The Greatest Intellectual Dilemmas of Humanity: The Self’s Deception of the Intellect
Mohammad Kourani — 2026.09.17
A Different Path Toward Consensus Among the Elites in the Human Sciences
Perhaps one of the greatest intellectual dilemmas humanity has faced throughout history is not the absence of reason, nor its inability to infer and draw conclusions according to Aristotelian logic, inductive reasoning, persuasion, or the strength of conviction. Rather, it is a far more complex problem: the self can deceive the intellect and use its capacity for thinking and reasoning to produce justifications for what it has already inclined toward.
Human beings may not always begin with truth and then arrive at it. Sometimes they begin with a desire, fear, interest, identity, or emotional impulse, and then make reason search for evidence that gives that inclination a logical and scientific appearance.
Here, the real question in the human sciences is not merely the question of all forms of human reasoning and thinking: How do we think? It is also: How can we ensure that what is thinking through us is an intellect genuinely seeking truth, rather than a self using the intellect to justify itself?
This becomes particularly important when people begin to question the very foundations of good and evil, benefit and harm, truth and falsehood, and even every firm ground upon which human beings have traditionally relied with confidence.
Here the importance of authentic irfan and Sufism becomes apparent as an attempt to construct an integrated worldview that places the human being within a system of worlds, levels, and manifestations, while connecting knowledge with the purification of the self and the elevation of perception.
The Human Being Between Intellect and Self
In the irfani worldview, the intellect is not merely a machine for producing arguments, nor is the self merely a psychologically neutral object.
The human self can influence intellectual judgment through desire, anger, arrogance, fear, attachment to personal interests, the love of control, the desire for recognition, and identity-based fanaticism. The self contains an enormous amount of egoism, while at the same time possessing the potential to move from one stage to another and from one world to another.
Therefore, a person may be extremely intelligent, highly knowledgeable, and capable of constructing sophisticated theories, while at the same time being profoundly distant from truth in certain areas. The intelligence of the intellect does not necessarily mean that it is being used correctly.
This is where the danger of certain conceptions that automatically regard the cognitive and technological development of humanity as evidence of the completion of the human intellect becomes apparent.
Human beings can develop their tools in astonishing ways, discover precise laws of nature, and construct sophisticated technologies and complex systems, while simultaneously remaining prisoners of illusions, desires, biases, and psychological conflicts.
Therefore, we must distinguish between two things: the development of the capacity to produce knowledge, and the completion of the human being as a creature capable of knowing itself, the purpose of its existence, and the levels of truth.
The Worlds in Theoretical Irfan and Sufism: Escaping the Prison of a Single Level
One of the most important things the irfani worldview offers humanity is that it does not regard existence as a single, flat, material, worldly level.
The arif, according to the various terminologies of theoretical irfan, speaks of levels and worlds that differ according to degrees of manifestation, determination, and multiplicity. These include such levels as Jabarut, Malakut, the World of the Imaginal, the World of Dominion (Mulk), and the world of nature.
This does not mean that these worlds are geographical places situated above one another, nor that God moves from one world to another. Rather, what is meant is different levels of manifestation, determination, and perception.
In this conception, something appears at a lower level in a more restricted, multiple, and detailed form, whereas the higher world is understood as deeper and closer to the reality of what appears at the lower level.
Thus, we arrive at a profoundly important principle:
What appears at a lower level is not necessarily the whole of reality; it may be a limited manifestation of a reality broader than itself.
This idea alone produces a fundamental transformation in the way human knowledge is understood.
A person who perceives only the sensory level may assume that what the senses reveal is the entirety of reality. Someone who adds psychological experience may assume that their inner experience is the ultimate truth. Someone who reaches rational thought may assume that the conceptual picture constructed by the intellect represents the end of knowledge.
The irfani worldview, however, continually pushes the human being to ask:
Is what I have perceived reality itself, or one of its manifestations? And is the limitation in my perception caused by a limitation in reality itself, or by a limitation in the capacity that receives that reality?
