The Use of Nafs ‘Soul’ for Self-Referencing in al-Maqqarī’s Nafḥ al-ṭīb and the Evolution of the ‘Divided Self’

Abstract

This article will analyze the use of the noun nafs ‘soul’ with the first-person possessive pronominal suffix, through the corpus of Andalusi texts gathered in Nafḥ al-ṭīb by the North-African author Shihāb al-Dīn al-Maqqarī (d. 1632). The aim is threefold: one, to identify patterns of the use of nafsī in the Nafḥ, their semantic performance, and diachronic evolution; two, to compare the use of the term in this corpus with its use in lists of collocates in the macro corpora KSUCCA and arTenTen of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic; and three, to show that linguistically systematizing self-expression is adequate for the identification of highly subjective texts in a corpus. Analysis will show that the notions of the ‘divided self’, sacrificing oneself, and yearning change towards a closer relationship between the subject and the self over time.