense of gratitude and optimism that we are

walking hand in hand with the Divine by following the sacred laws. We have cultivated a high

level of self-discipline over our physical needs by fasting during Ramadan and re-constellated a

sense of community when we break the fast as families. We have engaged in altruistic financial

participation in the interests of social justice by paying zakat, and, if we can afford it once in our

lifetime, we have met our need for a profound religious experience shared by millions of

pilgrims that teaches us humility and even deeper levels of surrender.

 If Dar al-Islam can claim that through the practice of the five pillars we have evolved an

enlightened society, then Islam would not be a faith in crisis. Some of the most devoted believers

of Islam, who subscribe to the five pillars, are full of anger, envy and hate (anti-Americanism,

anti-Semitism and sectarianism are on the rise in Dar al-Islam), whether it is the Sunni Muslims

of Palestine, Algeria, and Syria, whether it is the Shi’a Muslims of Iran and Iraq or whether it is

the treatment of the Ahmadiyya by their fellow Muslims. The five pillars do not in and of

themselves provide the level of well being, both material and spiritual, that an enlightened

religious community can claim. The praxis of the pillars does not in and of itself result in the

formation of a beloved community. The five pillars are a methodology to raise the level of

human consciousness so that we can build and live in a just society. But the results, since the fall

of the Ottoman Empire, seem precarious, at best.

Perhaps the problem lies in the normally accepted hermeneutic of the Straight Path. If we are

over-identified with the path as a religious identity, we are merely meeting the need for

belonging, in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of water (i.e., at a behavioral and inter-

personal level of our existence), but at the same time, we may be depriving ourselves of a

profound religious experience by meeting the higher need of self-transcendence in the Garden of

Paradise fed by the river of wine, the subject of chapter 9.

For purposes of an Integral Psychology of Islam, the praxis must surely be accessible to all

individuals and groups, from all walks of life, from the four corners of the planet. An exclusivist

faith that aspires to dominate the planet again with its worldview, without first rectifying the

pressing issues in its backyard, cannot sustain itself on the Straight Path without compromising

its highest values, no matter how hard we pray. Eighty percent of Dar al-Islam does not

understand Arabic and yet say their prayers in a language they do not feel or understand. The
problem of language will be explored further in chapter 8 on the cultural psychology of Islam, in

the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of honey. Suffice it to say that without an engaged and

conscious practice of the faith, the dream of an Islamic renaissance is unrealistic. An Integral

Psychology of Islam is thus not fixated on the habitual ortho-praxis of the faith. It calls for a

sincere meaningful praxis of the faith through an engaged process of self-cultivation.

My own translation of this verse is teleological: Please guide us to the Straight Path of self-

cultivation to the Gardens of Paradise. In this version of the guidance verse, I am invoking the

archetypal symbols of the Straight Path and the Gardens of Paradise. The Laughing Buddha in

the imaginal dialogue (please see Appendix D) suggests that the Straight Path is one which calls

out to us. From the perspective of an archetypal psychology, it is not necessarily the one we

think we know by a set of practices, especially if the practices do not achieve the results we are

looking for psychologically. This clearly sounds like a heretical argument to mainstream Islam,

either Shi’a or Sunni. Joseph Campbell, in his classic work Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and

Personal Transformation, cites in his introduction, an Arthurian text by an anonymous 13th-

century monk titled La Queste del Saint Graal that captures the essence of the ecological

dialogue (Please see Appendix D) I had with the Amazon trail: “You enter the forest at the

darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path; each

human being is a unique phenomenon. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss” (Campbell,

J., & Kudler, D. Ed.,2004, p. xxvi). The experience of elation I felt when the trail was washed

away by the rain is still with me. Maria and I frolicked in the rain because we found ourselves in

a pristine place in the Ecuadorian rainforest with no pathway out. It was a moment of profound

gratitude and joy. It was a moment of baraka, blessing. Time stood still. There was nowhere to

go. It was a foretaste of the Garden of Paradise, fed by the river of water.
 This is not a suggestion, for one Meccan minute, that we interrupt the ortho-praxis of Islam.

But by simply categorizing the Straight Path as a set of practices, we may be depriving ourselves

of the deepest calling of the faith. What is being proposed is that we begin to think of a conscious

practice in which we respond to the call of the archetypal Straight Path through self-cultivation.

Ortho-praxis may be one aspect of that process of self-cultivation, but it need not be the only

one. One example of a community that has adopted this approach is the Sufi community led by

Llewellyn Vaughn Lee in Northern California. There will be more discussion of the cultural

representations of Islam in the cultural psychology of the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of

honey in chapter 8.

The imaginal dialogue with the Enneagram, found in Appendix D, was also very instructive

in this regard. The recognition that all three symbols are archetypal forces - the Straight Path, the

Gardens of Paradise, and the Enneagram - takes the understanding of this verse to another level

of consciousness. We clearly cannot ignore the fact that every individual, as he or she begins to

differentiate from the undifferentiated family mass ego, and begins to develop a sense of the

imaginal self, immediately constellates a unique imaginal field, and ideally a healthy narcissism

based on the relationship with the Divine and the re-cognition of the fitra, the primordial

essence. The development of character through dis-identification with our nafs, persona, and

subpersonalities, the evolution of our own Imago Dei are all an essential part of self-cultivation.

Notwithstanding the potential for multiple expressions of personality and character evoked by

the archetypal symbol of the Enneagram which are manifested in each of these imaginal fields,

the Straight Path becomes teleological when we clarify the destination to which we aspire. We

are now speaking of taqlid, khalifa, khayal, himma, niyyah, iradah, ‘aql and nur because these

are the faculties required for self-cultivation and transmutations of the nafs to the Gardens of
Paradise. We are called by the Straight Path and the Gardens of Paradise by the very fact that we

are already endowed with the primordial essence, fitra. The pace and quality of our process of

self-cultivation and the path which we tread may well be influenced by any one of the ennea-

types of the archetype of the Enneagram, whichever interpretation of the symbol one favors,

even if the ennea-type merely expresses an egoic delusion. One aspect of our self-cultivation is

to learn to offer a full surrender (Islam) to the archetypal force of the Straight Path to the

Gardens of Paradise. Our prayers can only be deeply enriched when we step out of the way and

hold our narcissism in check. This takes an open hearted surrender to the Straight Path, and in

present day reality, it may not look anything like the one which has been prescribed in the

shari’a for the past 1400 years.

However, Maslow’s motivation theory and his hierarchy of needs cannot be underestimated

for the millions of individuals who may not enjoy the environmental and structural conditions on

the planet or in their societies conducive to the aims of self-actualization. But from an Islamic

perspective, self-actualization is nigh impossible without guidance, whether this is consciously

derived or unconsciously motivated. If all praise is due to Allah, how can the self actualize on its

own? Can it be inferred from the first six verses of al-Fatiha that self-actualizers are on the

Straight Path, whether they subscribe to the faith of Islam or not to any faith at all? Is it possible

to accept the rejection of Islam as perceived by the Rushdies, Nasreens and Hirsi Alis as an act

of individuation from an Imago Dei which no longer nourishes the soul? The next verse clarifies

this potentiality.

Q 1:7 sirât al-ladhîna an`amta `alayhim

The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favors, blessings and Grace
 Traditionally, this verse has been interpreted to mean the path of the Prophets, (and for the

Shi’a − their Imams), the saints, the martyrs and the mystics, and all those who have attained the

highest levels of consciousness. The conventional patriarchal hermeneutic has historically

focused on the male stars of the spiritual firmament. But what is essential to an integral

psychology is that even this limited hermeneutic included all of the 25 named and other un-

named prophets and servants of Allah cited in the Qur’an. Those named include Adam, Idris,

Noah, Hud, Salih, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, Lot, Joseph, Shuayb, Job, Dhu al-Kifl,

Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Zechariah, John the Baptist, Jesus and

Muhammad. Brannon Wheeler’s analysis of the stories of the prophets in Prophets of the Quran

cites the following verses, Q 2:136, Q 3:84, Q 4:136 and Q 42:13, stipulating “belief in all the

prophets and the books revealed to them without making distinctions among them. Ibn Sa’d (d.

