or satisfies him with a share of it, you then see him become their assistant. Such men may, on account of their former denunciation, slip into a state even uglier than the one they had been in; or they may fall back into something slightly less heinous, or something much the same.
A second group rise up on sound religion. They act solely for Allah’s sake, seek to set things right in what they do, and keep to that path so long as they endure whatever harm reaches them. These are the people who believe and perform righteous deeds; they belong to the best community ever raised for mankind—they enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong, and believe in Allah.
A third group combines both qualities, and they make up the majority of believers. Within such a person, faith and appetite coexist: in his heart lies both the will to obey and the will to disobey, and at times one prevails while at other times the other does.
[Categories of Souls]
This threefold division corresponds to the saying: souls are of three kinds—
- nafs ammāra (the soul that commands to evil),
- nafs muṭmaʾinna (the tranquil soul),
- nafs lawwāma (the self-reproaching soul).
The first group possess the commanding souls that prod one toward wrongdoing. The middle group possess the tranquil souls of which it was said:
“O tranquil soul, return to your Lord, well-pleased and well-pleasing. So enter among My servants, and enter My Garden.”
(Sūrat al-Fajr 27–30)
The others possess the self-reproaching souls: they commit a sin and then blame themselves for it; their states keep changing—now this way, now that—and they mix righteous deeds with others that are evil.
For this reason, when people lived in the time of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar—whom the Muslims were commanded to emulate, as the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “Follow the two who will come after me: Abū Bakr and ʿUmar”—they were closer in time to the Message and possessed stronger faith and greater rectitude,