3.1 Jurisprudence (fiqh)

The term fiqh in Arabic has several meanings, being generally related to the concepts of knowledge and law within various disciplines, such as fiqh al-lugha, related to the science of language. In the Qur’anic context, the word tafaqquh (derived from the same root) is identified simply with knowing. The term fiqh, however, came to be identified predominantly in the Islamic tradition with the science of jurisprudence, the term faqīh, one who knows fiqh, being applied to specialists in the Sharīʿa (or Islamic Law) and its applications to both various domains of activities of the individual in society and to the laws of society itself.

The discipline of fiqh does not usually deal with the heart, or even directly with ethics, but its injunctions and elucidations certainly imply the effect of the practise of those injunctions upon not only a person’s īmān (as a result of his or her actions), but also upon his or her heart. In some books of fiqh, one finds statements such as ‘breaking the heart of a believer is worse than breaking down the Kaʿba into little stones’ (attributed to the Prophet or other early authorities) to explain the gravity of certain injunctions. Nevertheless, while taking account of the importance of fiqh, and especially the Sharīʿa itself in Islam, it is not in texts of jurisprudence where one should look for the deeper layers of meaning of the heart in the Islamic tradition.

3.2 Theology (kalām)

Although kalām is usually translated into English as theology, it does not play the same role or cover the same field of meaning in Islam as the term ‘theology’ does in the Christian tradition. Any subject of a religious nature in Christianity is in a sense theological, and even some Christian mystics who went beyond formal ‘theology’ lived in a religious universe where there was a strong presence of what came to be known as mystical theology, which spoke extensively of the heart. Such is not the case for kalām in the Islamic tradition. There were many Sunnī Sufis who were both Sufis and masters of the Ashʿarī or Māturīdī schools of theology, and while there was mutual influence among the separate disciplines of kalām, falsafa (philosophy), and Sufism, they remained separate disciplines and a single author, such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), could author different works employing the different methodologies and technical terminologies of those disciplines (much as one would with different disciplines of mathematics or logic or medicine). They could even employ distinct methods and perspectives from these different disciplines in a single work (such as Jāmī does in his book, al-Durrat al-Fākhira, ‘The Precious Pearl’).

In kalām, the heart is treated primarily as the seat of human intention, will, and understanding as well as being the locus of īmān. It is the heart that God judges, and various schools and scholars of kalām debated the nature īmān in the heart, whether it could increase or decrease, the effect of actions upon the heart, the nature of the heart’s intention when determining the moral quality of actions, the implications of God’s sealing hearts (Q. 2:7; 7:100) for free will and moral responsibility, and the relationship between the heart and the ʿaql (intellect or reason). Nevertheless, when writing about the heart, authors such as al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), who was both a Sunnī mutakallim (one who practices kalām) and a Sufi, tended to do so primarily through the language and methods of Sufism, not those of kalām.

3.3 Philosophy (falsafa) and the intellectual sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya)

In the Islamic intellectual sciences, at the peak of which stands falsafa (or ḥikma), the heart is associated with the highest form of knowledge, as is made clear in so many later Islamic philosophical texts, especially those produced by the schools of illumination (ishrāq) associated with al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) and the transcendent theosophy (al-ḥikmat al-mutaʿāliya) of Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1641), which sought to integrate the discursive knowledge associated with the rational faculty of the mind with the intuitive knowledge associated with both the heart and revelation (which was received within the heart and not simply the mind of the Prophet of Islam). Some of the most profound expositions of the nature of knowledge received by and through the heart are to be found not only in Sufism, but also in later Islamic falsafa and ḥikma. In works of Islamic philosophical ethics, the heart is often likened to the king of a city and the other human faculties to the city’s inhabitants. If the heart is sound, then the city will be run well and the inhabitants (the human faculties and the whole human being) will be happy and healthy. If the heart is sick and/or if another body part or faculty (such as hunger/the stomach, anger, pride, lust, etc.) take control, then the people of the city will be oppressed and the city will be out of balance and eventually fall into ruin, leaving the human being sick and wretched, physically, psychologically, and intellectually/spiritually. These accounts were inspired, in part, by Aristotle’s description of the soul as being primarily ‘located in’ the heart, through which it controls the rest of the body (Tracy 1974).

