The central gesture
In this book, Khaled Bentounes asks a simple question: who is the inner man? Beneath the social persona, beneath the agitation of desires and fears, there is an inner being — and it is of him, in reality, that the whole spiritual way speaks.
To describe him, Bentounes draws not on modern psychology, but on the Quran. The Book, read in depth, is a true cartography of the soul: it names its degrees, its maladies, its faculties, its paths. The inner man is not an abstraction — he is a reality that revelation illuminates.
The key concepts (made plain)
- The outer man and the inner man — We live most often at the surface of ourselves. The book invites us to descend — towards the deeper, more stable being that agitation covers over.
- The Quran as a mirror of the soul — What the Book says of God and of the world, it also says of the inner man. To read the Quran is to learn to read oneself.
- The degrees of the soul — Bentounes takes up the Quranic teaching on the states of the soul — the soul that commands to evil, the soul that blames itself, the soul at peace. The spiritual life is the passage from one to the other.
- The heart (qalb) — At the centre of the being, the heart: organ of true knowledge, place of the meeting with God. All inner work tends to purify it and to awaken it.
To read it
A book of meditation as much as of teaching, which lends itself to a slow reading, in fragments. It addresses anyone who wishes to make of the Quran not a text studied from afar, but a guide for the inner journey. The natural complement of Therapy of the Soul.
Resonances
- The author: Khaled Bentounes
- The heart — see the Qalb page and the Nafs page
- His other books: Sufism, the Heart of Islam, Therapy of the Soul