The Ego in the Quran

This post is a translation of the original Arabic article.

The story of the ego in the Quran is summed up in:

"Has there not come upon man a period of time when he was not a thing even mentioned?"

What is remarkable is that this verse is traditionally recited in the Fajr prayer on Fridays.

A human being exists even before becoming anything. Then he is born and begins forming what is known as the false self, or the ego — the opposite of the higher self, which is the true essence of a person that existed even before birth.

The false self grows as the person grows. The more a person learns, the more they attach what they learn to their identity, treating it as part of the ego. For example: when a child learns that his name is Ahmad, he ties his existence to that name — yet he existed before the name Ahmad ever was. And so with everything he learns, he binds it to his worldly existence.

The ego is natural, of course. But the larger the ego grows, the more a person loses connection with their core essence. Instead of being a servant of God who forgets himself, he comes to believe he is "so-and-so with the job and the salary and the car and the house and the family."

Prayer reduces the ego and reconnects the servant with their essence and their Lord. So does meditation, or the practice of imagining yourself from above. You are not your thoughts — you existed before you had any thoughts at all.