230) reports that the number of rasul including the Prophet Muhammad is 315, and the total

number of prophets is 1000. Other Muslim sources list the total number of prophets as 224,000”

(2002, p. 8). Whatever the accurate count of divinely ordained and imagined prophets, (the

symbolic number I am more familiar with is 124,000), the message is clear that the wisdom of

the prophets being referenced is the perennial wisdom. For purposes of this hermeneutic, the

verse Q 1:7 does not identify any single individual prophet. Clearly, for the majority of Muslims,

the final prophet, Muhammad, is considered the seal of the prophets and hence his example is the

key to consider in an Integral Psychology of Islam. But, there is, in fact, no mention of the word

prophet in the sacred verses. Hence a psychological hermeneutic need not limit itself to those

who have achieved the highest levels of self-perfection or those who have been commissioned to

remind humanity of the Divine, or for that matter only the Muslims saints and mystics. The

words which clearly resonate in this verse are the words referring to the bestowal of favors,
blessings, and Grace. The sixth verse identifies a Straight path. This seventh verse clarifies that

the path is one which has been walked by those who have received divine favors and Grace. So,

we might conclude that the verse refers to the perennial philosophy which as Aldous Huxley

explains in The Perennial Philosophy is potentially accessible to all, although attained by few:

“But direct awareness of the ‘eternally complete consciousness,’ which is the ground of the

material world, is a possibility occasionally actualized by some human beings at almost any

stage of their own personal development, from childhood to old age, and at any period of the

race’s history” (2009, pp. 20-21). After all, 124,000 or even 224,000 self-realized beings is a

miniscule number of humanity to have achieved such a spiritual rank over several millennia.

How many of us deign to consider ourselves amongst such a spiritual elite?

A more helpful psychological interpretation of the verse, for this particular Garden of

Paradise, is to focus on all those who have received Divine gifts and favors, not necessarily at the

level of complete consciousness, which would be more appropriate for discussion in the Garden

of Paradise fed by the river of wine. In a fascinating account of her near-death experience of

December 1998, documented in considerable detail by a Canadian Muslim journalist in A

Passage to Eternity, Azmina Suleman is surprised at the diversity of beings she encountered or

witnessed on the other side. Raised in the Shi’a Ismaili tradition of Islam, it was deeply inspiring

but not extra-ordinary for her to encounter the first Imam ‘Ali or even the Prophet Noah, or

Jesus. She was surprised to see Mary at the highest rank she had attained in those realms, next to

the Prophet of Islam. But she was equally astonished at the line up of individuals whom she

refers to as the “star heads:”

These “star heads”, as I like to call them, seemed to symbolically convey to me that what
mattered in this higher dimension was what was in our heart and in the space between our two
ears. In other words, they represented the intellectual elite and geniuses of our time that had
spanned the ages.
 One of the first shapes that I recognized was that of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates,
followed by his student Plato (whom I was only able to identify much later). Next to them
was the tall and imposing image of the fifteenth-century Italian renaissance painter, Leonardo
da Vinci. To their extreme right was the distinctive outline of the sixteenth-century English
playwright William Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century Austrian-born musical genius
Beethoven. They were followed by more recent and recognizable faces of the twentieth-
century nuclear physicist Albert Einstein, and the German theologian, philosopher, Christian
missionary, and winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize - Albert Schweitzer.

These “star heads,” to my mind, did not merely denote the eggheads but were individuals who
came with stellar credentials. They were the trailblazers and amongst the brightest stars in our
universe whose light had definitely shone the brightest. They were the inspired thinkers,
philosophers, scholars, poets, painters, artists, musicians, scientists, philanthropists, and
humanitarians who had dramatically revolutionized the thinking of their times. They were the
renaissance men, the true movers and shakers of our age who had awakened us to the
existence of new possibilities both in the world around us, and, indeed, within ourselves.
(2004, pp. 95-96)

The “star heads” which Suleman is referring to here are what Maslow has described as the

self-actualizers of human history. Hence, strictly from the perspective of a psychological

hermeneutic, in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of water, the first part of the seventh

verse includes, but is certainly not limited to, the prophets and guides of the perennial

philosophy. However, it cannot fail to include those who have left their mark on humanity with

the gifts, blessings and favors with which they were endowed. To that end, the discussion will at

first include the prophet of Islam as an exemplary self-actualizer but will not limit itself to the

founder of one religion.

It is important to note that in the third edition of Motivation and Personality, Maslow also

accepted, from his own observations of the self-actualizers he was studying, that such individuals

had their fair share of flaws and shadow material:

What this has taught me I think all of us had better learn. There are no perfect human beings!
Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist
creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers. This can certainly give us hope for the
future as a species even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these
very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To
 avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it. (1987,
pp. 146-147)

In a doctoral dissertation titled From Maslow to Muhammad, Irene Sheiner Lazarus presents a

case study and documents all of Maslow’s categories of self-actualization with which the prophet

of Islam was endowed. These include the prerequisite satisfaction of the four basic levels of

needs in his proposed hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem), an

absence of psychopathology, and the passion to fulfill his highest potential and calling. Lazarus

reviews the history of the Prophet and substantiates how Muhammad met all the hierarchy of

needs. She notes that it is impossible to assess the prophet for an absence of psychopathology:

“Of course, it is impossible to give Muhammad, s.a.w.s., a Rorschach test. But a simple look at

his life, which was filled with great vision, enormous risk taking, and effective action in the face

of major opposition and conditions of extreme stress, suggests a strong and healthy personality,

unfettered by crippling inner wounds” (1985, p. 166). But it was in answering the call to

prophethood that Muhammad demonstrated true self-actualization and it was on his spiritual

ascension that he met the highest need for self-transcendence.

In the Qur’an and in Dar al-Islam, the Prophet is identified as an exemplar, Q 33:21 and as a

mercy to the all the worlds, Q 21:107. As Carl Ernst suggests in his book Following

Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World:

he has served as an ongoing model for ethics, law, family life, politics, and spirituality in
ways that were not anticipated 1400 years ago. There are few people in history who have had
a greater impact on humanity, and it is through the historical elaboration of tradition that we
must seek to understand that impact. (2003, p. 74)

As a model of the perfect human, insan al-kamil, Muhammad is for many Muslims the

subject of great emulation. For some Muslims, this emulation extends to imitating all his habits

such as wearing a beard, following his desert dress code, praying as he prayed, polygamy,
arranged marriage, marrying a child-bride, and engaging in war as he engaged in war, sometimes

even in pre-emptive defense of the faith. Emulation is the concept of taqlid. Muslims are eager to

follow the sayings and traditions of the Prophet because he was an exemplar and a mercy to all

the worlds. As mentioned earlier, as an exemplar he becomes the External Unifying Center

which activates the integration of the personality. In Major Themes of the Qur’an, Fazlur

Rahman makes the point that the example of the prophet also lay in his capacity to model the

highest levels of virtue accessible to ordinary humans:

To be sure, no man is immune from the devil’s temptations - not even the prophets (22:52;
17:53), nor yet the Prophet Muhammad himself (7:200; 41:36) - yet it is within the reach of
any true man of faith and will, let alone the prophets, to overcome them (15:42); 17:65;
16:99). The reason is that such men, amidst all temptations, keep intact their “primordial
nature [fitra] upon which God created man,” which “cannot be [logically] altered [although it
may be more or less temporarily disturbed]” (30:30). Indeed it is these men who are the cream
of all creation, outstripping even the angels, whom they excel in both knowledge and virtue.
(1994, pp. 18-19)

Nevertheless, the Prophet’s life was not without controversy, especially his views on gender

parity. According to the research by Moroccan sociologist and renowned feminist scholar of

Islam, Fatima Mernissi writes in The Veil and the Male: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s

Rights in Islam, that it was Umm Salama, one of his wives, who drew the prophet’s attention to

the fact that the Qur’an seemed only to be addressed to men. Had the Prophet not noticed? It

was after this conversation with the Prophet that Qur’anic verse Q 33:35 began specifically to

address women. Mernissi suggests that this represented the first feminist protest movement in

Islam:

Many signs lead us to believe that it represented a veritable protest movement by the women.
Umm Salama’s question was the result of political agitation and not the capriciousness of an
adored wife. First of all, some versions tell us that the initiative came from the women of the
community: “Some women came to the wives of the Prophet and said to them: “Allah has
spoken of you [the Prophet’s wives] by name in the Koran, but he has said nothing about us.
Is there then nothing about us that merits mentions?” (1991, pp. 119-120)
 The women shared Umm Salama’s concern, but they also took that answer to mean that the

customs that ruled relations between the sexes was to be called into question. Mernissi recounts

that they felt successful because sura 4, An-Nisa “Women’ contains the new laws on inheritance,

which deprived men of their privileges. Not only would a woman no longer be “inherited” like

property, but she could also claim an inheritance.

To Muhammad’s credit, he did not ignore these questions and listened with an open heart.

The inheritance laws initiated a backlash from the men, but this was a clear sign that the Divine

intention was to move society towards gender parity. Mernissi takes exception to the use of the

word sufaha, which means foolish, in Q 4:5 on women because the men of the community and

patriarchal exegetes like Al-Tabari in later centuries used this word to refer to women and

children. What is important to note is that the word, sufaha, is translated by Muhammad Asad as

“those who are weak of judgment” (2003, p. 119). Hence, this may be a specific Qur’anic

reference to those with a mental illness or with impairment in rational functioning.

