Nafs and Maths

Nafs (pl. Anfus or Nufus) lexically means soul, the psyche, the ego, self, life, person, heart or mind. (Mu'jam, Kassis). Nafs is an important basis on how you view life. Your Nafs should ideally be under your control. If you Nafs level is too high that means that you think to highly of yourself to a point where it is harmful for you. However if your Nafs is too low that means that you think too lowly of yourself to a point where it is detrimental. I was talking to a very good friend of mine and we compared our nafs to the sin function where it goes up and down all the time, like the sin function. Sometimes we think too highly of ourselves and some time too lowly.

Figure 1: the Nafs and Sin function

Examine Figure 1 and notice that if you use sin (5x) instead of sin x then your graph goes up and down more rapidly. However if you use sin ( 0.1x) you can really slow down your ups and downs. Furthermore if you want to amplify your highs andlows you can do 2 sinx and amplify it or do 0.1 sinx and lower the high and low points. Moreover if you add a 1 to sinx ( sinx +1) you can raise your lowest level. So in the end I think where our graph should be is 0.001sin(100x)+10hahaha. So that it is at a constant ( positive =optamistic level). I have plotted the ideal nafs in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Ideal Nafs