Human in Imam Māturīdī: A Study on the Relationship Between Soul, Nafs And Body

This article aims to examine “the question of human nature”, one of the oldest and most discussed problems of the history of thought and of the Islamic Theology, in the example of Imam Māturīdī (d. 333/944), one of the founders of Ahl al-Sunnah and one of the most important names of the Islamic Theology. In this context, the following questions are asked in the article: What is human? What are the basic references of the definitions of human? Is man just a soul? Is it only the nafs that makes human beings as human? Is the human body its only reality? Is it a simple substance, or does it have a complex entity consisting of soul, nafs and body? There are different answers to those questions. In this paper, the philosophical foundations of these answers and the projections in Islamic philosophy and theology were examined by following the method of Māturīdī. In this context two different Mu'tazilah schools and the period of Māturīdī, his followers' ideas, and the similar to ideas of Māturīdī as well as opposed views were taken into consideration. There are holistic, fragmentary and reductionist approaches to the problem of human nature. Regarding the issue, this article presented the thoughts of Māturīdī and disclosed the extent to which his ideas influenced his successors