What is the higher self if the body is only a shell?

The higher self is a person’s consciousness, their soul. It is not a mysterious second being but the result of a long development that enables human beings to know God.

All life has a centre of consciousness. Even the simplest living things sense in their own way what is good for them and what harms them. They avoid danger and seek what keeps them alive. This awareness is very faint, but it is there. One could say that life is consciousness.

Over the long course of life’s development, this consciousness grew ever more alert. In human beings it has expanded far beyond anything that came before. An animal is aware of itself and its surroundings. But it cannot reflect on the universe or ask about life after death.

This vast, refined consciousness is what one may call the higher self. Islam does not speak of it in mysterious terms but quite plainly. The body is not worthless, for it is where the soul matures. Yet a person’s real self is this consciousness that God has given, as the first verse above says.

Why did God give human beings such a consciousness? Without it we could not come to know God. That is the purpose of creation. The other two verses above add that the soul can be perfected, and that whoever purifies it truly prospers.