As for the intellectual sciences, from mathematics to logic to astronomy to physics, usually texts on these subjects did not discuss the heart as the seat of the highest form of knowledge. Rather, proponents of those sciences operated in a world in which the centrality of heart knowledge was taken for granted. One of the greatest Muslim mathematicians, ʿUmar Khayyām (d. 526/1131), who was also a notable poet, wrote of grades of knowledge, placing those who have heart knowledge at the summit of the different classes (Nasr 1968: 33–34).

A word must also be said about the understanding of the heart in Islamic medicine, traditionally closely related to the discipline of falsafa, where the heart was recognized as the centre of man’s biological being and connected not only to the flow of blood in the physical functioning of the heart but, following Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, also to emotions that affect the physical body as well as the intellect and spirit of man. Galen posited that the rational soul (logistikon) was located in the brain, the animating soul (thumoeides) in the heart, and the appetitive soul (epithumetikon) in the liver (Lloyd 2007). Some Sufis in fact drew analogies from medicine to deal with spiritual ailments, referring to the methods of awakening awareness of God in the soul as cures of the heart.

3.4 Literature (adab)

In almost every form of traditional literature, the heart in its many meanings plays an important role, with Islamic literature being no exception. For example, Arabic and Persian poetry are replete with references to the heart, especially in romances such as Laylī o Majnūn (Layla and Majnun) by Niẓāmī Ganjavī (d. 605/1209). In most cases, literary works deal with the heart in relation to love, although there are also many that include its relation to faith, inner purity, yearning, the essence of something, as well as compassion, principial knowledge, and illumination. A common Arabic proverb, oft-cited in response to stirring oratory, poetry, and literary works, states that ‘words that rise form the heart, enter the heart’, emphasizing the centrality of the heart in both literary production and reception. Poetry, particularly love poetry, exemplifies this dynamic and so has sometimes been referred to as ‘the speech of the people of the heart’, as in the following famous verse of Ḥāfiẓ:

When you hear the speech of the people of the heart, do not say that it is mistaken,
The mistake is, my dear, not understanding this speech. (Ḥāfiẓ 2013: 32–33)

The heart is also to be found in the title of many literary works, Sufi and otherwise, such as Qūt al-Qulūb (Food for Hearts), Maḥbūb al-Qulūb (Beloved of Hearts), and Nūr al-Fuʾād (Light of the Heart). If Islam is considered as a whole, one can say that the heart of Islam is the Islam of the heart (see Nasr 2004), and Islamic literature, both in the particular sense of the term and in its general meaning, belong to a universe of discourse where this truth was accepted heartily.

3.5 Sufism

Of all the dimensions and perspectives in Islam, none is as closely and intimately associated with the heart as Sufism. In fact, one of the early names for the tradition of Sufism was ʿilm al-qulūb, the ‘science of hearts’. Being the main repository of Islamic esoteric teachings, Sufism by nature issues from the heart (or the interior, baṭin) of the tradition and provides the means for entering the heart – or, using another symbol, for opening the ‘eye of the heart’ (ʿayn al-qalb/chism-i dil). The goal of Sufism is in fact to open the eye of the heart, as is stated in the previously cited famous Persian Sufi poem:

Open the eye of the heart to see the Spirit,
That which is not visible, to see it.

It is with this third eye that the heart is able to see and know that which is invisible to the physical, outward eye, while the kind of mind that is tied to outwardness is distanced from the intellect and heart knowledge, and therefore from this vision.