Sexuality in Islam

In fact, the Prophet often sought the counsel and advice of Umm Salama and Aisha, his

youngest and favorite wife. But the controversy does not end there. The Prophet’s multiple

marriages, which may have been rationalized by the Muslims of the day as marriages of political

convenience to unite the Arab tribes and clans, are still emulated in polygamous relationships in

Dar al-Islam. Muhammad’s relationship with his wives clearly represented Divine approval of

sexuality within marital bounds. The Prophet was not abstinent. The relationship with Mariya,

whose status as “saraya, a wife who retained the status of a slave but whose children would be

free” (Armstrong, 2007, p. 184) is not fully explained in Muhammad: A Prophet of our time,
Karen Armstrong’s biography of the Prophet. None of this would be significant if not for the fact

that Mariya bore Muhammad a son, Ibrahim, who died at birth. Tamam Kahn’s biography,

Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, addresses the issue of Mariya’s status:

Mariya’s relationship to Muhammad is described by most sources as concubine or slave. This

description was in line with contemporary usage. Besides marriage, there was one sort of
relationship between women and men in which the woman belonged to the man and was, to
use a denigrating phrase, his property. Unlike his Arab and Jewish wives, she had her own
house with with a garden called al-‘Aliyya. He also “set up a screen for her,” an act which
usually implied the status of wife. Since we are told Mariya had converted to Islam, it is
possible that the Prophet married her. If he did so, this would have made her the only foreign
woman honored by marriage. Allah’s messenger would have been close to sixty years old
when he met Mariya. He was nearly at the peak of his life’s work. His activities and the words
that flowed from his mouth had begun a revolution in God-consciousness. It would be natural
to honor this Christian, Islamic convert with marriage. Historical memory, including the
hadith of the other wives, stubbornly views her as a concubine, clearly an outsider. (2010, p.
95)

Whatever the truth, his relationship with Mariya was a cause for much jealousy amongst his

other wives, not least because she had born him a son, perhaps even out of wedlock. It is clear

from the Prophet’s intimate life that he was sexually active, which Maslow notes is typical of

self-actualizers. We know that he was perplexed by his own desire for Zaynab, the beautiful wife

of his adopted son, Zayd, who gifted his wife to the Prophet because of her own attraction to

Muhammad. The example that has been left for the followers of the Prophet to emulate is one of

male sensuality and sexuality, not just the political statesman who married for the purpose of

uniting the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, in contrast, the example for women to follow was the

chastity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, the wisdom of Khadija, the piety of Fatima, his daughter

and the nobility of his later wives and concubines. There is some disjunction in these two

gender-differentiated models which Muhammad left as his legacy: a mixed message that has

caused no end of conflict between the sexes.

 So, what does that say about the psychology of sexuality in the psychology of self in Islam?

For Abdelwahab Bouhiba, in Sexuality in Islam, sexuality in Dar al-Islam should represent the

foretaste of the pleasures of Paradise:

The image of the Muslim paradise is positive and affirmative of the self. Islam does not
repress the libido. In paradise our desires will be accommodated, taken seriously. This means
that the peace of paradise is achieved through self-fulfillment. For paradise is first of all a
meeting with others. Love is in a sense multiplied by the presence not only of wives, but also
houris. This pluralization of love implies its own transcendence in others. In paradise
everyone will have at least one companion, for “there is no celibacy in paradise” (ma fil
jannati min a’zab).

Paradise, then, is crowded. Without the Ahl al-janna, the “people” of paradise, it would lose
all meaning. An empty paradise is inconceivable. Moreover the myth shows us that the desire
of the believer to meet the houris is not a one way affair, for the houris, too, await impatiently
the arrival of the blessed to whom they have been promised. Sometimes, the houris ardently
wish to see their earthly masters. They leave their palaces. The archangel Radhuan sometimes
takes them to the summit of paradise where they can contemplate their masters. (2004, p. 84)

This is clearly a patriarchal, if not sexist, interpretation of paradise. It is one that, no doubt,

the 9/11 hijackers had in mind when they set out on their mission of global jihad. In their

delusions about paradise, they ignored every other sacred law about the preservation of life, not

least their own. There is no doubt that there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslim

militants who live under this delusion that seems to have gained global currency, and there are

millions who might even echo Bouhiba’s claim that “If earthly orgasm gives some foretaste of

paradise, one must admit that life in paradise is an infinite, eternal orgasm” (2004, p. 85).

This is clearly in sharp contrast to what is prescribed by Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh in The

Psychology of Sufism: “From the Sufi point of view, Satan is none other than the amalgam of the

attributes of the nafs which arise from the realm of Wrath. In other words, Satan is the

manifestation of God’s Wrath … .The Masters of the Path have urged that the passions be

resisted” (1992, p. 35). So, there are two, seemingly polar-opposite, views on sexuality in Islam.

The Qur’anic one which seems to endorse the notion of women as tilth for men, as in Pickthall’s
rendition of Q 2:223: “Your women are as tilth for you to (cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye

will, and send (good deeds) before you for your souls, and fear Allah, and know that ye will (one

day) meet Him” (2006, p. 45), while exhorting chastity for women. The other view requires

chastity and self-discipline as a methodology for both men and women so as to prepare for an

encounter with the Transpersonal. Neurosis may arise from the confusion in not knowing which

path to pursue, especially if Satan is on the prowl. However, from an integral perspective, both

approaches may be valid with each meeting the needs for success and sustenance in two different

Gardens of Paradise. The garden fed by the river of water is the behavioral quadrant. It

accommodates one set of needs, the physiological and safety needs, and the need for love and

esteem on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The Garden fed by the river of wine is the transpersonal

quadrant and it accommodates the highest level need for self-transcendence, when either the

lower level needs have been satisfied or are less satisfying, or the burning desire for self-

transcendence overwhelms the psyche to the exclusion of all other needs. Perhaps, there is yet

another perspective in which balance and harmony are attained by enjoying both Gardens of

Paradise: a balance between the zahir and the batin, in which we successfully manage the tension

of the opposites, as did the Prophet Muhammad. We know that this is not just within the purview

of a prophet. The aide de camp and biographer of the mystic, sage, polymath, medical doctor,

and imaginal psychotherapist, Ibn Sina, is reported to have remarked in Arthur Arberry’s classic,

Avicenna on Theology that “The Master was powerful in all his faculties, and he was especially

strong sexually; this indeed was a prevailing passion with him, and he indulged in it to such an

extent that his constitution was affected; yet he relied upon his powerful constitution to pull him

through” (1994, p. 22). One might even conclude that the Prophet’s legacy was to set an example

of the principle of tawhid, oneness or unity within the human being, which requires self
acceptance of all aspects of our selves. Maslow made the point in the third edition of Motivation

and Personality that with self-actualizers:

Sex can be wholeheartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person,
even at the same time that it does not play any central role in the philosophy of life. It is
something to be enjoyed, something to be taken for granted, something to build upon,
something that is very basically important like water or food, and that can be enjoyed as much
as these; but gratification should be taken for granted. I think such an attitude as this resolves
the apparent paradox in the self-actualizing person’s simultaneously enjoying sex so much
more intensely than the average person, yet at the same time considering it so much less
important in the total frame of reference.

It should be stressed that from this same complex attitude toward sex arises the fact that the
orgasm may bring on mystical experiences, and yet at other times may be taken rather lightly.
(1987, p. 152)

The view that the sexual dimension of love is impregnated with spiritual significance is also

affirmed by Nasr in The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s mystical

tradition, in which he asserts that

sexual union is an earthly reflection of a paradisal proto-type. The male experiences the
Infinite and the female the Absolute in this earthly union, which returns, albeit for a moment,
the human being to his or her androgynic wholeness. The bliss of sexual union is also a
foretaste of the bliss of the union of the soul with the Spirit. (2007, p. 65)

If we are keen followers of the Enneagram as a model for the integration of personality, we

know that for each of the nine ennea-types, there is a point of integration and a point of

disintegration, and that we do in fact have passions and fixations. Based on this verse of al-

Fatiha, Islam clearly favors the concept of a perfect model for integration of the personality,

rather than a psychological type. One might examine whether there is a difference between

imitation of the Prophet in all his sayings and actions as an ideal model of human behavior in

contrast to emulation of his qualities as a self-actualized human being. The former might suggest

that one begins with a denial of one’s own self wheras the latter might suggest that one seeks

inspiration from the qualities of the prophet’s character to become more of one self.
Psychologically, we might ask, is imitation an expression of healthy narcissism? Do we just fake

it until we make it? Or do we attempt to integrate those qualities that inspire us to higher levels

of personal self-cultivation and refinement? What would imitation or emulation look like for a

Muslim woman?

