Nafsanalysis: The Problem of Refinement in Sufi Ethics

Abstract

The nafs is the spirit in its ordeal of embodiment. It is the veil through which separation from God becomes the condition of relation to Him. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among practitioners of the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan, this article approaches the nafs as the site of enjoyment that survives refinement by investing itself in piety, renunciation, and in the spectacle of its own defeat. I introduce “nafsanalysis” as an analytic for reading how practitioners interpret their conduct in relation to the enjoyment of the nafs . By approaching “spiritual unveiling” and “psychocorporeal disturbance” as internally implicated modes of experience between which the subject cannot finally adjudicate, this article develops an account of Sufi ethical life in which sin may preserve God‐orientation, discipline may nourish the desire it seeks to extinguish, and the veil may protect the intimacy it appears to obstruct.