Spidey and Nafs

Spider-man 3 was a good sequel to the previous sequel. The action and special effects were mind-blowing and painstakingly rendered. There was lots of humour - but also quite a lot of mushy moments. But it stood out because there were moments of "bad moods" uncharacteristic of the Good Guy Peter Parker/Spiderman.

Without giving away too much, let's just say that Spidey encounters a situation where he realises that he has potential for listening to his baser instincts and become quite a different guy. This guy is egotistic, violent, brutal and enjoys being brutal.

Knowingly or unknowingly, the writers had explored an aspect of the nafs in humans. The topic of nafs is in itself a huge subject. But I'm not qualified to talk about it. But I will share the little knowledge I have. The nafs is basically negative energy that resides in all of us - in Freudian terms, it is the id. The nafs is the primeval or "beast" in man, which prefers the baser activities of human life - eating, sleeping, sex etc. The nafs prompts the individual to eat a lot, sleep a lot and do things that give pleasure to the individual. It is raw energy that needs to be tamed.

Upon returning from the Battle of Badr, the Prophet s.a.w. said, "We have returned from the lesser jihad [holy war] to the greater jihad." They asked, "O Prophet of God, which is the greater jihad?" He replied, "The struggle against the nafs."

So the nafs is constantly trying to get the best deal by egging on the individual to have more of everything. To make things worse, the avowed enemy of man, Iblis, sends his Iblis juniors to instigate all our nafs-es to go the extra mile and screw us up. The start point can be a very small thought (eg. "I feel a bit lazy"). That's enough to make a mountain out of a molehill. The main deliverable of the small iblis' exercise is to eventually make us forget the truth of the relationship we have with our Creator: the nafs is instigated up to a point where it wraps around our hearts, clings onto us and blocks all rational thought. We begin to compromise with what our Creator and Prophet have commanded us to do (for our own good!). Then we inch towards disobedience. Slowly, we forget our role as vicegerents on Earth, eventually making us subservient to our desires, when it should be the other way round.

Warning - Spoiler Ahead
In a similar fashion, Spidey gets enveloped by the alien matter which wraps itself around him and instigates his rather small thought of revenge and pride, into something big and unrecognisable to himself later on. He realises what he has become, but he chooses to rid himself of it. He then literally tears it off with a lot of struggle.

The battleground is within all of us. We can choose whether to fight this instigation and reinstate control on our lives and submit to the Truth, or we can choose to ride on the wave of the nafs and encourage it to do more damage to our health and mind.

This struggle is the essence of what the greater jihad really is - the battle against yourself. When one is able to conquer oneself, he has indeed conquered his reality. Everything else becomes easy.

And for such as had entertained the fear of standing before their Lord's (tribunal) and had restrained (their) souls from lower desires (i.e. nafs) -
Their Abode will be the Garden

79: 40-41 - (Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali)