Presented by Zia H Shah MD

A scientific, philosophical, and theological commentary situated within Surah Ash-Shams (91:1–15), with comparative Abrahamic reflections and a review of moral cognition research

Abstract

This report offers a close exegetical reading of Quran 91:7–10—“By the soul and what proportioned it; and inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness; successful is the one who purifies it, and ruined is the one who buries/corrupts it”—situating these verses within the oath-driven rhetoric of Surah Ash-Shams (91:1–15). The analysis argues that 91:7–10 functions as the surah’s moral “thesis statement”: the cosmos’ ordered signs (91:1–6) culminate in the human interior as a morally oriented microcosm, and the Thamud narrative (91:11–15) supplies an historical exemplum of what “corrupting/burying” the soul looks like in collective life. Classical Sunni tafsir—especially  and —frames “inspiration” (ilhām) as God-given moral disclosure (bayān/taʿrīf) and/or the implanted capacity for both trajectories (fujūr/taqwā), while highlighting moral responsibility through purification (tazkiyah) and warning of moral self-suppression (dass). Comparative theology is developed through Christian and Jewish accounts of conscience (synderesis, law of God, prophetic pathos), and the philosophical section tests the user’s “physicalism is bland and purposeless” intuition against both theistic and naturalistic theories of moral normativity. Finally, empirical research in moral psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and evolutionary theory is reviewed to clarify what scientific explanation can (and cannot) say about the phenomenology and authority of conscience. 

Introduction

I analyze Quran 91:7–10 as a compressed anthropology: a claim about (i) what the human self is (nafs as a morally “shaped” reality), (ii) how humans come to know moral difference (ilhām of fujūr and taqwā), and (iii) what ultimately matters (tazkiyah vs. suppression/corruption). The report’s method is deliberately “triangulatory.” First, I perform close reading: Arabic wording, transliteration, and translation comparison, with attention to syntax and lexical range. Second, I synthesize tafsir—classical Sunni and modern moral-expository readings—focusing on how exegetes reconcile divine “inspiration” with human freedom and accountability. Third, I place the Qur’anic account into dialogue with (a) Christian and Jewish theological reflections on conscience, (b) major philosophical positions on moral knowledge and normativity, and (c) empirical work on moral cognition and moral emotion.

Two user-specified blog posts from The Glorious Quran and Science are treated as secondary, rhetorically ambitious reflections that invite interdisciplinary expansion. Their distinctive moves—(i) reading Surah Ash-Shams as a meditation on the “evolution of conscience,” and (ii) relating the Qur’anic discourse of birr/conscience to a moral-historical “Lincolnian” idiom—are evaluated for linguistic plausibility, exegetical fit, and scientific credibility. 

Because “conscience” is not an exact Arabic technical term in 91:7–10, I treat it as an analytic bridge-word spanning multiple registers: Qur’anic nafs, ilhām, taqwā, tazkiyah; prophetic ḥadīth on birr/ithm; and modern psychological constructs (moral emotion, self-evaluation, internalized norms). This approach aims to be both faithful (to text and tradition) and dialogical (with contemporary philosophy and science), while clearly distinguishing theological assertions from empirical findings. 

Text, lexicon, and rhetoric of Surah Ash-Shams

Arabic text and transliteration

Arabic (91:7–10):
وَنَفْسٍۢ وَمَا سَوَّىٰهَا۝٧
فَأَلْهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقْوَىٰهَا۝٨
قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَن زَكَّىٰهَا۝٩
وَقَدْ خَابَ مَن دَسَّىٰهَا۝١٠ 

Transliteration (one scholarly-leaning rendering):
wa-nafsin wa-mā sawwāhā
fa-alhamahā fujūrahā wa-taqwāhā
qad aflaḥa man zakkāhā
wa-qad khāba man dassāhā 

Translation comparison

Below are three reputable English renderings that illustrate the interpretive pressure-points: the referent of mā in 91:7, the force of alhama in 91:8, and the semantic range of dassāhā in 91:10.

1. Sahih International: “And [by] the soul and He who proportioned it / And inspired it [with discernment of] its wickedness and its righteousness, / He has succeeded who purifies it, / And he has failed who instills it [with corruption].” 
2. : He renders 91:7 with emphasis on “proportion and order” and glosses 91:8 as God “breath[ing] into it an understanding of what is sin… and what is… right conduct,” presenting “distinguishing between right and wrong” as a central gift. 
3. : His translation (as displayed in parallel on Quran.com) keeps the compact oath-style and conveys 91:8 as divine inspiration of an internal moral contrast (right/wrong). 