Sufism emphasizes that it is by means of the heart that man can know God as well as love Him. ʿAql and ʿishq, intellect and love, are both associated with the heart in the Islamic tradition, especially in Sufism, which also emphasizes the association of real faith with the heart and not only the mind. Moreover, the heart also has an epistemological function in the Sufi tradition, one that is brought out especially forcefully in the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (d. 672/1273).

It is important to recall that Mecca is considered in the sacred geography and cosmology of Islam to be the ‘centre of the world’ for Muslims – the centre towards which Muslims all over the world orient themselves during their obligatory five daily prayers and to which every Muslim who has the means is required to make pilgrimage (al-ḥajj) at least once in his or her lifetime. Sufis see this pilgrimage to the geographical heart of the Islamic world as a symbol of the spiritual ḥajj to the inner heart that is the locus of Divine Presence within men and women and to which the person in quest of the Divine is invited to make the quintessential pilgrimage. And so, in another famous poem, Rūmī writes, referring to the heart:

O folk who have gone on pilgrimage, where are you, where are you?
The Beloved is right here, come forth, come forth. (Rūmī 1984: 65 [vol. 2])

Sufism, moreover, relates virtues and also vices not only to the mind, but also to the heart. In the same way that we have virtues and vices which are related to the heart in English (such as ‘heartless’, ‘warm-hearted’, ‘heart-felt’, ‘open-hearted’, etc.), the Islamic languages used by Sufis are replete with such expressions. For Sufism, the centre of the human state is the heart wherein are to be found the roots of so many of the states, tendencies, desires, ethical immoderations, thoughts, and actions of human beings.

4.1 Family

The family is the basic unit of traditional Islamic society – not the atomized family prevalent in much of the West today, but the extended family. Even in recent centuries, when as a result of the advent of modernism, many Islamic institutions have been destroyed, weakened, or modified, the extended family still constitutes the foundation of Islamic societies. So, it still holds true to say that in Islam, the family is the heart of society.

If, as in what remains of the traditional Western social order, one refers to the father as the head of the family, one can do the same for the Muslim family everywhere. As for the mother, she can be called its heart. Like the physical heart that is hidden, but constitutes the centre of the body, the mother in Islamic society seems mostly hidden from the external functions and aspects of society, especially urban society. Nonetheless, she is its heart, without which the body of society could not function properly – or, if it did function, could not do so Islamically should the roles of women be delimited to only childbirth and raising children. One could, therefore, say that the family is the heart of society in Islam, and the wife and/or the mother the heart of the family.

4.2 Society and politics

If for Islamic society as a whole the heart is the traditional family, which by extension would include one’s tribe, where tribal structures still survive, there are also other institutions and organizations that play the role of the heart on a certain scale or within a limited domain. One could cite as examples the class of ʿulamāʾ (Islamic scholars), the inner structure of the craft and trade guilds (aṣnāf), the elite groups within military organizations, charitable organizations, secret societies, and, of course, the Sufi orders, with their hierarchic structure, a characteristic that is also shared by most institutions similar to those just mentioned. When one looks at traditional Islamic society, one sees both heart and centre complemented by hierarchy nearly everywhere. Although Islamic society is not based on a rigid social hierarchy, traditional Islam is grounded, nevertheless, on a balance between spiritual equality before God and a spiritual hierarchy based on virtue and knowledge, where the heart is ever present as the centre, origin, and source of the human order. The extensive references to the heart in so many contexts within everyday Muslim life are a clear witness to this truth.