An anthology of Muslim women’s voices, I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being

Muslim, includes an essay by Atlanta journalist and CNN producer, Maria M. Ebrahimji titled

“In search of Fatima and Taqwa.” In it, she recounts the experience of a particular Shi’a ritual of

the rhythmic beating of the chest, which is performed during the month of Muharram, a time

when followers of the descendants of the Prophet mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein:

The first time I saw my mother cry was when we performed that ritual in mosque. It was a
profound yet simple act of faith, but her emotion and that of the women surrounding me
became increasingly high when Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, was
recognized. Great tears of respect and celebration and sorrow were shed in recognition of her
life.

Many times, in my own youthful naiveté, I had questioned how a woman who had seemed
almost of legend, who had lived more than 1,000 years ago, could still inspire emotion among
men and women alike. I now know why. As a foremother of Islam and a timeless model of
womanhood, she was the kind Muslim woman I knew I wanted to become. I was searching
for the Fatima in myself. (Ebrahimji, M.M., & Suratwala, Z. T. Eds., 2011, pp.26-27)

A recent anthology Women and Islam, edited by Claremont professor of religious studies,

Zayn Kassam, includes an insightful essay titled “From Ritual to Redemption: Worldview of

Shi’a Muslim Women in Southern California” authored by Bridget Blomfield of the University

of Nebraska. She discusses the significance of two very important role models for Shi’a women:

Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, and her own daughter Zaynab, who is considered a patron

saint to mothers, orphans, and the oppressed:

Depicting images of piety and resistance, Fatima and Zaynab serve as important role models
for Shi’a women, guiding them to fight for human rights and justice. As revealed in early
Shi’i history, Fatima and Zaynab were, and continue to be, integral parts of the community
 spiritually and politically. Shi’a women continue to emulate both of these women as
exemplary role models. (2010, p. 305)

Fatima, known for her purity and piety, works as an intercessor for both male and female

Shi’a Muslims. The prevailing Shi’a belief is that she stands at the gates of paradise, holding a

70-yard scroll wherein the merits and transgressions of the believers are written. She serves as a

mediator between this world and the next. Adoration of Fatima for her patience and suffering

means instant admission into paradise.

The Qur’an itself identifies Mary in Q 3:42 as the woman who was raised above all the others

of the world and according to a sound tradition researched by Resit Haylamaz in the biography,

Khadija: The First Muslim and the Wife of the Prophet Muhammad, recounts how the prophet

himself acknowledged both Mary and his own wife Khadija as the ideal of feminine perfection:

One day, Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, was describing her virtue, and he
pointed to the heaven and earth with his finger and stated, ‘Mary, mother of Jesus, is the best
of the women of the heavens, and the worthiest woman of the earth (still alive) is Khadija,
daughter of Khuwaylid. (Haylamaz, R., & Coṣar, H., 2009, p. 62)

Aliah Schleifer’s doctoral research in Mary the Blessed Virgin of Islam proposes, based on Ibn

Kathir’s commentaries, that Mary’s status was considered as the most preferred of Paradise:

He thus ranks the four as follows: firstly Mary the daughter of ‘Imran, secondly Fatima,
thirdly Khadija and fourthly Asiya. Ibn Katyhir then concedes that ‘Indeed, God purified and
preferred Mary above the women of the world of her time, and it is possible that her
preference was above all women. (1998, p. 64)

But given the enormity of these figures such as Muhammad and the prophets before him,

Mary, Khadija, and Asiya, the wife of the Pharoah, and for the Shi’a, the lineage of the Imams,

Fatima, and Zaynab, all of whom were blessed with favors and Grace, what, we must surely

wonder, can the average person aspire for? To set an ideal that is beyond our capacity of

attainment is cause for additional anguish and neurosis, even though their purpose as models and

external unifying centers is clearly for us to emulate for the integration of personality. Can we be
expected to attain the ranks and status of Muhammad and Khadija, Mary and Jesus and Moses,

or ‘Ali and Fatima? Perhaps, psychologically we might aim, in the Garden of the Paradise fed by

the river of water, to emulate Aisha, the prophet’s favorite wife for her courage and sagacity or

his other wife, the beautiful Umm Salama, whose counsel Muhammad sought and heeded, even

as she questioned him on why the Qur’an had not, up until then, specifically mentioned women.

Perhaps we can aspire to attain the integrity and courage of Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, who

has fought for the rights of women in Iran without abandoning her faith. We can seek to emulate

the exemplary courage of self-actualizers such as the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan or Aung

San Suu Kyi of Burma or former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, in their noble stand

for democracy, which has been inspirational for all humanity. We need mentors and models of

self-actualization from whom we can learn and with whom we can interact in our own times;

models closer to our worlds and imaginal realms, if we are to fully engage in the work of self-

cultivation and the integration of personality. Is it any wonder that the apostles who followed

Jesus or the followers of Muhammad who emerged from the desert sands to create a global

civilization were able to achieve higher levels of consciousness? They had living models closer

in time to their daily reality. We must find our modern-day exemplars and self-actualizers whose

qualities inspire us such as the ‘aql, khayal and himma of a Bill Gates for transforming the way

we learn and process information, or the khayal, niyyah, and iradah of Muhammad Yunus who

found a way to alleviate poverty through the spread of micro-loans, or the fitra and niyyah of

Marla Ruzika, whose brief life resulted in US congressional war reparations for the innocent

victims of the Gulf war in Iraq. Perhaps we can look to the ‘aql, khayal, himma and niyyah of

figures like Bangladeshi-American Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, which provides

free online math tutorials to children world-wide, or the first Arab woman to win the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2011, Yemeni journalist and activist, Tawakkul Karman who led the movement to

topple the Yemeni dictatorship. Hers was also an act of iradah.

American Muslim inter-faith activist, Eboo Patel, who holds a doctorate in the sociology of

religion from Oxford University, offers a contemporary vision of the kinds of models in his

imaginal realm, who inspired his evolving faith as a Muslim, in his compelling memoir, Acts of

Faith: The story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation:

The perspective I brought to Islam had been shaped by my admiration for Dorothy Day,
Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama, as well as my friendship with Kevin and Brother
Wayne. I loved the spirituality and social justice in Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and
Buddhism. I had had no interest in Islam until my most recent trip to India, when I had found
Muslim prayer surfacing in my Buddhist meditation, when the Dalai Lama had told me to be a
good Muslim, and when I had seen my grandmother model what that meant. Now I wanted to
learn about the tradition behind her spiritual equanimity and service ethic. Were there heroes
in my faith like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr.? Did it have poets like
Tagore and Blake? Philosophers like Maimonides and Aquinas? Had my faith helped free
countries the way that Gandhi’s Hinduism had? Did it have mouth-widening beauty like the
Sistine Chapel? I knew nothing of Islam except that it lived in my bones. I desperately wanted
it to be magnificent. (2007, pp. 104-105)

In Sufism, the model that often represents the external unifying center is the Sheikh or

Sheikha of a tariqa. In the Shi’a Ismaili tradition, the Imam often serves this function for

some of his followers although many murids will also claim the inimitability of the Imam. In

Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’a Islam, an ayatollah may serve this function. In all instances,

however, the model can serve to integrate the personality to, at minimum, prepare the

potential for a transpersonal or religious experience. But we also know that Ibn ‘Arabi and

others have had encounters with imaginal figures. Ibn ‘Arabi encountered Jesus and Khidr. I

have to confess that my own encounter with the imaginal figure of the Laughing Buddha was

a profoundly transformative experience over a period of 2 years. As the dialogue with him

suggests, I had not fully accepted the reality of his being until I read about Jung’s encounter

with Philemon. The intensity of the experience of transformation inspired by the encounter
 with the Laughing Buddha is impossible to quantify, but the impact of this imaginal figure is

as real in my life as any living Imam or prophet of yore.

Q 1:7 ghayr il-maghdûbi `alayhim wa la d-dâlîn

Not of those consciously or unconsciously immersed in Sacred Chaos,

Nor of those who have lost their way.

Traditionally, the majority of the translators use a literal translation to articulate the first

part of this verse: “Not of those who earn Thy Anger” (Please refer to translations in Appendix

A). Enter the Divine Anger or Wrath or Displeasure of God. As noted in the literature review,

many of the Qur’anic exegetes have then gone so far as to ascribe the recipients of this Divine

Anger to the Jews, who are never mentioned in this verse. If one harbored the notion that the

anti-Semitism that exists in Dar al-Islam today was a phenomenon that began with the birth of

Israel in 1948, we have shown that these interpretations predated the creation of the Jewish state.