A key observation: mainstream translations converge on a moral polarity (wickedness/righteousness) and on the success/failure contrast; they differ chiefly on how explicitly to interpret 91:8 as “discernment,” “instinct,” or “moral disclosure,” and on whether 91:10 emphasizes corruption broadly or the more imagistic “burying/suppressing” suggested by dassāhā. 

Lexical and syntactic notes central to conscience

Nafs (نَفْس) in 91:7 is not merely “consciousness” in a modern sense; it is the self/soul as moral subject.  notes interpretive options: “nafs” could refer to  specifically or to every ensouled self; and the oath-structure grammatically places “nafs” among the cosmic oath-objects (sun, moon, day, night, sky, earth), elevating interiority into the same rhetorical field as the cosmos. 

The particle mā (مَا) in 91:7 is a major syntactic hinge.  reports two classical readings: (i) mā as a maṣdariyyah (“and [by] its fashioning/proportioning”), producing an oath “by the soul and its proportioning”; or (ii) mā as relative (“and [by] the One who proportioned it”), pointing explicitly to God as the fashioner. 
This matters because conscience is being framed either (a) as a feature of the soul’s internal constitution or (b) as a feature of the soul grounded explicitly in divine agency; many translators combine both by paraphrase (“the soul and the One who fashioned it”). 

Alhama (أَلْهَمَ) in 91:8: the Qur’an uses a verb form that classical commentators often gloss as “made clear,” “taught,” or “caused to know,” which is extremely close to a theological account of conscience as a divinely grounded moral disclosure.  explicitly glosses 91:8 as God “clarifying” what the soul should do/avoid, framing ilhām as moral explication (bayān) across “good/evil, obedience/disobedience.” 
At the same time, he reports a second interpretive strand: that God “placed within it” its fujūr and taqwā—an ontological reading with direct implications for debates about innate tendencies and moral responsibility. 

Fujūr (فُجُور) in 91:8 denotes moral “rupture” or open transgression; it is not mere error but a breaking beyond due bounds. 
Taqwā (تَقْوَى) is often rendered “piety” or “God-consciousness,” but in conscience-discussions it can be read as moral attentiveness anchored to accountability.  explicitly argues that “conscience” can convey taqwā provided conscience’s “object” transcends the self (i.e., is oriented to ultimate moral reality, not mere self-preference). 

Zakkāhā (زَكَّاهَا) in 91:9 carries both “purify” and “cause to grow” resonances in Qur’anic moral discourse; hence many exegetes treat tazkiyah as a process of cultivated moral-spiritual development rather than a single ritual act. 
Dassāhā (دَسَّاهَا) in 91:10 is rhetorically striking: several translators capture it as “burying” or “suppressing,” not just “doing wrong.” This imagery aligns conscience with something that can be muffled—an internal witness that may be obscured by repeated moral compromise. 

Immediate context and rhetorical structure

Surah Ash-Shams is structurally legible as: cosmic oaths (91:1–7) → moral thesis about the soul (91:8–10) → historical exemplum and warning (91:11–15). Its opening multiplies oath-objects—sun, moon, day, night, sky, earth—before arriving at the “soul,” thereby rhetorically implying that the same order perceivable in the external cosmos is mirrored in the internal moral subject. 

Verses 7–10 function as the surah’s pivot: they translate cosmic symbolism into moral accountability, concluding the oath sequence with a verdict about success and ruin. 

Verses 11–15 narrate the arrogance-driven denial of  by the people of Thamud and their violent action against the divine sign (the she-camel), culminating in destruction. The blog’s quotation of  highlights how the Thamud narrative functions as an example of preferring impurity/iniquity over purification, and how the story recurs across Qur’anic passages, suggesting its paradigmatic moral role. 

A key connective insight—also present in Qur’an Wiki’s “Tafsir Zone”—is the intertextual resonance with Qur’an 90:10 (“shown him the two paths”) and 76:3 (“shown him the way”), which frames 91:8 as part of a broader Qur’anic anthropology: humans are shown moral alternatives and are accountable for a chosen trajectory. 

