The Reality of the Soul

Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (13/341) said: “The creed held by the Companions, their Successors who followed them with excellence, the entire early community, and the Imams of the Sunnah is that the soul is a self-subsisting entity. It parts from the body, experiences bliss or punishment, and is neither the body itself nor any of its parts. Since Imām Aḥmad—may Allah have mercy on him—explicitly affirmed this, just as other leading scholars did, his disciples never differed over it.”

He said elsewhere (9/303): “The sound position is that the soul is not composed of indivisible atoms, nor of matter and form, and it is not of the same kind as the separate, tangible bodies with which we are familiar. Yet one can point to it; it rises and descends, leaves the body and flows out of it, exactly as the textual proofs state and the rational indicators confirm. As for the question, ‘Where in the body does it reside?’ the soul is not confined to any specific limb. Rather, it permeates the body just as life—an incidental quality—permeates every part of it. Life is contingent on the soul: when the soul is present in the body, life is present; when the soul departs, life departs.”