God's Unique Creation -The Human Being

"Who or what am I?" Possibly you may at some point have asked yourself this question. If so, you probably worked out some sort of an answer for yourself. But and again this is of utmost importance-how can you know whether or not your answer is correct?

We will now turn to Islam's answer to this question, which has been provided by the Creator Himself. In the Qur'an, God informs us that among His many creations, we human beings are quite unique. While it is a fact we're not simply a higher form of animal life. For the thing that, more than anything else, makes us unique is that we possess immortal souls.

Islam teaches that our souls originated in the spiritual world. While we were in our mothers' wombs, they were put into our developing fetuses and carne into this life with our bodies at birth. As long as we're here, our bodies are our souls' temporary homes-the places that have been 'leased' to them for a while, so to speak. Then, when the lease is up, our souls move out. When this bodily life ends, they return to the spiritual realm from which they carne, prior to their final stop, their permanent destination. But we'll return to this point a little later.

Another thing that makes us human beings unique is that we have been given reasoning minds. Our minds work with our bodies and senses, sifting, analyzing, storing and transmitting knowledge. And still another unique part of us is the heart, not the bodily heart but the spiritual one, which feels, recognizes and understands at the spiritual level. The heart is allied with the soul, and has a desire and attraction for higher, spiritual things.

That brings us back to our bodies, which we all know about well enough. These bodies have specific material needs which must be met if they are to function properly: the need for oxygen, nutrition, sleep, sex, and all the rest. And allied to our bodies is our lower self, our ego, which is known in Arabic as the lower nafs.[1]

This nafs of ours has no use at all for anything higher. It's the grasping, greedy, power-hungry, primitive part of us which wants everything for itself and denies the rights of all others. By nature, it's purely selfish and, if it remains unchecked, can do evil beyond imagination. Its desires are endless, and the more one gives in to it, the more it demands.

All this tells us that our human nature is tremendously complex, a subtle blending of both interacting and opposing forces. The soul longs for God, for the spiritual life, while the lower self denies anything higher, has an unlimited appetite for worldly pleasures, and tries to stamp out the soul's yearning. Consequently, our bodies and minds can be used either for higher purposes or for lower ones, according to which side of our nature we permit to dominate. Likewise, our nafs can either be the force, which enables us to carry out our responsibilities, or the power driving us to unspeakable evil. We have the capacity to be higher than the angels or lower than any animal.