Muslim tafsir and theological debates on conscience

Core exegetical question: what is “inspiration” doing in 91:8?

The most linguistically and contextually plausible translation of fa-alhamahā fujūrahā wa-taqwāhā is one that keeps three elements in view:
(1) divine origin (God as ultimate ground of the soul’s moral capacity),
(2) moral polarity (fujūr vs. taqwā as real options), and
(3) human responsibility (tazkiyah vs. suppression as the decisive line).

A translation like “and inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness” is faithful to surface structure, but it leaves ambiguous whether “inspired” means “placed tendencies,” “gave knowledge,” or “activated conscience.” The classical tafsir record suggests that this ambiguity is not a translator’s failure so much as an intentional density: 91:8 can simultaneously sustain epistemic (knowledge/discernment) and dispositional (capacity/tendency) readings. 

Classical Sunni tafsir patterns

 (d. 310/923). In his commentary on 91:8, he first glosses alhama as divine clarification: God “made clear” what the soul should do or leave—good/evil, obedience/disobedience. He transmits reports from early authorities (notably attributions to  and others) reading the verse as “He made clear the good and the evil.” He then records another interpretive view: God “made within it” its fujūr and taqwā. 
The conscience-relevant frame here is twofold: ilhām grounds moral knowledge, and the soul contains (in some sense) a structured moral potential in both directions.

 (d. 774/1373). In the tafsir excerpt preserved on Tafsir.app, he reads 91:7 as the soul created “upright upon the sound fitra,” explicitly cross-referencing Qur’an 30:30 (fitrat Allah) and citing the famous hadith “every newborn is born upon fitra.” 
For 91:8 he reports the familiar range: “He clarified to it the good and the evil” (Ibn Abbas, Mujahid, Qatadah, etc.), and also the view that God “placed within it” fujūr and taqwā (Ibn Zayd). 
For 91:9–10 he states that purification can mean purifying the self through obedience and cleansing blameworthy traits; he also notes a theological possibility: that “successful is the one whom God purifies” and “failed is the one whom God causes to be buried,” but he treats this as one interpretive possibility among others, while still emphasizing responsibility and moral formation. 

 (d. 671/1273). His commentary on 91:7 foregrounds grammar: the dual reading of mā (maṣdar vs. “the One who”), and whether “nafs” is Adam or all souls; he also reads the oath series as God swearing by created signs because they manifest “wonders of craftsmanship” indicating the Creator. 
This is conscience-relevant because it roots moral inwardness in the same semiotic logic as cosmological signs: conscience is not arbitrary; it is part of intelligible order.

Modern and contemporary Muslim moral-expository readings

Mufti Shafi Usmani’s Maʿārif al-Qur’an (20th c. Deobandi tradition, as hosted on Quran.com) explicitly defines ilhām as “casting into the heart” and reads 91:7–8 as evidence that God equipped the human soul with the capacity to distinguish right and wrong and with the ability to choose freely, linking the verse to debates about divine destiny and human agency; this reading is explicitly conscience-forward: “Not a creature of pure force,” but a chooser accountable for the chosen path. 

 (d. 1966). The Qur’an Wiki “Tafsir Zone” articulates a moral-psychological reading characteristic of Qutbian expository style: 91:7–10 outlines a “basis” for Islamic human psychology—duality of tendencies and a conscious faculty that decides between them; messages and revelation “awaken” and guide but do not create the innate ability. It emphasizes that freedom implies responsibility within God’s will, and it makes intertextual links to Qur’an 90:10 and 76:3. 
Even if one brackets Qutb’s broader political theology, this section is valuable as a clear statement of conscience as (i) an internal capacity and (ii) a responsibility-bearing faculty placed within a revelatory moral ecology.

 (d. 1992). Asad’s translation choices highlight the imagistic moral psychology of 91:10 by rendering dassāhā as “buries it [in darkness]” (as presented in Alim.org’s translation comparison), preserving the metaphor of conscience suppression rather than mere wrongdoing. 
This is exegetically significant: “burying” implies a prior luminous or witnessing capacity (akin to conscience) that can be covered over.

 (d. 1988). Rahman’s account of taqwā as “conscience” (when conscience is oriented beyond the self) provides a contemporary conceptual bridge: taqwā becomes not a narrow ritual scruple but a stable moral attentiveness responsive to ultimate accountability. 

