Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-Muhasibi by Gavin Picken (review)

In 1935 the British scholar Margaret Smith published An Early Mystic of Baghdad, the first major study in a European language on the life and thought of al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857), considered by many to be the first major moral psychologist of Islam. The work was followed five years later by Abd-el-Halim Mahmoud’s al-Mohasibi: Un Mystique Musulman Religieux Et Moraliste, originally completed as a doctoral dissertation under the able supervision of the well-known Catholic theologian and Islamicist Louis Massignon. The author would go on to become the rector of al-Azhar University from 1973 to 1978. Since the pioneering works of Smith and Abdel-Halim, and later Joseph van Ess, Muhasibi has been the subject of a range of studies, each of which has focused on different facets of his thought. The present monograph by Gavin Picken builds on the research carried out to date with painstaking attention to the primary sources and with a particular focus on Muhasibi’s concept of tazkiyat al-nafs or “purification of the self.”

Picken’s study is divided into five chapters. After briefly overviewing the relevant scholarship in the field over the course of the last century, he turns to a survey of the main ascetic and intellectual currents to which Muhasibi was heir in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire and the city in which he spent most of his life. Following a short discussion of the nature and origins of Baghdadi mysticism in Basran ascetic pietism, Picken then explores the place of the Mutazilites in Abbasid society and the well-known mihna or “inquisition” instituted by the caliph Ma’mun under their influence. In the second chapter he presents a brief synopsis of Muhasibi’s life, followed by a third chapter where he summarizes the main contents of Muhasibi’s extant works, published and unpublished, with a terse foray into the debate surrounding the chronology of his writings. Here Picken tends to incline, with some minor caveats, toward the argument put forward by Abd-el-Halim that Muhasibi’s writing can be divided into three periods, each of which reflects a growing interest in and mastery of Sufism and the science of the soul and a corresponding gravitation away from more conventional theological subjects. The minor caveats in question are rooted in Picken’s understandable reservations in using the subject matter of Muhasibi’s books as a gauge by which to determine when they were written.

Chapters 4 and 5, which form almost half of the entire monograph, focus on the theme of self-purification. Picken begins with an extensive Scriptural and semantic analysis of the concepts of the “self” (nafs) and “purification” (tazkiya) before turning to shed further light on the subject by exploring the views of some prominent classical and modern commentators. While his selection of authors may come across as somewhat arbitrary, and breaks the diachronic development of the study, the survey nevertheless sets the groundwork for an in-depth examination of Muhasibi’s own views, a task that Picken accomplishes with considerable skill. Here he demonstrates, through a close reading of a wide range of the medieval moral psychologist’s literary corpus, Muhasibi’s overriding concern with mastering and taming the “lower soul” through a process of introspective examination and spiritual combat. Muhasibi, we are shown, continuously encourages the spiritual aspirant to remain conscious of the stratagems and machinations of the nafs, which, unless reformed, inclines toward ease and comfort and resists the sacrifices that are demanded by the spiritual life. “Be its [al-nafs] adversary opposing that which it invites you to,” Muhasibi writes, and “spend all your time mortifying its desires, burying its wishes and be cautious concerning its aspirations and procrastination” (185); “abase it,” he counsels elsewhere, “as God has abased it” (182). While the markedly self-lacerating nature of the regimen of moral and spiritual discipline offered by...