The Heart and Mind

based God-realization were deprived of wisdom, for they were seeking wisdom in the heart, whereas wisdom did not stem from the heart at all. It is to compensate for this lack of wisdom that religionists (those who believe in one religion or the other) resort to concocted stories to make their point. Man is a thinking animal. All of man’s activities are controlled by thought. It is believed that man’s personality is shaped by his thinking. It is this thinking faculty which is called the mind. These are the words—synonyms –for the mind that occur in the Quran: Aql, Lub, Fuwad, Hijr, Nuha and Qalb. “Heart” is generally taken in the sense of a major organ of the body, but in addition to this, the word heart is also used in the sense of the mind (aql). The most standard dictionary of Arabic Lisan al-Arab says that “heart” (qalb) is also used in the sense of ‘the mind.’ Farra Nahvi, a grammarian, corroborates this with an allusion to the thirty seventh verse of the fiftieth chapter of the Quran. “There is truly a reminder in this for whoever has a heart, whoever listens attentively.” (Quran 50:37) In the Arabic language ‘heart’ is often used for ‘mind’. For instance, “You had no heart (on such and such occasion).” That is, you had no mind. (Lisan al-Arab, Ibn Manzur, vol. 1. p. 687) The truth is that the greatest thing man possesses is the mind. The words “heart” and “mind” are used synonymously with the only difference being that the word aql is used for “mind” in its literal sense, while the word ‘heart’ is used for the mind in a literary sense. In present times, it has been proved that the heart is only