Theological implications: freedom, responsibility, and fitra

Across these readings, three implications repeatedly emerge:

1. Innate moral orientation (fitra) and moral discernment. Ibn Kathir’s fitra framing suggests conscience is not a socially arbitrary construction; it is grounded in the human being as created upon a primordial orientation, even if culture can distort it. 
2. Divine inspiration does not cancel responsibility. Maʿārif al-Qur’an explicitly uses 91:7–8 to clarify that humans are granted capacity and choice, and therefore can be rewarded or punished for self-purification vs. self-corruption. 
3. Conscience can be suppressed. The lexical emphasis on dassāhā as “burying” (Asad) and on “instilling corruption” (Sahih International) supports a moral-psychological model in which repeated vice can muffly internal moral perception, yielding a self that is not merely “wrong” but morally anaesthetized. 

Comparative tafsir table on the key phrase

The table below compares readings of the core conscience-relevant phrase (91:7–10, especially 91:8). Because some sources provide interpretive ranges rather than a single “take,” “key reading” represents the dominant emphasis in the cited material.

Commentator	Date	Key reading/translation emphasis for 91:7–10	Theological implications	Notes
	d. 310/923	Ilhām as clarifying the good/evil and/or placing fujūr/taqwā within the soul	Conscience as divinely grounded moral disclosure; hints at innate moral structure	Reports multiple early authorities; preserves plurality (epistemic + dispositional)
	d. 774/1373	Soul created upon fitra; ilhām as guidance/clarification; purification as obedience and moral cleansing	Innate orientation + accountability; possible theological reading of divine purification while maintaining moral labor	Explicitly cites fitra (Q 30:30) and hadith “born upon fitra”
	d. 671/1273	Grammar of mā (maṣdar vs “Who”); “nafs” as Adam or all souls; oaths as signs of divine craftsmanship	Conscience framed within cosmic sign-order; God as explicit fashioner or implicit via maṣdar reading	Emphasizes syntactic nuance shaping theological reading of moral inwardness
Mufti Shafi Usmani (Maʿārif)	20th c.	Ilhām as “casting into the heart”; built-in capacity to distinguish right/wrong; free will within divine destiny	Strong conscience-reading; freedom and responsibility foregrounded	Links to destiny discourse and prophetic supplication for taqwā/tazkiyah
	20th c.	Emphasizes metaphor: dassāhā as “buries it [in darkness]”	Moral psychology of suppression: conscience can be covered, not only violated	Translation choice sharpens the “conscience as inner light” motif
(via Qur’an Wiki “Tafsir Zone”)	d. 1966	Dual tendencies + conscious faculty; revelation awakens and guides an already present capacity	Freedom implies responsibility within divine will; conscience thrives in revelatory ecology	Intertextual links to Q 90:10; 76:3; emphasizes “task” and dignity of moral agency

Comparative theology and moral philosophy

Conscience in Christian and Jewish theological reflection

The Qur’anic claim that the soul is “inspired” with moral polarity resonates with, but also differs from, classic Christian accounts of conscience and Jewish accounts of prophetic moral inwardness.

 (Christian natural law / synderesis). Aquinas distinguishes synderesis (a natural habit containing first practical principles) from conscience (the application of knowledge to a particular act). He explicitly describes synderesis as a natural habit “incit[ing] to good and murmur[ing] at evil,” which conceptually parallels the idea of an implanted moral orientation. 
In Qur’anic terms, one could analogize synderesis to what 91:8 presupposes (a built-in moral polarity and capacity), while conscience resembles tazkiyah’s lived discernment in concrete choices. The analogy is imperfect—since Qur’an 91 anchors this in direct divine inspiration and oath rhetoric rather than in Aristotelian habit theory—but it provides a rigorous bridge concept.

 (conscience as divine authority in the subject). Newman’s famous formulation—conscience as the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ”—casts conscience as an interior authority with a quasi-prophetic normativity: not mere preference but morally binding summons. 
This strongly illuminates the Qur’anic emphasis on normativity: 91:9–10 presents conscience not as optional aesthetic taste but as destiny-bearing.