Among various activities in Islamic society, politics bears mentioning separately because of its far-reaching effect upon social and even private life. Whereas the English word politics comes from the Greek term polis, meaning city or town, the Arabic term for politics, al-siyāsa, is related in its root to taming a wild horse. At first sight, al-siyāsa may seem to have nothing to do with the heart, but just as the Prophet was the spiritual, religious, and political leader of the early Muslim community, he was also its heart and throughout Islamic history many Muslim leaders have sought to fashion themselves in this prophetic mould, of being at once the spiritual and political heart of their people, be it a tribe, city, state, or empire, with varying degrees of success, to say the least. The metaphor of classical Islamic philosophical ethics, with the heart as the ruler of the city of the human being, was bi-directional, with sovereigns sometimes being described as the heart of the state, as they directed and controlled the life sustaining forces of the whole body politic under their power. Moreover, throughout Islamic history, there have been leaders who have not necessarily ruled a country or empire, but groups of tribes, geographic regions, or networks of followers for whom they also served, and in many places still serve, as the heart. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim leaders who fought against colonialism on the African continent, for example, such as Emīr ʿAbd al-Qādir (d. 1300/1883), ʿUmar al-Mukhtār (d. 1275/1858), al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal (d. 1280/1864), Shaykh Aḥmadu Bambā (d. 1346/1927), and Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1395/1975), were seen by their followers as the heart of their movements. Moreover, many such men were both spiritual and political leaders, serving as shaykhs to large Sufi orders (ṭuruq), as well as becoming heads of political or military movements and organizations.

4.3 The heart and the Kaʿba: spiritual and social centres

As previously mentioned, the Kaʿba is, spiritually and religiously speaking, the heart of the Islamic universe, and the ḥajj (or pilgrimage) to it is the journey to the heart-centre of that universe. Many Islamic texts associate the heart with the Kaʿba, since both are described as the loci of the Presence of God. For example, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 560/1165) writes, commenting on the traditions, ‘The heart of the believer is the throne of the All-Merciful (ʿarsh al-Raḥmān)’, and ‘My heavens and My earth do not contain me, but the heart of my believing servant contains Me’:

When God created your body, He placed within it a Ka‘bah, which is your heart. He made this temple of the heart the noblest of houses in the person of faith. He informed us that the heavens […] and the earth, in which there is the Ka‘bah, do not encompass Him and are too confined for Him, but He is encompassed by this heart in the constitution of the believing human being. What is meant here by ‘encompassing’ is knowledge of God. (Cited in Hirtenstein 2010: 27)

Muslims everywhere, even if not theologically educated, identify the Kaʿba with the heart of their religion. They are aware that when they orient themselves during the canonical prayers (al-ṣalāh) towards the Kaʿba, they are also orienting themselves towards the heart of their religious universe, and when they make the ḥajj, they are going to the heart of the Islamic world. It is worth repeating that the idea of identifying the heart with the Kaʿba is central to Sufi teachings and practice. A veritable follower of Sufism (called a muṭasawwif) should behold only God in his or her heart and, in referring to this seminal truth, Sufis often identify the spiritual heart with the Kaʿba, since a heart whose eye (ʿayn al-qalb) has been opened witnesses the presence of the One who resides in its centre. Thus, Persian Sufi literature refers often to the Kaʿba-yi dil, or Kaʿba of the heart.

The heart as spiritual centre is not only related to the Kaʿba in Mecca, but also to secondary ‘reflections’ of that supreme centre in other places throughout the Islamic world. Besides Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, there are the tombs and maqāms (shrines) of saints (and in the case of Shī‘ism, the Imāms) that are major centres of pilgrimage and spiritual life. One need only visit Moulay Idrīs or Shaykh Aḥmad al-Tijānī in Fes, Touba in Senegal, the Zaynabiyya and Raʾs al-Ḥusayn in Cairo, the Zaynabiyya and the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī in Damascus, numerous Sunnī and Shīʿī holy sites in Samarra, Kadhimayn, Najaf, Karbala, and Baghdad in Iraq, the mausoleum of Imām Riḍāʾ in Mashhad and his sister Maʿṣūma in Qom, Dātājī Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore or Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ in New Delhi, just to cite a few well-known examples, to experience reflections of the Kaʿba as the heart of the religious community in various localities of the Islamic world. There is no part of dār al-Islām (the Muslim world) from which these reflections of the heart-centre and the Kaʿba in its spiritual sense are absent.