Regrettably, this bigotry in Dar al-Islam is still common in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,

and Jordan. The controversial Canadian journalist Tarek Fatah claims in his book, The Jew Is

Not My Enemy, that anti-Semitism is still rampant and even sanctioned by certain religious

authorities:

In one government-approved textbook for Jordanian high school students, Jews are described
as innately deceitful and corrupt. “Up to the present,” it states, “they are the masters of usury
and leaders of sexual exhibitionism and prostitution.” It is not uncommon to hear Islamist
televangelists and Saudi clerics in their sermons refer to Jews as descendants of apes and
monkeys.

In Pakistan too, textbooks continue to depict Jews in a bad light. Conservative officials
regularly block attempts by the government to delete anti-Jewish material from textbooks. In
one instance, the text-book board agreed, under pressure from the World Bank and other
funding agencies, to remove a section from ninth- and tenth-grade text-books that urged
pupils to “fight against those who believe not in Allah” and asked for “Allah’s curse” on Jews
 and Christians. However, after removing the offensive text from books for grades nine and
ten, board officials sneaked it in to books for grades eleven and twelve. (2010, p. 21)

To claim that the pathology of certain expressions of Islam is derived from its scripture can be

challenged for the most part, but to deny that the pathology is derived from some of these

malignant interpretations defies the truth and boggles the imagination. Christians are also often

ascribed to the second part of this verse, as “those who are astray.” If there was any doubt that

these world-views were embodied by the 9/11 hijackers, one cannot doubt that those who

beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan were motivated by an extreme anti-

Semitism and those who recently bombed Christian churches in Nigeria were motivated by

religious bigotry.

But it is also true that in the nascent phase of Islam, there was a collective need to understand

and validate any distinctions between the faith established by a new prophet, and the existing

monotheistic faiths, which also had their prophets and scriptures. Hence the early interpretations

of this verse were the origin of identity politics in Dar al-Islam and one of the sources for the

hegemonic impulse in Islam. The move to establish a class distinction between Muslims and the

followers of the other two monotheistic traditions will be discussed in further detail in the next

chapter. Yet we know that the Qur’an makes no distinctions between the prophets, Q 3:84.

Muhammad acknowledged the sanctity and authenticity of all those who came before him and

the Divine message that they were anointed to share with humanity. The alchemical transference

dialogue serves to underscore how feelings of inferiority, confusion, and the need for belonging

can also inspire identity politics.

It is time, in the context of an emerging global civilization, to abandon these pre-modern

interpretations which have had the sanction of religious authority over the millennia and examine

the words themselves. Some still claim that Allah, like the God of the Bible is wrathful, so when
they pray the al-Fatiha, the Divine Wrath is invoked for them several times a day. One may ask

what the psychological outcome of such an invocation might be. We might adopt a Jungian

perspective and affirm that in Islam at least the shadow of Allah is not denied and that the

believer must hold the tension of opposites, the Infinite Compassion and Mercy of Allah with

Allah’s wrathful nature. But how can we tolerate the notion of an Infinitely Compassionate and

Infinitely Merciful God with its opposite: a wrathful God. Hammoudi writes in A Season in

Mecca about the dread of punishment he feels in Medina, a religious fear he experiences as he

gets caught up in a crowd of worshippers. Is this dread contagious or was he caught in what Jung

referred to as a participation mystique? Hammoudi contemplates the psychological impact of

divine violence, reminiscent of the Biblical narratives of God:

The actual commerce that religion has with violence is often disregarded in favor of a few
abstractions. Vengeance by fire and destruction, justice through plague or the sword,
annihilation in floods or attacks carried out by birds - these represent reparation and
compensation through violence. The motives for divine violence aren’t always
comprehensible. (Hammoudi & Ghazaleh, 2006, p. 188)

To bring this verse closer to home, I well remember the anguish my devout mother felt when

valiantly battling breast cancer which had metastasized to the bone after 20 years. “Which great

sin could I have committed to have to endure such excruciating pain?” she had asked me. Did

she believe in a wrathful God who would make her suffer before she was finally called home?

Do I, too, carry the memory of this belief, and avoid its implications by seeking a different

narrative for God?

In Living Islam Out Loud, another anthology of American Muslim women’s voices, edited by

Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, California-based novelist Samina Ali, whose family migrated from

Hyderabad, India, echoes the same anguish as my mother expressed to me. She describes the

beliefs of her family and community and her victimization by them on discovering that her
husband was gay: “If God’s wrath were not enough, even my community, who insisted my

husband was not gay, sided with him while making me, the girl who had grown up in their midst,

the pariah: they said God was punishing me for my sins, which was why a perfectly good

Muslim husband had left me” (2005, p. 28). Can we really blame her for her abreaction to such

infamy when we know that violence begets violence? “My anger pushed me away from God.

Immaturely, I thought: If He can forsake me, I can forsake Him. That first year in Eugene was

the last time I kept fast during Ramadan for six years. My salat also dwindled over the months to

nothing” (p. 29). Her anger is justified as all too often the female victims in Dar al-Islam are

blamed and shamed for the acts of violence and disregard perpetrated on them, but, as Samina

Ali herself intimates, the anger was displaced until she learned about Sufism, the esoteric and

mystical dimension of the faith.

The fiery Syrian-American psychiatrist, Dr. Wafa Sultan, addresses this issue in her

controversial memoir on the shadow of Islam, A God Who Hates, with an Object Relations,

depth psychological interpretation - the power of negative introjections:

When you teach a child the attributes of God and tell him that he is an avenger, a compeller,
imperious, one who subdues, as well as one who nourishes, what have you done to him? You
have helped create a vengeful, tyrannical, and over-bearing person who also nourishes, but at
what cost? For people see their God as their ideal, and strive both consciously and
unconsciously to internalize him and merge with him. When we convince them that God is
vengeful we justify their becoming vengeful too. Human nature strives for union with its
ideal, so what do you think happens when that ideal is God Himself? (2009, pp. 55-56)

It is from these kinds of attitudes, reflections, and experiences that so many Muslims

understand the term taqwa as the fear of God. This fear of God is the cause of much neurosis in

Dar al-Islam. Fazlur Rahman presents in Major Themes of the Qur’an, an alternative

proposition, which requires a conscious effort to balance the extremes of pride, narcissism and

self-indulgence, on the one hand, with hopelessness and despair, on the other:
 This unique balance of integrative moral action is what the Qur’an terms taqwa, perhaps the
most important single term in the Qur’an. At its highest, it denotes the fully integrated and
whole personality of man, the kind of “stability” which is formed after all the positive
elements are drawn in. The term is usually translated by the words “fear of God” and “piety.”
Though these are not wrong, Muslims are increasingly discarding the term “fear of God”
because they think the phrase misleading in view of the false picture, widely prevalent in the
West until recently - and present even today -of the God of Islam as a capricious dictator or a
tyrant, in the light of which “fear of God” might be indistinguishable from, say fear of a wolf.
(1994, p. 28)

This approach serves only to invalidate these widely held beliefs which is psychologically

inappropriate since the experience of fear and dread is so real for so many, based on literal

translations and comprehensions of al-Fatiha. On the other hand, it also serves to affirm that the

Divine Wrath may be interpreted as the sacred chaos which disintegrates or disorganizes the

personality or the self, as Rahman suggests earlier in the text:

God’s ‘remembrance’ ensures the cementing of personality where all details of life and
particulars of human activity are properly integrated and synthesized; ‘forgetting’ God, on
the other hand, means fragmented existence, ‘secularized’ life, an unintegrated and
eventually disintegrated personality, and enmeshment in the details at the cost of the whole.
(1994, pp. 21-22)

It is the disintegration and disorganization of the self which represents the immersion in sacred

chaos. Psychologically, this condition can present as a crisis in faith or worse, a chronic mental

illness resulting in the loss of both himma and ‘aql.