The Sequence of Hiddenness and Manifestation, and the Strengthening of Perception
Here another powerful dimension of the irfani worldview emerges: the integration of manifestation and hiddenness.
A thing may appear in one level in a particular form while possessing a deeper reality at another level. What is manifest in relation to a lower world may be hidden in relation to a higher world.
Existence therefore becomes something like a chain of levels, none of which can legitimately be reduced to another.
The human being at the sensory level sees the body, but the human being is not merely a body.
The psychological world reveals emotions, desires, and motives, but the human being is not merely a collection of desires.
The intellect reveals meanings, relationships, and laws, but the human being is not merely a reasoning machine.
Then, according to the irfani conception, higher levels of perception emerge, allowing the human being to discover that every level reveals a more subtle aspect of reality while concealing other aspects that are less immediately manifest.
Thus, reflecting on the journey through the worlds gradually saves us from the deception of the self.
This is a crucial point.
If ten people observe the same thing from different angles, their different perceptions do not necessarily mean that the thing itself has no reality. It may simply mean that each person has perceived one aspect of it according to their position, capacity, and instrument of perception.
In this way, the irfani worldview can explain differences in perception without immediately falling into the claim that truth itself is relative.
The higher world is the reality of the lower world.
If every lower world represents a level of manifestation, and the higher world contains a deeper reality than what appears in the lower world, then the human being’s movement from lower to higher becomes a movement in the degree of perception.
At that point, ascent is no longer merely an obscure spiritual movement. It can be understood as a process through which the human being is trained to move beyond superficial readings of reality.
The human being begins with the senses, then moves toward contemplation, then intellect, then the perception of relationships and meanings, and then toward deeper levels of knowledge according to the terminology of authentic irfan and Sufism.
Here theoretical irfan acquires a highly important epistemological function: it prevents the human being from turning his particular level of perception into an absolute criterion for all of existence.
How Does This Become a Confrontation with the Self’s Deception?
The self can deceive the intellect by convincing it that the first image it has reached is the final image.
The irfani worldview, however, makes the intellect itself more cautious of this deception, because it teaches the intellect that there is a difference between truth and its own perception of truth.
A person may discover that what they regarded as certainty was merely an assumption arising from the limitations of their perceptive instrument, inadequacies in their premises, or the influence of their desires and interests.
Here several elements of theoretical irfan converge:
the levels of existence, the multiplicity of worlds, differences in receptive capacities, varying degrees of perception, the distinction between the manifest and the hidden, the epistemological ascent of the self, purification, intellect, and revelation.
It does not tell the intellect: “Abandon yourself.”
Rather, it tells it:
“Know your limits. Understand how the self operates within you. And do not make the first thing you have perceived the last thing that can ever be perceived.”
This may be one of the most important strengths of this conception.
Why Is the Consensus of Humanity’s Elite Not Sufficient?
When we move from the individual human being to the human sciences, the problem becomes even greater.
A theory is not necessarily true simply because a large number of people believe in it. Nor is the historical consensus of the majority of humanity by itself a sufficient criterion of truth—especially when military or financial superiority, or both, belongs to a group that plans, manipulates, and imposes its dominance through these instruments.
Humanity has witnessed different periods in which widely accepted cosmological and scientific conceptions later changed when new evidence and explanatory models emerged.
The geocentric conception, for example, was a dominant model for long historical periods, before astronomical models changed with the development of observation, mathematical calculation, and theory.
The lesson is not that earlier generations were stupid, nor that later generations are infallible. Rather, it is that the widespread acceptance of a belief does not necessarily mean that it corresponds to reality.
«“Rather, we follow what we found our forefathers following.”»
The consensus itself can be shaped by the knowledge available in a particular era, educational institutions, prevailing scientific language, cultural authority, social interests, inherited patterns of thought, directed funding, and what may be called educational policy in its negative dimensions.