 (conscience “captive” to divine Word). The Luther tradition’s emphasis that it is not “safe nor right to go against conscience,” especially when conscience is tethered to divine testimony, underscores a key Qur’anic theme: the conscience is not sovereign in isolation; it is healthiest when aligned with a true moral source. 
This parallels, though without identity, the Qur’anic claim that the soul’s moral clarity is given by God and purified through fidelity.

 (prophetic consciousness and moral inwardness). Heschel’s theology emphasizes prophetic “consciousness” as a responsiveness to divine pathos and a moral seriousness that makes justice and righteousness matters of divine concern, not mere social convention. 
While Heschel is not “conscience theory” in scholastic terms, his account of inward moral awakening helps illuminate 91:8 as a divine-human intersection: the moral interior is not closed; it is a site of summons.

Comparison with Quran 91:7–10

Three comparative contrasts are especially instructive.

First, the Qur’an’s framing is cosmic-judicial: conscience is embedded in a rhetoric of oaths and judgment, immediately connected to “success” and “ruin” (91:9–10), and then concretized by a historical case (Thamud). 

Second, Christian accounts often parse conscience at the level of faculty psychology (synderesis vs. conscience) or ecclesial authority debates; the Qur’an’s emphasis is more directly on formation: conscience is given, but it must be purified or it will be buried. 

Third, Jewish prophetic reflection (Heschel) resonates with the Qur’an’s insistence that moral inwardness is ultimately tied to God’s reality, not merely human convention—yet the Qur’an frames this with a sharply dichotomous moral outcome (aflaḥa vs. khāba). 

Philosophical positions on conscience and moral knowledge

In philosophy, “conscience” is often analyzed under the broader questions: How do we know moral truths? Why do moral judgments feel binding? What is the status of moral normativity? Quran 91:7–10 can be located in this space as a theistic meta-ethical claim: moral polarity is not a human invention but a divinely grounded feature of the soul’s constitution, and moral flourishing depends on aligning with that structure.

Moral intuitionism (e.g., Ross/Moore traditions) often treats certain moral truths as known non-inferentially. Qur’an 91:8 can be read as congenial to a moderated intuitionism: certain moral discriminations are “given” rather than derived. The Qur’anic difference is that the source of this givenness is explicitly divine (ilhām), not metaphysically brute.

Moral sentimentalism (Humean line; modern moral psychology) locates moral judgment significantly in affective response. This aligns with scientific accounts of “moral emotions” (guilt, shame, empathy) and with prophetic traditions that define sin as what “rankles” in the heart. 
A Qur’anic sentimentalism reading, however, must be disciplined by 91:10: feelings can be dulled (buried), so moral sentiment is not automatically trustworthy without purification.

Kantian rationalism views moral law as rooted in reason and autonomy. Qur’an 91, by contrast, frames moral law as grounded in God, yet still assigns responsibility and a kind of internal moral agency. Qur’an Wiki’s Qutbian reading captures this: freedom implies responsibility “within the confines of God’s will.” 

Natural law theory—especially in Aquinas—has the closest structural analogy to Qur’an 91: an implanted orientation to good (synderesis) plus the need to apply it rightly (conscience) and build virtue over time. 
Qur’an 91 can thus be read as offering a theistic natural-law anthropology in poetic form: God swears by the soul’s moral constitution and warns against deforming it.

Physicalist/empiricist accounts argue that moral judgments arise from evolved brains, social learning, and affective cognition. These can explain the phenomenology of conscience—why guilt feels painful, why empathy motivates care, why norm-violation triggers aversion—but the question of normative authority (“why I ought”) remains contested.

Is physicalism necessarily “bland, purposeless, and indifferent”?

The user’s claim—that a strictly physicalist universe might be “bland, purposeless, and indifferent”—is philosophically intelligible but not logically forced. Two clarifications help.

First, physicalism as a metaphysical thesis (“everything is physical or depends on the physical”) does not, by itself, entail axiological nihilism (“nothing matters”). A physicalist can argue that meaning and value are emergent, relational, and real at higher levels (persons, cultures, rational practices) even if there is no cosmic Person guaranteeing them. Many contemporary naturalists claim that moral normativity is grounded in facts about flourishing, reasons, social cooperation, or reflective endorsement.