Robert Dilts, Tim Hallbom, and Suzi Smith discuss the nature of beliefs in Beliefs: Pathways

to Health and Well-Being:

Beliefs are not necessarily based upon a logical framework of ideas. They are instead,
notoriously unresponsive to logic. They are not intended to coincide with reality. Since you
don’t really know what is real, you have to form a belief – a matter of faith. (1993, p. 16)

Whichever way this verse is translated and understood, the psychological meaning seems to

purport to the negative and sometimes harsh outcomes for deviant conduct on the path of self-

cultivation. Swiss-based psychoanalyst and social anthropologist Francoise O’Kane coined the
phrase “sacred chaos” in her book of the same title, Sacred Chaos: Reflections on God’s Shadow

and the Dark Self. The phrase captures for me the depth psychological essence of this

anthropomorphic attribute of wrath ascribed to God. Perhaps the classical, literal translation was

adopted because the verse, as metaphor, was revealed at a time when the collective

consciousness could not fathom the mystery of its deeper meanings, as O’ Kane glimpses in her

analysis:

The Self is given, is unquestionable and unfathomable, and it manifests an ambiguous nature,
both benevolent and nefarious. Further, far from being only an ordering principle, the Self,
like the sacred, is related to chaos: it pertains to nature and to the origins of humanity. It is a
powerful entity which thinking and reason cannot simply structure and explain. (1994, p. 48)

In Eros and Chaos: The Sacred Mysteries and Dark Shadows of Love, Veronica Goodchild

reframes the paradigm of chaos, not as one in opposition to order, but as a harbinger of eros,

“calling us into the unus mundus, into a world of synchronicities, where the desire of spirit for

matter is witnessed” (2001, p. 1). Hence there is a dynamic relationship between the path of love

and the state of immersion in sacred chaos, whether conscious or unconscious.

Psychologist, Richard Bandler and linguistic professor, John Grinder (1982), collaborated in a

program to assist millions of people overcome their fears, increase confidence, enrich their

relationships and achieve greater success in a revolutionary approach to human communication

and development. They called it NLP for neuro-linguistic programming. How this is pertinent to

the seventh verse of the Qur’an is demonstrated by an important NLP principle simply

articulated by Andreas and Faulkner, the editors of NLP: The New Technology of Achievement:

“A fundamental discovery of NLP had been made. How people think about something makes the

crucial difference in how they will experience it” (1994, p. 49).

Hence, strictly from a psychological perspective, it is perhaps more useful to focus on the

outcome of a deviant or regressive behavior that may result in sacred chaos than a small and
angry God who is responsible for acting out some notion of patriarchal displeasure or wrath.

Similarly, those who perhaps may not have found the path of self-cultivation could well have lost

their way in unknown territory or may have repressed or rejected the Sublime, as Assagioli

explains in Transpersonal Development: The Dimension beyond Psychosynthesis:

Finally there is a fear of entering a world different from the one we are used to – an unknown,
disturbing world. This is accentuated by the fact that the attainment of such experiences has
often been presented in the negative form of the renunciation of everything to which man is
usually most attached without placing sufficient emphasis on the positive, joyful
compensations.

The result of all this is resistance and reluctance, or what has sometimes been referred to as
“rejection of the sublime.” (1993, p. 66)

These individuals are not necessarily those who are willfully and defiantly astray, but perhaps

those who remain unconscious or those who may have, through the struggles and

incomprehensible neurobiological events in their lives, somehow managed to repress their fitra

as we all have done at some point in our lives. They may be individuals like Samina Ali who

wrestle with their negative introjections of an angry and vengeful god. Furthermore, one cannot

underestimate the influence of archetypal forces and the jinn, who can play havoc with our lives,

if we have not engaged in prayers for protection and refuge from these forces.

It is for those of us who remain unconscious or even recalcitrant that surely the enlightened

believers will pray for the Grace of our awakening. As we reflect on the translation that is being

proposed for an Integral Psychology of Islam, Steven Pinker’s remarks on semantics in The Stuff

of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature are well worth considering:

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words
to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that
speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts
are anchored to things and situations in the world. It is about the relation of words to a
community - how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to
evoke the same idea in the rest of the population, so people can understand one another when
they use it. (2007, p. 3)
 Pinker explores the relationship between words and emotions and the relationship between

words and social relations. He calls our attention to the fact that words are saturated with

feelings. Words can be endowed with a sense of magic, taboo, and sin. Language is used not just

to transfer ideas but to negotiate the kind of relationship we wish to have with our conversational

partners.

As a mental health clinician and now a licensed psychotherapist, I have struggled long and

hard with the prospect of changing the words I have used in my daily prayers. I can no longer

hold the tension of opposites between an infinitely compassionate and infinitely merciful deity

with the notion of an emotionally immature God who acts out in anger by setting Satanic

archetypal forces loose on his creation. The verses have more meaning for me if we consider that

in fact these are words used to qualify the different types of paths on which humans may find

ourselves. Nasr offers his own reflections in The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of

Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition, on the three states of consciousness which are contained in

the last three verses of al-Fatiha. The interpretation that is rendered here seems to imply that

humans have complete autonomy and free will to choose their paths. It diminishes the

complexity of human personality and character, and the influence of archetypal forces, reducing

the infinite permutations of states of consciousness to just three categories:

These verses specify three possibilities: the Straight Path, which is “the path of those on
whom Thy grace is”; the path of “those on whom Thine anger is”; and the path of “those who
go astray.” In relation to the Divine Reality, which is both transcendent and immanent at the
center of our being as the Self, there are only three paths one can follow. (2008, p. 19)

The first possibility is the path of ascension and the second is the path of descent away from

ontological reality on a vertical axis. The third is to neither an ascent nor a descent but a

horizontal path. We have a choice to ascend the vertical axis and be among those on whom
blessings, favors, and Grace are bestowed, or we can descend into ever lower states of

consciousness as one of those who experiences Divine Wrath. Finally, we can wander along the

horizontal line among those are astray. Nasr makes the eschatological suggestion that these three

possibilities hint at the paradisal, infernal, and purgatorial states of consciousness.

As a wraparound family facilitator, I have encountered many parents who have hit bottom

from their addictions and neglect of their children and turned a page in their lives. Some have

even returned to a life of faith. So, whether we are on a path of descent or a horizontal path, from

the perspective of tawhid, we are not ever disconnected from the One. Our moment of

awakening may be brought on by the very obstacles and hazards on the path on which we may

unconsciously find ourselves, thus affirming Maslow’s concept of a dynamic self.

Take for example, a fatherless 17 year old Caucasian youth, whose mother was a vagrant. He

was enrolled in our community-based mental health program. He was assessed and evaluated by

the counselors at the children’s shelter in Northern California as a “bad seed.” He could do no

right. He was oppositionally defiant, manipulative, and disrespectful to adults and his fellow

teens. He had been pathologized to the point that he no longer had any faith in himself. He had

been at the shelter for 18 months and rejected for placement in intense therapeutic foster homes.

How was it that after just one week as a volunteer at an Outdoor Science Camp supervising fifth

and sixth graders that he was able to turn his life around? He was given an excellent performance

evaluation, had the best time in his life, and welcomed to return any time he wanted. A few

weeks later he had found his own foster home and left the shelter and graduated from the

wraparound program. He had found his own inner khalifa. Granted he had told me that the

science camp was the place that he had had the most fun as a sixth grader. Was it his

spontaneous inner child work that was enough to transform him from a “bad seed” to a valued
member of the volunteers as the science camp? Had he just lost his way? Did his experience as a

volunteer at the science camp facilitate a process of retrieval of his fitra and a rehabilitation of

his himma? Whatever the explanation, the turn-around in his life came from finding some light,

nur, in the darkness. His shelter staff was astonished. He had proved them all wrong. He was not

a bad seed, nor a narcissist, entrenched in his nafs amaara. He was a normal teenager, in need of

love and a sense of belonging, who had lost his way in the confusion of a life, without any caring

parent. He had found unconditional positive regard from total strangers and a sense of

camaraderie with a new peer group.

And if we were to take an ecological perspective and recite this verse on behalf of other

species, then those who may have lost their way might mean that we humans also pray for a

murderous tiger whose hunting range has been invaded by villagers in India. Or a rogue elephant

whose family has been decimated by poachers in Africa? Or a killer whale whose migratory

range has been thwarted by human exploitation? The ecological dialogue in Appendix D

suggests the possibility that the dove whose intention, niyyah, was merely instinctive saved the

life of the prophet of Islam merely by pursuing its own feeding needs, even though it sensed that

something important was happening, demonstrating how all of life is an interdependent passion

play.