Therefore, turning the “consensus of humanity’s elite” into a final criterion of truth contains a methodological problem:
Who guarantees that the human beings who construct the consensus have themselves been liberated from the psychological and cognitive limitations that can cause human beings to make collective mistakes?
The same applies to elites.
An elite may be more educated than the general population, yet it remains human, with its own motives, interests, biases, and historical limitations.
Therefore, the problems of the human sciences are not solved simply by replacing the opinion of the masses with the opinion of the elite, or replacing popular consensus with academic consensus.
The problem is deeper:
What methodology allows us to discover human error even when human beings are convinced that they are right?
The Natural Sciences and Technology Are Not Sufficient Measures of the Completion of the Human Sciences
Here we must distinguish between the development of the natural sciences and technology and the development of the human sciences.
Humanity’s success in building increasingly precise technologies does not necessarily mean that it has become more knowledgeable about the true nature of the human being.
Human beings have developed astonishing tools in physics, engineering, medicine, communications, and computing because these fields allow for high degrees of measurement, experimentation, repetition, and prediction.
The human being himself, however, is a far more complex object of study, because the human being is the subject studying itself.
When a person studies a natural phenomenon, they can, to a considerable extent, place themselves outside the object of study. But when they study ethics, religion, society, desire, power, happiness, freedom, or meaning, they themselves enter into the equation.
The possibility that the researcher’s desires, values, and conceptions of humanity will influence their conclusions therefore becomes greater.
For this reason, it is not valid simply to say:
Because science and technology are advancing, the human sciences must necessarily be moving toward truth to the same degree.
There is an enormous difference between discovering a law of nature and determining what the human being ought to become.
The former can be tested through a high degree of repetition and measurement. The latter involves questions of purpose, value, meaning, virtue, happiness, and the Perfect Human Being.
Hence the need for a deeper foundation for the human sciences.
The Human Being Is Not the Center of Truth Merely Because the Human Being Is Its Subject
The irfani worldview offers an important correction to the epistemological position of the human being.
The human being may be the central subject of the human sciences, but this does not make humanity the origin of truth, the source of values, or the ultimate criterion of all existence.
There is a fundamental difference between saying:
“We study the human being,”
and saying:
“The human being is the ultimate criterion of everything.”
Theoretical irfan begins from a different vision: the human being is limited, poor, dependent, changing, and simultaneously capable of knowledge and error.
Yet these very conditions open vast horizons of knowledge to the human being and connect them to the very source of truth and its springs.
The Qur’an expresses this meaning powerfully:
«“O mankind, you are those in need of Allah, while Allah is the Self-Sufficient, the Praiseworthy.”
(Qur’an 35:15)»
The human being, therefore, is not an independently self-sufficient entity, but a being whose existence is fundamentally characterized by need and dependence.
From here, knowledge of the self can become the beginning of liberating the intellect from the self, rather than glorifying the self without limits.
The more deeply a person recognizes their dependence and limitations, the more capable they become of epistemic humility.
And the more they imagine themselves to be self-sufficient, the more susceptible they become to turning their own ideas into absolute truths.
From “Knowing the Human Being” to “Cultivating the Human Being”
This point can become the heart of the project of Islamic Humanities.
The human sciences should not be satisfied with asking:
How does the human being behave?
They should also ask:
Why does the human being behave as they do, and what do they desire? What is human perfection? Toward what should the human being ascend? What prevents the human being from knowing the truth? And how can a person move from being governed by desire, anger, and arrogance to becoming connected with the highest degrees of truth?
Here the concept of the Perfect Human Being (al-Insan al-Kamil) appears in the irfani tradition as an epistemological and ethical horizon for humanity, rather than merely as an isolated mystical concept.
The Perfect Human Being is one whose intellectual capacity is not separated from purification, whose knowledge is not separated from servitude to God, whose freedom is not separated from truth, and whose power is not separated from mercy and justice.