This spiritual and religious presence has also played a very important role in Islamic social life. There are so many social centres that have been created as a result of this presence, including whole cities and towns, such as Fes in Morocco, Cairo in Egypt, Touba in Senegal, Mashhad in Persia, and Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. Moreover, the social life of many cities, towns, and villages revolves around these heart-centres, which reverberate with the baraka (blessed presence and power) of the Kaʿba. The universality and widespread practice of pilgrimage throughout the traditional Islamic world is related directly to this reality. Also, in the deepest sense, the cultivation and development of both authentic Islamic intellectual activity and Islamic art and architecture are related to these reflections of the Islamic heart-centre and the Kaʿba throughout all aspects and areas of the Islamic world.

5.1 Heart-brain interactions

The popular model of the brain being the sole seat of cognition, feeling, and consciousness was challenged in the West itself in the latter half of the twentieth century by work that illustrated the importance of the parasympathetic nervous system and clusters of neurons in various parts of the body, including the gut and the heart. The heart itself contains a ‘little brain’ of 40,000 neurons that helps modulate and control the rhythm of the heartbeat, as well as communicating with the brain (Armour 2008). The heart also secretes hormones such as noradrenaline, oxytocin, and dopamine that affect various brain functions. The heart and the brain communicate with and influence each other in myriad ways. In one of the most extreme examples of this relationship, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or ‘broken heart syndrome’, constituting extreme emotional distress, can cause heart failure (Peters, George and Irimpen 2015). Conversely, studies of heart surgery patients have shown significant cognitive and sensory effects associated with their surgery, such as changes in smell and taste, cognitive performance, and memory, while cardiovascular disease and depression have been shown to be causally related (Vogels et al. 2007; Lacey and Lacey 1978; Wilson et al. 2019).

Moreover, the heartbeats of romantic partners and those sharing an experience, such as listening to a story or watching a movie attentively, tend to synchronize (Helm, Sbarra and Ferrer 2012; Yoon et al. 2019). But perhaps most tellingly, several studies of heart transplant patients have found that some recipients report dramatic changes in personality, tastes, habits, and even memories matching those of their donors (Pearsall, Schwartz and Russek 2000; Liester 2020). From the perspective of the traditions of Sufism and Islamic philosophy, such results are the physical and psychological traces of the profoundly intimate connection between the spiritual and physical levels of the heart. In these traditions, the physical heart is understood as the shadow or the vehicle or the instrument of the spiritual heart, and so the dynamics of the spiritual heart affect the physical heart, and transplants of physical hearts can bear the traces of its spiritual counterpart.

5.2 Two kinds of knowing

Contemporary popular discourse often contrasts the ‘heart’ and the ‘brain’, the former representing intuitive, emotional modes of understanding and the latter rational, discursive modes of reasoning. For example, American neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, author of several studies on personality changes in heart transplant patients, writes, ‘As I’ve come to focus on the awe response itself, I am learning that awe happens when something occurs that causes our heart to somehow manage to free itself from the dominance of our brain and to cause us to feel profoundly connected with the world in new, challenging, and sometimes frightening ways’ (Pearsall 2007: 16). Psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist has published numerous works refining this intuition on the basis of recent functional neuroscience to describe the distinct approaches to cognition associated with the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In brief, the right hemisphere is generally associated with global, associative, and relational modes of perception and cognition, while the left hemisphere is associated with more focused, detailed, and instrumental modes of perception and cognition. In his works, McGilchrist (2019) generalizes from these findings of the lateralization of brain function to characterize different disciplines, genres of literature, and societies as being more right- or left-hemisphere dominant. For example, he combines insights from psychologist Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism (1992) – which argues that modern art, literature, and culture bear striking similarities to the psychopathology of schizophrenia (e.g. a devitalized, mechanistic view of reality, defiance of convention, nihilism, extreme relativism, and profound disconnection) – with findings in neuropathology that attribute schizophrenia to multiple lesions in the right hemisphere, to argue that modern life and thought can be characterized as overly-left hemisphere dominant.

