Humility, Self-Naughting, and Self-Transcendence: A View from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, in Humility: A History, ed. J. Steinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 93-106 By Atif Khalil

Muslims understand humility (Arabic: khushu’ /tawadu’) to be inseparable from the servitude to God (‘ubudiyya) that is demanded of them by their faith. The defining place of the virtue in Islamic ethics is underscored by the fact that the sin of the two archetypes of wrongdoing in the Quran–Pharoah and Iblis (Satan)–was pride. With that said, humility can be conceived in two complementary ways in the Muslim tradition. When viewed through the lens of a dualistic theology that separates God from the world, humility involves a shift on a spectrum away from the soul’s natural inclination toward feelings of conceit and self-importance. This movement, however, must halt somewhere near the center-point of humility, and not extend into the domain of self-loathing, since the latter is marked by a narcissism of self-hate and self-denigration, unlike pride, which is marked by a narcissism of self-aggrandizement. In Islamic mysticism, particularly from the vantage point of the doctrine of the unity of being, the movement of self-naughting must continue, but now it must do so vertically, upward, toward self transcendence, self-forgetting, and ultimately self-effacement in the divinity. Only then is humility obtained in its fullness as a state of nothingness before the all-consuming in unity of God. This is not a nothingness where the ego is abased as much a nothingness where the ego, like a mirage, is recognized to be unreal. There is a humorous story of an imam of a mosque who, for some reason or another, was overcome one day by a feeling of great humility. It became so intense that it caused him to fall into prostration. As he was on the ground, with his forehead on the prayer rug, he kept repeating, “Oh God, I am nothing. Oh Lord, I am nothing. ” The muezzin (the individual commissioned with the task of making the call to prayer five times a day)

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