There was never one “Islamic view of the mind.” Islam began in Arabia in the 600s CE; according to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Qur’an between 610 and 632 CE (University of Birmingham, 2015). Over the next five centuries, scholars from Basra and Baghdad to Bukhara and Damascus argued about the soul, intellect, imagination, and how character changes, mostly in Arabic and sometimes in Persian (Gutas, §1.2; Griffel, §5). They rebuilt the Greek philosophy they read in Arabic translation, and they often disagreed. What survives is mostly the writing of educated men near courts and schools; the people who actually struggled are much harder to hear.
This page sits in Part II, but its story is medieval: roughly 800 to 1200 CE.
What words did they use for “mind”?
Two Arabic words do a lot of the work. Nafs is usually translated “soul” or “self,” and ʿaql is usually “intellect” or “reason.” Specialists translate each differently by author and argument; no single English word always fits. Al-Ghazālī’s ethics, for example, uses both terms (Griffel, §5).
Analogy: English “mind” does the same trick. It means memory in “keep in mind,” opinion in “change your mind,” and attention in “mind the gap.”
Where did the Greek ideas come in?
After the Abbasid dynasty came to power in 750, Baghdad became the center of a long movement to translate Greek books into Arabic (Gutas, SEP, §1.1). Al-Kindī (about 800–870), born in Basra and educated in Baghdad, worked with a group of translators, many of them Syrian Christians, who put Aristotle, later Platonist writers, and Greek scientists into Arabic. His own treatises leaned heavily on those translations (Adamson, SEP, introduction and §1.1).
Al-Kindī: four kinds of intellect, and a book against sadness
In On the Intellect, al-Kindī says your intellect starts out potential, just able to grasp ideas. It becomes actual when it’s thinking one. Once it has an idea, it’s acquired, so you can call the idea up again at will. The fourth type, the “first intellect,” is always thinking and is the outside source of those ideas. Peter Adamson calls it the first Arabic treatise to sort intellect into types, building on Greek commentators’ schemes for Aristotle (Adamson, §§1.2, 4.2).
For al-Kindī, the rational soul is a person’s true self. It isn’t made of matter, and it’s the only part of us that survives the body’s death (§§4.1, 4.3).
He also wrote On Dispelling Sadness, a book of philosophical comfort. Wealth and possessions can always be lost, he argues, so valuing them sets us up for sorrow. He argues for valuing things of the mind, which he regards as secure from loss. The book adds practical tips and stories, including an image of life as a short stop on a sea voyage, which goes back to the Greek Stoic Epictetus (§4.3). It’s advice, not a treatment study; whether it helped anyone is Unknown.
Much of this nearly vanished: most of al-Kindī’s surviving philosophy sits in a single manuscript in Istanbul (§1.2).
Heart or brain? Two different answers
Al-Fārābī (about 870–950) followed Aristotle in making the heart the body’s ruling organ. In Luis López-Farjeat’s reading, al-Fārābī places both imagination and reason in the heart and makes the brain a secondary ruler under it, one that regulates the heat the heart sends out (López-Farjeat, SEP, §2). (Strongly supported as a specialist’s reading.)
Ibn Sīnā, known in Europe as Avicenna, moved much of the action into the head. He was born near Bukhara in the 970s, possibly earlier; the exact year is Unknown. He died in 1037 (Gutas, §1.1). Around age 18 he wrote his first work, a Compendium on the Soul, for the Samanid ruler of Bukhara. In a 1906 English translation of it, he places control of “common sense,” which gathers what the separate senses report, in the front hollow of the brain. Imagination sits in the middle hollow and memory in the back. When those hollows are harmed, he says, the powers in them suffer too. He doesn’t simply drop the heart: the same passage reports Aristotle’s view that the heart is the source of all these powers, then puts control over them in the brain (Van Dyck trans., Section Seventh). Those hollows are what anatomists now call ventricles. Across his works, Gutas explains, Ibn Sīnā charts five “internal senses located in the brain”: common sense, imagery, imagination, estimation, and memory (§4).
Analogy: picture an assembly line. The front room collects deliveries from the senses, the middle room rearranges them, and the back room stores them.
Reason was different. For Ibn Sīnā, the rational soul is immaterial and immortal. It needs the bodily senses, including the ones in the brain, to learn. But it has no storage of its own. Storing belongs to imagery and memory, which have a base in the brain (§4).
The floating person
In his Healing, Ibn Sīnā asks you to imagine a person created fully grown in an instant, eyes veiled, floating in air or empty space with limbs spread so nothing touches. Could that person be sure they exist? Ibn Sīnā says yes, without also affirming that they have a heart, a brain, or any other body part. So, he argues, the self isn’t the body (McGinnis and Reisman trans., Soul 1.1, ¶7).
It’s a thought experiment: nobody was suspended, and nothing was measured. Scholars often call it the “Flying Man.” In Latin translation, it helped shape European discussions of the soul (Hasse, SEP, §5).
Al-Ghazālī: a crisis in his own words
Al-Ghazālī (about 1056–1111) came from Ṭūs, in what is now northeast Iran. In 1091 he was appointed to a prestigious teaching post in Baghdad. In 1095 he suddenly gave it up and left (Griffel, SEP, §1).
