Psychology in the medieval Islamic world

Islamic psychology or ʿilm al-nafs (Arabic: علم النفس), the science of the nafs ("self" or "psyche"), is the medical and philosophical study of the psyche from an Islamic perspective and addresses topics in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and psychiatry as well as psychosomatic medicine. In Islam, mental health and mental illness were viewed with a holistic approach. This approach emphasized the mutual connection between maintaining adequate mental wellbeing and good physical health in an individual. People who practice Islam thought it was necessary to maintain positive mental health in order to partake in prayer and other religious obligations. Concepts from Islamic thought have been reexamined by Muslim psychologists and scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the writings of Muslim scholars, the term Nafs (self) was used to denote individual personality and the term fitrah for human nature. Nafs encompassed a broad range of faculties including the qalb (heart), the ruh (soul), the aql (intellect) and irada (will). Muslim scholarship was strongly influenced by Greek as well as by the study of scripture, drawing particularly from Galen's understanding of the four humors of the body. In medieval Islamic medicine in particular, the study of mental illness was a speciality of its own, and was variously known as al-‘ilaj al-nafs (approximately "curing/treatment of the ideas/soul/vegetative mind), al-tibb al-ruhani ("the healing of the spirit," or "spiritual health") and tibb al-qalb ("healing of the heart/self," or "mental medicine"). The Classical Arabic term for the mentally ill was "majnoon" which is derived from the term "Jenna", which means "covered". It was originally thought that mentally ill individuals could not differentiate between the real and the unreal. However, due to their nuanced nature treatment on the mentally ill could not be generalized as it was in medieval Europe This term was gradually redefined among the educated, and was defined by Avicenna as "one who suffers from a condition in which reality is replaced with fantasy".