Second, the strongest philosophical pressure on naturalistic moral realism often comes not from “blandness” rhetoric, but from genealogical challenges: if our evaluative attitudes are shaped by evolutionary forces, do they track independent moral truths or merely adaptive preferences?  formulates a “Darwinian dilemma” for robust realism: either evolutionary forces are unrelated to independent moral truths (risking skepticism) or they somehow track them (raising scientific concerns). 
Relatedly,  explores how evolutionary explanation can “debunk” rather than vindicate moral objectivity unless additional arguments are supplied. 

From a Qur’anic standpoint, 91:7–10 functions as a counter-genealogy: conscience is not merely an adaptive byproduct but a divinely inspired moral faculty whose corruption leads to ruin (and whose purification yields success). Whether one finds that persuasive depends on broader metaphysical commitments—but the claim is philosophically coherent and can be tested in dialogue with the very genealogical critiques naturalists deploy.

A balanced conclusion for this subsection: the “bland purposelessness” charge is best treated as (i) an existential intuition many experience under certain forms of naturalism, rather than (ii) a strict entailment of physicalism. The Qur’an’s response in 91:1–10 is not merely argumentative: it is aesthetic-rhetorical, using the beauty and order of natural signs to press the plausibility of a morally structured cosmos culminating in the soul. 

Scientific review: conscience, moral emotions, and moral cognition

What contemporary science can describe

Empirical research does not use “conscience” as a single operational construct; instead, it studies components that map onto conscience-like functions:

• Moral judgment (evaluating right/wrong in scenarios)
• Moral emotion (guilt, shame, empathy, compassion, disgust)
• Theory of mind and intention-attribution (inferring beliefs/intentions)
• Moral development (how children differentiate moral vs. conventional rules)
• Self-control and conflict monitoring (resisting temptation; resolving moral conflict)

The strongest interdisciplinary consensus is that moral cognition recruits both affective and deliberative systems, and that moral norm enforcement is deeply social. 

Neural correlates frequently implicated

One influential early fMRI finding—popularized in moral neuroscience—suggested that “personal” moral dilemmas engage brain systems associated with emotion and social cognition more strongly than “impersonal” dilemmas.  and colleagues reported differential activation patterns when subjects considered moral dilemmas, contributing to “dual-process” models of moral judgment. 

Lesion evidence strengthens the relevance of affective systems:  and colleagues found that patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage were more likely to make “utilitarian” judgments in high-conflict dilemmas, suggesting that intact vmPFC-mediated emotion/social emotion normally constrains certain outcome-maximizing choices. 

Mental state reasoning is crucial for moral blame:  and colleagues used TMS disruption of the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) to reduce the role of beliefs in moral judgment, supporting the claim that ToM-related neural regions are necessary for intention-sensitive moral evaluation. 

A major review by  and colleagues argued that a consistent network involving prefrontal, temporal-parietal, and limbic structures supports moral cognition, integrating concepts, emotions, and social meaning. 

Finally, the relation between empathy and morality is not simple:  and  emphasize that empathy can guide moral judgment, distort it, or interfere with it depending on context, motivating caution about equating “feeling with others” and “moral rightness.” 

Moral development and the shaping of conscience

Developmental theories help explain why conscience feels both personal and socially mediated.  described moral reasoning in stages, linking moral judgment development to cognitive development and arguing for progression from punishment-avoidance to principled reasoning. 
 argued (in social domain theory) that children distinguish moral rules (harm/justice) from social conventions (custom/authority), suggesting conscience is not reducible to mere rule-following. 
Contemporary moral psychology, exemplified by , proposes that moral judgment is often driven by rapid intuitive responses with post hoc reasoning (“the emotional dog and its rational tail”), highlighting the role of social influence and affect. 

Psychiatry and conscience: when moral capacities are impaired

Clinical research intersects conscience where moral emotions and social norm sensitivity are diminished or distorted. Cognitive neuroscience perspectives on psychopathy highlight reduced empathy and guilt as central features, with models emphasizing dysfunction in affective systems relevant to moral learning and harm aversion.  reviews psychopathy models in developmental psychopathology and frames the moral impairment in neurocognitive terms rather than as merely “bad character.” 
Such findings do not settle theological questions, but they complicate simplistic moral voluntarism: “conscience” has biological enabling conditions.

Evolutionary accounts of moral cognition

Evolutionary biology does not explain morality by “justifying” it but by describing mechanisms that could produce cooperative and norm-enforcing behavior.