From a psychological perspective, as Shahrastani has proposed, we may accept that the only

human agency we ever have is the choice to pray for guidance on the Straight Path, but we may

find ourselves physically and emotionally traumatized, like Dr. Wafa Sultan, and unable to

accept what the path represents, especially if it is based on an exclusivist xenophobic way of

being which leads us away from our fitra. Her memoir seems to strike a vein of the cultural

complex of the hegemonic Syrian Arab society in which she was raised:
 The relationship between Islam and its adherents on the one hand and the rest of the world, as
exemplified by all other religions on the other, is still founded upon fear and mistrust. To a
great extent this relationship still resembles and reflects the relationship between the nomadic
Bedouin and his desert environment. It is a relationship founded on fear and mistrust. No
relationship rooted in fear and mistrust can be sound or healthy, nor can it guarantee the
rights of both parties. (2009, p. 58)

If we are to take this Arab-centric generalization of Islam by Wafa Sultan seriously, we may

begin to recognize the psychological implications of the deeply neurotic dimension of what may

really be misguided notions of Divine Wrath, manifested as the whims and vengeance of Satanic

forces. This in itself might be enough to obscure the reality of the fitra. But Sultan forgets that

the Prophet emerged from this same harsh desert environment and earned a reputation for being

trustworthy, al-amin, before he accepted the mantle of prophet of humankind. It was the personal

embodiment of his transpersonal experiences in encountering Gabriel, receiving the Divine

revelation over a period of 22 years and, most of all, his ascension to the highest levels of

consciousness, which allowed the Prophet to convey an Imago Dei that was sufficiently

trustworthy to transform an entire Bedouin society. Nevertheless, it is also true that Muslims who

have held on to a khayal of a wrathful God, as a result of experiences of victimization and

violence, cannot be expected to cultivate the corresponding himma and meet their needs for

esteem. They live in fear of a punishing God, which is at the weaker end of the experience of

taqwa. This in itself may be the cause of a neurosis that begins to immerse us in sacred chaos,

which can then trigger psychological symptoms or somatic disorders.

This last verse of al-Fatiha can then be interpreted to explain some of the sources and

etiology of mental illness and psychopathology within an Integral Psychology of Islam.

Experiences of disintegration and disorganization of the self can derive from sacred chaos

leading to an impairment of reason, ‘aql and sometimes a gradual dissipation of taqwa. On the

other hand, it is also possible that a disintegration of the self can be provoked by a spiritual
emergency, resulting in a profound apprehension of light, nur, and hence a restoration of taqwa

with a corresponding retrieval of the fitra. Experiences of deep alienation, depression, and even

increased narcissism can result from losing our way, leading to a loss of himma, iradah, and

taqwa. But on the other hand, deep alienation can also result in disidentification, to provoke a

spiritual emergency. All of these states of consciousness may have intense neurobiological

implications requiring pharmacological interventions.

In Al-Junun: Mental Illness in the Islamic World, an anthology edited by Ihsan Al-Issa, an

essay by Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Malik Hussain Mubbashar, titled “Mental

Illness in Pakistan,” suggests that

mental illnesses are caused by upheavals of nafs which is categorized into nafs-e-mutmainna
(satisfied self), nafs-e-lawwamah (critical self), and nafs-e-ammarah (base self). It is the
latter two which have the tendency to fall prey to Satanic designs leading to abnormality of
thought and behaviors. (2000, p. 188)

It would seem then that these two aspects of the self are more vulnerable to the powerful

archetypal forces in the imaginal realm, which as has been explained, can be both internal and

external. The author goes on to say that “the etiology of mental illness is attributed to Satanic

designs which take the form of waswas (obsessional thoughts). Mental illnesses caused by

waswas are categorized as alienation, desacralization, dispersion into multiplicity, and crises of

identity” (p. 189).

The role of these archetypal forces and the jinn cannot be under-estimated. Al-Issa, in his own

essay in Al-Junun, titled “Mental Illness in Medieval Islam” reminds us that the jinn are

recognized in the Qur’an and that the word for madness, majnun in Arabic has its roots in the

word jinn:

The jinn may possess persons, harm them, or drive them mad. Indeed, opponents of the
prophet accused him of being possessed by the jinn (majnun) but the Qur’an defended him
against such accusation and affirmed his position as the messenger of God” (2000, p. 64)
It is interesting to note, in this essay, that the recitation of al-Fatiha was among the methods

recommended for prevention and treatment of the harmful effects of the evil eye, perhaps acting

as an antiserum, given the medieval interpretations of this verse.

The Imaginal Self

What is also important to consider in formulating an accurate integral psychology of the self

in Islam is the notion of the imaginal field, as I have already proposed in my discussion of the

transference to the topic and the researcher’s imaginal field in chapter 2. Al-Ghazali, according

to Ebrahim Moosa, framed the relationship between the human being and the universe as the

relationship between the script (tasnif) and a composition (ta’lif), which conforms to some extent

to contemporary ideas about a narrative psychology:

“The universe, and whatever mystery it hides, is God’s script and His composition, His
original creation and invention. And the spirit is a part of the many components of the
universe. And every unit of its multiple parts teems with mystery.” It is as if Ghazali had in
mind a score, an orchestra, and a conductor. He did not revel in the fragmented nature of the
universe, as some post-modernists do; rather like a musician, Ghazali sought harmony and
symmetry between the various units of the universe. Just as the composite is unique, so too
does each component independently reflect the mysteries of the divine. (2005, pp. 213-214)

In the essay on seduction and psychotherapy cited earlier in Fire and Stone, Corbett presents

a depth psychological perspective within the context of the multiplicity of selves in the

personality in relationship with a matrix of others who inhabit our imaginal field:

All of this emphasis on our ineradicable connections to others moves psychotherapy out of
what R.D. Stolorow and G.E. Atwood (1992) call the “myth of the isolated mind.” Classical
Jungian analysis, with its emphasis on introspectively obtained data from dreams and active
imagination, has often been guilty of this attitude. In fact, we are always selves in a matrix of
other selves, or selfobjects, who are responsive to our needs to varying degrees, in ways that
sustain us or glue us together; we are never selves in a psychological vacuum.

Intrapsychically, the self, like the Self, does not end at the skin. It includes those who are
important to us, and some of the content of our intrapsychic imagery is accordingly tied to the
vicissitudes of these relationships. In Jung’s words: “In the deepest sense we all dream not of
ourselves but out of what lies between us and the other.” (1997, p. 129)

As we begin to unravel the inter-relationships between the four rivers of the Gardens of

Paradise and the feminine fountain of Salsabil at its center, in these next five chapters, it should

become quickly apparent that a psychology of the self cannot rely on the upper-right quadrant
dimensions of the self. Rather the self is part of an imaginal field constellated by all the

dimensions of the terrestrial Gardens of Paradise, and that the imaginal field is both zahir (outer)

and batin (inner).

The shadow dimension of the Sufi system of the nafs is in its denial of the organic factors of

human experience as well as childhood trauma, deficient parenting, and other familial, societal,

and cultural factors that can often contribute to the intensification of the nafs of the Lower

Unconscious.

Clearly, the seven sacred verses of al-Fatiha are imbued with sufficient psychological content

to formulate a psychology of the self, in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of water. It

remains to be seen whether these verses can provide adequate and relevant psychological content

to warrant an Integral Psychology of Islam in the other three Gardens of Paradise. The

alchemical dialogue contributed some depth of understanding and appreciation for the potential

to misconstrue the notion of the Straight Path with issues of religious identity and exclusivism,

especially under conditions of distress and alienation. The pursuit for knowledge became a way

to anesthetize the reality I was living. I was seeking a mythical space, a utopia, where people

shared similar values in an egalitarian society. I had not realized how, because of my

powerlessness, I was unconsciously seeking acceptance and a role to play in some imagined

powerful elite. I was continuously being harassed by a racist elite. This emotional or

psychological distress is perhaps what draws many seekers to a religious group or community.

There is strength in numbers and a shared ideology. It fills the need for belonging, love, and

esteem. There was no sincere vision for a religious experience because my needs for safety,

belonging, love, and esteem were being frustrated. It was all about finding another social group

within which to meet my needs for survival, safety and belonging. I was also seeking some
sense of balance, but I also had dreams of freedom and fantasies about the pursuit of pleasure.

Unconsciously, there seemed to be the feeling that the faith I was raised in was a backward

religion, which is clearly the collective perception of many non-Muslims even today. When I

finally found freedom in Paris, and intellectual stimulation, I was seduced by the world of the

senses, and La Dolce Vita in Italy. I lacked any serious taqwa, even though I was regular in my

ritual prayers. There were no role models for me at the time, even amongst members of my own

faith tradition. The prophet of Islam and the Imam of the Ismailis seemed quite remote as

marginal religious figures. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in my imaginal field. My

search for a Muslim identity was only a reaction to my sense of oppression as a non-White in a

racially charged environment in which I lived in almost daily fear and anxiety. My search for a

religious identity seemed inspired by this dread and anxiety. I think this is the case for many

Muslims today. The concept of identity politics will be treated in the next chapter, but it is clear

that the crisis of religious identity is often confused with a religious fervor and passion, not

sincerely aligned with the Straight Path.