These findings and arguments are mentioned here because they are analogous, but not identical, to distinctions common in Sufi literature between the merely rational aspect of the ʿaql (intellect/reason) and the qalb (heart). This limited aspect of the ʿaql is the instrument of ordinary knowledge drawn from the senses and rational reflection, which tends to restrict and bind reality within its particular delimitations, whereas heart knowledge is drawn directly from God and changes perpetually, reflecting the never-repeating Self-disclosures of God. As Ibn ʿArabī wrote in his famous poem, exploiting the fact that the words for heart (qalb) and receptive (qābil) are derived from the same root letters in a different order to thereby emphasize the dynamic receptivity of the heart (qalb) to theophanies:

My heart has become receptive to any form:
A meadow for gazelles, a cloister for monks,
A house for the idols, and the pilgrim’s Kaʿ bah,
The tablets of the Torah, the scrolls of the Qur’an
My creed is love and wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That love is my belief, my faith. (Sells 1994: 90)

Sufi scholars such as al-Ghazālī and Rūmī have illustrated the distinction between the knowledge of reason and of the heart by comparing the former to irrigation channels running along the surface of the earth and the latter to a spring welling up from deep beneath the earth’s surface (Al-Ghazālī 2010: 57). Rūmī writes:

There are two kinds of knowledge and the former,
Is what you learn at school as a young scholar,
From your books, teachers, thinking, and your memory,
Concepts and interesting new fields of study.
You will surpass men with knowledge gained,
Yet you’ll be burdened by what you’ve retained,
For in your search you’re a retaining tablet.
This other knowledge comes from God’s bestowal,
And this true wisdom’s found inside your soul,
When wisdom’s water gushes in your breast,
It never stagnates; it’s forever blest.
Why feel concerned if its path’s blocked outside,
When it keeps gushing constantly inside?
That knowledge that’s acquired though is a river,
That runs through streams to homes to give men water.
If their path’s blocked, the home’s supply will end –
Seek the fount deep within yourself, my friend. (Rūmī 2017: 118)

Al-Ghazālī, Rūmī, and Ibn ʿArabī also use the parable of the competition between Byzantine and Chinese painters to contrast these two different modes of knowing. In the parable, a king divides a room in his palace into two parts and invites a Byzantine and Chinese team of painters to decorate one half of the room each. The Byzantines create elaborate, realistic images on their wall, whereas the Chinese merely polish theirs. When the competition is over and the curtain separating the two halves of the room is removed, the mirror-like walls of the Chinese side contain all of the beautiful images of the Byzantine side, but with additional, dynamic shine and splendour. Al-Ghazālī concludes from this that:

The care of the saints In cleansing, polishing, purifying, and clarifying the heart until the true nature of the Real shines forth clearly therein with utmost illumination is like the work of the Chinese. The care of the learned and the philosophers in acquiring and adorning knowledge […] is like that of the work of the Byzantines. (Al-Ghazālī 2010: 63)

While this heart-reason dichotomy is not identical to the differences between the right and left brain hemispheres, traditionalist critiques of modernity (such as those in the works of Muṣṭafā Ṣabrī Effendi, ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī , Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Frithjof Schuon, and René Guénon), as well as the critiques of overly rationalistic approaches to philosophy and theology [kalām]) found in the work of certain Islamic philosophers and Sufis (such as al-Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, Rūmī, and Ibn ʿArabī), find many parallels in the works of McGilchrist and others. These distinct traditions converge in characterizing modernity as emblematic of a hypertrophy of a certain, limited mode of knowing and an atrophy of another mode, with the traditional ideal being to balance or harmonize both modes together.