This opens an entirely different path for the human sciences.
Instead of studying the human being only as they are, they can also study the process through which the human being moves from their present condition toward a more perfect state.
Irfan Does Not Abolish the Intellect; It Places the Intellect Within a Broader System
The point is not that theoretical irfan offers an alternative to rational demonstration or scientific experimentation, nor that every irfani proposition can be converted into an empirical equation.
Its essential strength here lies in providing an anthropology and metaphysics of knowledge.
It explains human limitation, levels of perception, the influence of the self, differences in receptive capacities, the relationship between the manifest and the hidden, the possibility of error, the need for ascent and purification, and the mechanisms through which rational perception can be strengthened.
This is extremely important for the human sciences, because their problem is not merely a lack of information. Their deeper problem is the human being who produces the information, theories, and values within them.
From this perspective, theoretical irfan can become an element in correcting methodology, rather than merely a historical subject for academic study.
Toward Human Sciences Moving in the Right Direction
If we want human sciences that are more capable of approaching truth, what is required is not the rejection of reason, the rejection of science, or the replacement of one university with another or one elite with another.
What is required is the construction of a system of knowledge that recognizes that the human being has multiple layers, that perception operates at multiple levels, that the self can influence the intellect, and that truth is not identical to what human beings happen to agree upon at a particular historical moment.
Here theoretical irfan can offer several complementary elements:
First: A worldview in which truth precedes the human being, so that humanity does not become the creator of truth merely because it thinks about it.
Second: A theory of the levels of existence and manifestation that prevents reality from being reduced to a single world or a single level of perception.
Third: A theory of receptive capacities and levels of perception that explains why people differ in their apprehension of truth without requiring the conclusion that truth itself is relative.
Fourth: The concept of epistemological ascent, which makes knowledge a process of elevation rather than merely the accumulation of information.
Fifth: Purification as an element in the soundness of knowledge, because correcting the knowing instrument is part of correcting knowledge itself.
Sixth: Revelation as a source that transcends human limitations when the human intellect is incapable of reaching certain ultimate truths and values on its own.
Seventh: The concept of the Perfect Human Being as a higher criterion for studying the possibilities of humanity, rather than limiting the study of humanity to its weakest, most disturbed, most desire-driven, and most conflict-ridden forms.
Conclusion: Liberating the Intellect Begins by Discovering Who Is Speaking Through It
Perhaps the greatest problem in human knowledge is that a person imagines they are using their intellect, while at times it may actually be the self that is using the intellect.
Therefore, the deeper question is not:
Do we possess an intellect?
Rather:
Is our intellect sufficiently liberated to search for truth, or does it sometimes operate within a system created by the self, after which the self asks the intellect to justify it?
In this way, the project of Islamic Humanities can become more than an attempt to add religious terminology to the existing human sciences. It can become a deeper project: the reconstruction of our understanding of the human being itself, its position within existence, the nature of the knowledge it produces, and the conditions that make this knowledge more capable of approaching truth.
The human sciences do not merely need more information about the human being.
They need knowledge of the human being who produces knowledge about the human being.
The process of reviving the human sciences here is not complicated. It is sufficient to establish a state that believes in this intellectual vision and gives attention and priority to the arifin—those devoted to authentic spiritual and intellectual insight.
Then we may witness the emergence of a vast tree of knowledge from a tiny bud.
The Qur’an says:
«“Have you not considered how Allah presents an example: a good word is like a good tree, whose root is firmly planted and whose branches are in the sky.”
(Qur’an 14:24)»
Then this light can radiate through the spaces of yearning hearts throughout the world—from Black Africa to fair-haired Europe, from Chinese eyes to blue eyes.
From these illuminated hearts, a bright, ideal global civilization can emerge: a civilization that elevates all peoples through justice and carries the willing human being toward the highest degrees of true perfection.
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