He told the story himself in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (“Deliverance from Error”). In Claud Field’s 1909 English translation, he describes about six months torn between his career and a religious life. Then, he writes, “God caused an impediment to chain my tongue,” and he couldn’t lecture. He sank into despair and couldn’t eat or drink. His doctors said the trouble was “in the heart” (Field trans., section “Sufism”). He left Baghdad and turned to Sufi practice.
It’s a retrospective first-person account. Whether “heart” here means the organ or the inner self is a translation question. Whether his experience matches any modern condition is Unknown, and this page doesn’t diagnose him.
After leaving Baghdad he began his major work, the Revival of the Religious Sciences. In scholar Frank Griffel’s summary, it teaches “disciplining the soul” (riyāḍat al-nafs): good character comes from repeating good actions, forced at first and later close to second nature. Anger and sexual desire are part of human nature and can’t be removed; reason (ʿaql) has to govern them. The summary pictures the soul as a young horse to be broken in, schooled, and treated well. Throughout, the Revival reminds readers that life is a path toward Judgment Day and its reward or punishment (Griffel, §5). This is religious ethics, not psychotherapy.
Where did people in distress actually go?
Philosophy books can’t answer that. Two Jewish family letters from the Cairo Geniza offer glimpses. A woman writes of crying and fasting over her sick nephew (PGP, T-S 6J4.20, perhaps 12th century). A father urges his son, ill again, to come home so the family can take him to physicians (PGP, AIU VII.E.149, probably 14th century). Two letters can’t show what most families did.
Some cities had hospitals. A marble inscription dates Nūr al-Dīn’s hospital in Damascus to 1154 CE (Beksaç, TDV). Historian Michael Dols reports that the traveler Ibn Jubayr visited two Damascus hospitals in the 1180s and described people confined and bound in chains (Dols 1987, p. 3). This is a traveler’s report passed on by a modern historian. It does not give the confined people’s own accounts or establish a modern diagnosis (Unknown).
Myth check
- “He was the first psychologist” or “he invented CBT” (cognitive behavioral therapy, a modern talk therapy). The sources cited here do not establish either claim. Describing an old argument in modern language does not establish that its author invented a modern profession or treatment (Unknown).
- “They just kept Greek books safe for Europe.” That story erases people who argued and built new systems. The scholar Dimitri Gutas describes Ibn Sīnā combining Greek and early Islamic strands into one new, self-consistent system (Gutas, introduction). And al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā didn’t even agree on where imagination sits.
How we know
- What evidence exists: hand-copied Arabic treatises, some surviving in only one or two manuscripts; old English translations (Van Dyck 1906, who admitted he sometimes lost Ibn Sīnā’s argument, and Field 1909); modern specialist studies; a reported inscription; one traveler’s account; two family letters.
- Whose voices are missing: almost everyone who wasn’t an educated man near a court or school. That includes women, children, the poor, enslaved people, rural people, and the people chained in that Damascus hospital. Al-Ghazālī, the rare first-person voice, was one of the most famous scholars of his time. In the Geniza letters, the sick men’s own words don’t appear.
- How power shaped the record: Many of these books were written for rulers: al-Kindī addressed treatises to the caliph’s family, and Ibn Sīnā’s first treatise was a gift to a ruler. Others later decided what Europe read. In 12th-century Toledo, Dominicus Gundisalvi translated Ibn Sīnā’s On the Soul into Latin with the Jewish scholar Avendauth, who had recommended it (Hasse, §1). Modern translators framed texts, too: Van Dyck wrote for students in Cairo’s government schools (Van Dyck trans., title page), and Field’s 1909 London edition billed the Munqidh as rare “genuine Eastern autobiography” (Field trans., introduction).
- Gaps: No summary here of Qur’anic teaching on the soul or of the words rūḥ and qalb; both need careful specialist and community review. Also missing: later Sufi writers, Christian and Jewish scholars writing in Arabic (Gutas notes Maimonides took up many of Ibn Sīnā’s ideas: Gutas, introduction), Persian-language works, North Africa, and al-Andalus.
Then vs. now
| What people argued then | How that compares with current evidence |
|---|---|
| Al-Fārābī: imagination and reason live in the heart; the brain regulates heat. | Neuroscience says “all sensations, movements, thoughts, memories, and feelings” come from signals passing through neurons (NINDS). The heart model doesn’t hold up. |
| Ibn Sīnā: control of common sense, imagination, and memory sits in the brain’s hollows, and damage to the hollows harms them. | Tying thinking to the brain fits current science. But the ventricles are cavities that cerebrospinal fluid flows through, and that fluid cushions the brain (NINDS, Hydrocephalus). Memory depends on brain tissue such as the hippocampus (NINDS). |
| An immaterial, immortal rational soul; the floating person. | A philosophical and religious position, reported here as history, not tested here. |
| Al-Kindī’s advice on sadness; al-Ghazālī’s soul-training. | Advice and ethics. The sources used here don’t show whether they helped anyone. This page makes no treatment claims. |
| Ibn Jubayr reported confinement and chains in Damascus hospitals. | A historical category, not a modern diagnosis. The record shows restraint but not the people’s own experience. |