Take a moment to read these two words and pay attention to the range of emotions they make you feel. Focus on them briefly; maybe say them out loud: Sin, Desire.
Sin. It is a word that to a Western mind often brings immediate dread, panic, and fear—experienced as a crushing pressure upon the heart and spiralling thoughts in the brain.
Desire. This may bring a feeling in the groin area combined with a stab of guilt, located principally in the stomach area.
Sin and desire are terms rarely treated with respect among progressives. This is understandable given that the LGBTQ+ community has been rendered categorically sinful by most mainstream religions. There is much need for repair here. Putting the subsequent misuses of these words aside, we might better understand the crises of modernity by returning to their much earlier meaning. Sin, in both ancient Hebrew and Greek (chatá and hamartia, respectively) meant ‘missing the mark’—to fire an arrow towards an intended target and to fall short. Sin always involves human intention: we pursue a goal but sometimes when we strike the bull’s-eye, we feel an internal pang, as if the target wasn’t the right one.
To understand the nature of sin and desire, we first need to briefly outline Sufi psychology in the magnum opus of the Persian mystic and scholar Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Ihyā ‘ulūm al-dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences). He outlines four basic elements that constitute the psychology of the human being: the ego (nafs), the heart (qalb), the intellect (‘aql), and the spirit (rūh). We will focus principally on the first two here—the most important vis-à-vis desire. For al-Ghazali, aside from the physical heart, there is a more important meaning of qalb:the ‘subtle tenuous substance’ that can perceive and have knowledge of its Creator. This can see the wholeness of reality, its divinity, and longs to be at one with it. The nafs is the human ego, the collective sum of our experiences that makes us totally unique. If we attach too much importance to our individual ego, we draw a circle around ourselves separating us from the rest of the world; we believe that we are the only true reality.
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