Abstract
According to Islam, worshipping and serving Allah are humanity’s ultimate function, the fulfillment of which constitutes well-being. In other words, well-being is living a life in which all one’s actions and intentions are organized around the principle of Allah’s absolute sovereignty. This view requires absolute submission to the will of Allah in every aspect of life, no matter how small. Detailed guidelines on how to live a proper life are provided in the sharia, which is God’s revealed law to govern individual and social life. This notion of well-being underlies all concepts of well-being formulated in all Islamic schools of thought (e.g., Islamic philosophy and Sufism) throughout Islamic history including contemporary islamic conceptualizations of well-being.
Know that the key to happiness is to follow the Sunna and to imitate the Messenger of God in all his coming and going, his movements and rest, in his way of eating, his attitude, his sleep and his talk.
Al-Ghazali (Ruthven 2012)
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Notes
- 1.
Translations of all Qur’anic verses were obtained from http://Quran.al-islam.org/.
- 2.
Whereas the existence of a fixed and definable human nature with a telos that guides human actions and defines well-being has been largely questioned in secular psychology and philosophy, Islam (like many other traditional religions) posits a fixed human telos and conceptualizes well-being based on it (Joshanloo 2013).
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Joshanloo, M. (2017). Islamic Conceptions of Well-Being. In: Estes, R., Sirgy, M. (eds) The Pursuit of Human Well-Being. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39101-4_5
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