The Vicissitudes of the Nafs : Madness, Paralysis, and the Work of Transgression in Sufi Ethics

Abstract

ABSTRACT How should we theorize Sufi ethics when the practice of zikr (remembrance) that leads to spiritual enlightenment ( tazkiyya ) might also bring one to the brink of majzubiyat (madness)? What forms of regulation or restraint are imagined or enacted by practitioners to prevent spiritual boundlessness from perverting into its underside of paralysis ( faalij )? Drawing on three ethnographic scenes among practitioners of the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan, I examine zikr as a practice that cultivates states of divine awareness and consciousness while simultaneously exposing practitioners to the risk of ethical and experiential breakdown. I show how the disciplinary techniques meant to refine the nafs (base soul) are also feared to interrupt the embodied, relational, and ethical capacities through which practitioners sustain presence in social and moral life. This tension unsettles an ethical horizon of “perfectibility”, understood as cumulative refinement through discipline, and instead foregrounds a creative and at times transgressive labor of modulating devotional intensity so that movement toward God does not pervert into estrangement from both God and the world. I argue that through this labor ethical life comes to be organized by the improvisational and oscillatory temporality of protective interruptions that attend to the vicissitudes of the nafs , rather than by the temporality of habituation and incremental refinement.