Acknowledgments
I presented a few sections of thisessay at the Habib University in February of 2024 in a talk titled “Taming the Nafs: Islamic Notions of the Self in Cross‐Cultural Psychiatry.” I thank the faculty and students at Habib University for their generous feedback. I received the motivation to work on this essay after the completion of my fieldwork among Islamic healers in Pakistan in 2023. This research was published in Ethos. The feedback I received from the anonymous reviewers was central in shaping my ideas on questions of the self and psychology in Islamic thought. Lastly, I thank my students at Brandeis University for their close engagement with some of the concepts of the essay during a course on “Medicine and Religion” I taught in the fall semester of 2023 and the spring semester of 2024. The students shared excellent insights during the two semesters which helped me approach issues of self and the psyche in Islam from a comparative perspective.