The Commanding Self
About This Book
The Commanding Self is Idries Shah's most direct examination of what Islamic psychology identifies as the nafs al-ammara — the 'commanding self,' the aspect of the human being that asserts its desires and assumptions as absolute, that insists on its own centrality, and that systematically distorts perception and reasoning to maintain its sense of importance and control. In the Sufi tradition, the commanding self is not identified with the ego in the Freudian sense (a functional psychological structure) but with the specific pattern of self-assertion and self-deception that prevents genuine spiritual development — the part of the human being that is 'the enemy' in the sense of consistently working against the deepest purposes of the individual.
Shah's treatment is characteristically indirect: rather than providing a systematic analysis of the commanding self, he assembles stories, observations, case studies, and historical anecdotes that illuminate the commanding self's patterns from multiple angles. The cumulative effect of this approach is a recognition that goes deeper than conceptual understanding — the reader begins to perceive the specific ways in which the commanding self operates in their own experience, in the experience of people they know, and in the patterns of social and institutional behaviour that result when commanding selves interact in organised ways.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the Sufi concept of the nafs al-ammara: what the 'commanding self' is in the full context of Islamic psychology — how it relates to the other levels of the nafs (from the 'blaming self' through to the 'tranquil self') and what the full developmental arc from the commanding self to the tranquil self represents in the Sufi path
• Grasp the commanding self's characteristic strategies: the specific ways it maintains control — through self-justification, through the appropriation of spiritual language and concepts to serve its own purposes, through the inflation of its own importance, and through the systematic misinterpretation of any challenge to its authority as external attack rather than necessary correction
• Recognise the commanding self in spiritual contexts: how Shah illustrates the specific ways the commanding self colonises spiritual practice and spiritual organisations — creating what he elsewhere calls 'Sufism without the Sufi' or the appearance of the path without its substance
• Learn the distinction between genuine spiritual development and the commanding self's imitation of it: the specific signs that distinguish genuine progress on the path from the commanding self's successful impersonation of progress — a distinction that Shah suggests is among the most important and most consistently missed in spiritual communities
• Appreciate the social and cultural dimension: how The Commanding Self's analysis extends beyond individual psychology to the patterns of organisations, institutions, and cultures — illustrating how the commanding self pattern scales from the individual to the collective in ways that determine much of what ordinarily passes for human civilisation
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