The first imaginal dialogue with the Laughing Buddha helped me to clarify the reality of the

imaginal realm and then to identify the vocational dimension of the Straight Path as a calling and

not necessarily just as a set of ritual practices and a strict moral ethical code to be followed to

attain the Garden of Paradise. The imaginal figure of the Laughing Buddha brought awareness

again to the overidentification of Muslims to our religious identity and the underidentification

with the faith as a religious experience. The dialogue with the Laughing Buddha also brought to

awareness the potential correlation between the fitra and the Buddha-nature and the idea of being

present in the moment-to-moment now as an expression of gratitude on the Straight Path, while

accepting the unknowing and uncertainty of what may appear on the path with each step. The
Laughing Buddha was more concerned about the attitude with which we approach each step and

the way the step is executed, reminding me of the experience I had with this when I was open to

his guidance. Equanimity, a sense of mystery and wonder were the values that are important

along the way, not the outcome of the journey, nor even the final destination of the Straight Path.

I sought the guidance of the Laughing Buddha on how to write about the Gardens of Paradise

as a step in front of me, and he reminded me about staying with the image, as a way to cultivate

himma, aligning with my fitra, and surrendering to each moment. For someone with my fixation

for holy planning, as Hameed Ali, aka Almaas would call it, the Laughing Buddha responded

exactly as Ali suggests in the Facets of Unity for my particular ennea-type, point seven:

It is obvious that the fixation has to do with a blind spot of not seeing that there is a universal
plan, that there is an evolution that has its own momentum, its own direction, its own plan; we
don’t need to meddle with it. If we can see that, then just letting ourselves trust and be in the
present, whatever we do, is the Holy Work. Whatever work we do is the Holy Work because
it is the spontaneous evolution and unfoldment of the universe. This is the Holy Work which
happens according to the Holy Plan. (2002, p. 163)

Almaas notes that every once in a while when we have an insight when we work on

ourselves, we realize that the universal process has its own intelligence and that life takes its own

course. It is when we have an attachment to the outcome and we lack this insight and sensitivity

that we feel we need to make our own plans.

The Laughing Buddha also affirmed my ideas about khayal and the imaginal field. He

clarified the mystery of the way that meanings reveal themselves to us in the hermeneutic

enterprise, which in itself is a dynamic process that is continuous, reminding me that “the

meanings of al-Fatiha will not end with this dissertation because it will continue to reveal more

of itself as you delve deeper.” This was clearly what I needed to hear now to conclude this

section of the dissertation.

 The imaginal dialogue with the Enneagram revealed its archetypal dimension and confirmed

the reality of its existence as an archetypal force. It expanded the notion that each traveler on the

path encounters a unique individual state of consciousness just as there are many layers of

meaning in all symbols including language. I was reminded that the dissertation was not about

the Enneagram and that what was relevant for my inquiry was the spectrum of consciousness that

each traveler experiences is as unique as the imaginal field of each of us. This imaginal dialogue

helped to clarify that an Integral Psychology of Islam “cannot be based on any single dogma”

and that if one uses Claudio Naranjo’s interpretation then there are at least 36 different hybrid

personality types who will encounter and respond to the Straight Path differently.

The ecological dialogue expounded not only the interdependence of the circle of beings to the

Prophet’s mission but also to the fact that humankind is on the verge of an ecocide of

catastrophic proportions if the development of an ecological self is ignored as an expression of

faith. The Dove in the circle of beings also reminded me that “humans have learned to fly from

birds.” This was a clear expression that nonhuman life cannot be underestimated or ignored for

the knowledge that it contributes to planetary existence.

The most profound affective experience that I have had thus far in writing this dissertation has

been with calling the circle of beings, and specifically the dialogue with the well of Zam Zam. I

broke out into a spell of sobbing when the well said, “This well has been present for millennia

from before the time of the Prophet Abraham, and Zam Zam is here to serve in which ever

manner it can to quench your thirst for knowledge.” This was a very holy moment, as I know

that I connected with an archetypal force that spanned the millennia of time. If I can connect with

Zam Zam in this way, then connecting with all the other figures seemed completely plausible.
 The Prophet’s camel, Qaswa, did not hesitate to explain how it navigates the desert

energetically. Qaswa explained the blessing of its natural guidance system, which gives an

ecological meaning in Q 1:7 to the path of those upon whom Thou has bestowed blessings,

favors, and grace. Qaswa helped me to understand how restricted we are in our collaboration

with other species. This will be discussed further in the next chapter. For the moment, it is

important to note that other species fear and recognize us instinctively as genocidal beings. The

Spider explained how it has an innate understanding of geometry and how it is possible for other

species to have peak experiences, including the capacity to relate to the Prophet in its role to

protect him.

The birds that circumaviated the Ka’ba reported how they can sense the state of joy and

ecstasy of the pilgrims. It seems that I was not alone to witness such a wonder: Further research

on this phenomenon yielded an interesting anecdote by the courageous journalist, Asra Nomani,

in her biography, Standing Alone in Mecca:

A flurry of birds called ababeel dashed and darted above us in the night sky, as if to punctuate
my celebration of motherhood. They squealed and chirped in a concert both eerie and lyrical.
My father told me later that these birds hold a divine place in Islamic history. It’s said that an
Abyssinian leader names Abraha assembled an army of sixty thousand warriors and elephants
to destroy the Ka’bah, coincidentally in the year the prophet was born. When the warrior
reached a valley outside Mecca between two cities called Muzdalifah and Mina, the elephants
knelt down and refused to proceed to Mecca. These birds pummeled the soldiers with rocks,
forcing their defeat. (2005, p. 68)

The birds and the elephants are mentioned in Q 14:105. They clearly had a mission to protect

the spiritual vortex of the Ka’ba, and perhaps the birds I saw are entrusted with the same

mission. The birds in the ecological dialogue complained of the pollution that humankind is

visiting on other species: “and there are other species of birds who are suffering from the toxicity

in the plant life and other pollutants in the air.” They were the ones to invoke the sacred web of

life while realizing that there is a natural order of life that includes an interspecies food chain.
The well of Zam Zam, representing the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, expressed concern

about the balance and harmony of the elements, the deforestation of the planet and how water

will become a scarce resource if this is allowed to continue. I was specifically asked to pay

serious attention to this in my “psychological treatise.” Finally, the Amazon Trail urged on me

that human religions need to cultivate a higher sense of environmental conscience.

The ecological dialogue invokes The Sustainer of all the worlds in Q 1:2 to mean not just the

imaginal realms but also all the species on the planet. It also invokes a prayer for guidance on the

Straight Path for the protection from extinction of all existence, not just for the human species.

This requires the new birth of an ecological self. In the anthology The Deep Ecology Movement,

sociologist Bill Devall contributes an essay titled “The Ecological Self” that is relevant to the

birth of this new self:

Exploring the ecological self is part of the transforming process required to heal ourselves in
the world. Practicing means breathing the air with renewed awareness of the winds. When we
drink water we trace it to its sources - a spring or mountain stream in our bioregion - and
contemplate the cycles of energy as part of our body. The “living waters” and “living
mountains” enter our body. We are part of the evolutionary journey and contain in our bodies
connections with our Pleistocene ancestors. (Drengson & Inoue., Eds., 1995, p. 104)

Extending our awareness and receptivity with all other species, the elements, and the

landscape encourages and engenders respect for and solidarity with the field of identification.

This level of communion with our ecological field can serve to reduce tensions and conflicts

between the vital material needs of different groups of people or between humanity and other

species in specific situations. It can provide a basis for right action or right livelihood without

relying on abstract moralism, self-denial, or sacrifice.

This is a call for a deeper muruwwah, a moral goodness, to respect the relationship between

all of Creation and the Sustainer of all the Worlds. For this is how we can authentically give All

Praise to Allah as Q 1:2 calls on us to do. This is the true calling to khalifa. It requires khayal and
himma. We need new symbols such as the Gardens of Paradise to inspire us to a new

environmental ethics or an eco-theology as Kaveh Afrasiabi has proposed in his essay “Toward

an Islamic Ecotheology” (which was discussed in the literature review). We cannot sustain a

Garden of Paradise, fed by the river of water, unless we can depend on our willingness as

individuals to sincerely heed the call for an ethical stance for the very survival of life as we know

it. This ethos will be discussed further in the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of milk, which

symbolizes the collective nurturance of the imaginal self. Each of us is being called, in some

way special only to us, to tend the soul of the world. Even though we know that the Prophet and

the Ka’ba have been protected by other species, and we know that the Prophet also cautioned

against random destruction of trees as part of the terms of engagement in war, we do not have an

eco-praxis in our forms of worship as Muslims. Perhaps we need to learn to embody an

ecological attitude in our deepest appreciation for Q 1:4 “Thee alone we worship and Thee alone

we seek for help.” Can we find in our forms of worship expressions of our ecological self to the

Sustainer of all the Worlds?