Islamic thinkers dealt with the psychological dimension of human beings and tried to understand the processes of thought and behavior. Personalities such as Muhasibi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Kindi and Mawlana have worked to understand the mechanism between the soul and the body and have pondered to reach the psychological equivalents of the knowledge they have gained. Because Islam does not address the material side of the individual, but the human side and emphasizes his personal development.
Today, it is claimed that the source of the science of psychology is Western societies, and it is thought that there is no significant study on this subject in the East. However, Muslim thinkers, sufis and the people of the cause that shape history have done many studies to get to know and understand people and have focused on this issue meticulously. Sufis gave great importance to personality education and stated that people should know themselves first and recognize their weaknesses.
Self-knowledge is the first step of the ladder, where a person turns his attention to his inner world and realizes the negative traits such as envy, arrogance, heedlessness, hypocrisy and worldliness that his soul imposes on him and goes to a radical change. The Islamic elders, who act on the discourse of knowing oneself, draw attention to the awareness of the person and state that change can occur with a conscious awareness.
Sufis have subjected the mechanism of the human soul to a certain hierarchy and have centered these four levels. These four levels, which form the building blocks of personality, are determined as nafs-i emmara, nafs-i lawamah, nafs-i mulhime and nafs-i mutmaine.
The nafs-i emmara is the first step of the ladder, and it expresses the impulsive side of a person that has not been able to distinguish the good from the bad, and the untrained negative traits that can lead him to error. If the nafs-i ammara, which includes the primitive impulses of man, is not disciplined, it leads a person to evil and haram and prevents him from reaching the next level. “Surely, man’s inner self often incites to evil”. (Surah Yousef, 53)
After the nafs-i ammara, the nafs-i lawamah is mentioned, at this stage, the person can realize his mistakes and regret and turn to goodness, but cannot do it consistently. In other words, the person could not achieve dominance over his behavior and could not make goodness an ability. In the nafs-i mulhime, the person has moved to a higher level and has gained a discipline at the point of using his will. The person has now achieved a transformation in the dimension of thought and is able to keep his spiritual impulses under control. And now, by going through these processes, he will reach his self-confidence and continue his life with goodness and benevolence. The person has passed his soul through a natural and effective education process and can evaluate the events with a correct perspective.
While our people greatly admire the science of psychology developed by Western scientists, which ignores the spiritual aspect of the individual, reduces him to a material existence and impoverishes him, they despise and disregard the education method that our elders put forward centuries ago. That's why we encounter the sign of a therapist at every point we turn our heads, but for some reason, we cannot go beyond the first level of the soul. We are all at the stage of the nafs and we consent to remain as children stuck in the adult body. We do what our soul tells us to do, we go where it directs us, and we cannot get out of this ball of contradictions. We grow, develop and age physically, but our thoughts and behaviors never grow, they remain stubby and we say goodbye to life as a child stuck in an adult body.