• Kin selection:  formalized inclusive fitness, showing why helping genetic relatives can be selected. 
• Reciprocal altruism:  argued that cooperation with non-kin can evolve when repeated interaction allows reciprocity. 
• Multiple mechanisms for cooperation:  synthesized “five rules” (kin selection, direct/indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, group selection) as pathways by which cooperation can evolve. 
• Cultural evolution and group selection: work in cultural evolutionary theory argues that norms and institutions can be selected at group levels via cultural transmission, shaping moral cognition. 

Critiques matter. Not every trait is best explained as a direct adaptation;  and  famously warned against “just-so” adaptationist stories and emphasized constraints and byproducts (“spandrels”). 
In moral philosophy, evolutionary debunking arguments challenge whether evolved evaluative dispositions track objective moral truths (Street; Joyce). 

Table of key scientific contributions

Author/year	Discipline	Method/sample	Main findings (high-level)	Relevance to conscience/Q 91:7–10
et al., 2001	Social neuroscience	fMRI; moral dilemmas	Moral judgment engages emotion/cognition networks; supports dual-process modeling	Mechanistic account of moral conflict; maps to “discernment” and moral struggle
et al., 2007	Neuropsychology	Lesion study; vmPFC damage	vmPFC lesions increase utilitarian choices in high-conflict dilemmas	Biological enabling conditions for “moral emotions” tied to conscience-like restraint
, 2001	Moral psychology	Theoretical synthesis	Moral judgments often intuitive; reasoning often post hoc; social influence central	Explains why conscience feels “immediate”; warns about rationalization and social shaping
et al., 2005	Neuroscience review	Review of imaging/clinical evidence	Consistent network implicated in moral cognition	Supports network model for conscience-related processing
& , 2014	Social neuroscience	Review/opinion	Empathy and morality have complex, sometimes interfering relations	Helps distinguish conscience from raw empathy; supports nuanced moral psychology
et al., 2010	Cognitive neuroscience	TMS; RTPJ	RTPJ necessary for belief/intention in moral judgment	Explains intention-sensitivity central to moral blame and conscience
, 2005	Psychiatry/neuroscience	Review; psychopathy models	Psychopathy involves affective deficits linked to moral learning/emotion	Clinical boundary conditions for conscience; distinguishes moral failure vs impairment
, 1969 (and tradition)	Developmental psychology	Theoretical + empirical program	Stage-like development of moral reasoning tied to cognition	Provides developmental account of conscience formation (reasoning dimension)
, 1964	Evolutionary biology	Mathematical theory	Inclusive fitness explains kin-directed altruism	Evolutionary pathway for prosocial tendencies that conscience may regulate
, 2006	Evolutionary theory	Mathematical synthesis	Multiple mechanisms allow cooperation to evolve	Naturalistic scaffolding for moral norms; does not settle normative authority

Compatibility question: can science “accommodate” 91:8?

Empirical accounts can plausibly explain how moral discrimination and moral emotion arise (proximate mechanisms) and why cooperative norms might be selected (ultimate evolutionary histories). They can also explain why conscience is variable, developable, and suppressible, which is strikingly consonant with 91:9–10’s emphasis on purification vs. burial. 

But science typically cannot, by its own methods, decide the metaphysical claim embedded in 91:8: that God is the ultimate source of the soul’s moral structure. One can therefore articulate three broad relations:

1. Compatibility (layered causation): God as ultimate cause; biological and cultural processes as secondary causes. This frame is conceptually consistent with exegetical readings that treat ilhām as God-given capacity mediated through created nature. 
2. Complementarity (different questions): science explains mechanisms; theology interprets meaning, purpose, and ultimate accountability. 91:7–10’s function is primarily normative and teleological (“success/failure”), which science does not adjudicate.
3. Tension (strong naturalism): if one insists that only scientifically describable entities exist and that normativity reduces fully to evolutionary preference, then 91:8’s divine inspiration claim is rejected. This is where genealogical debates (Street/Joyce) become relevant: the tension often shifts from “mechanisms” to “normative truth.” 

Integration, epilogue, endnotes, and bibliography

Integrating and evaluating the two user-specified blog posts

The blog post “Surah Al Shams – The Sun: Evolution of the Human Conscience” explicitly identifies 91:7–10 as the surah’s center and interprets the passage as describing purification vs. corruption by heeding or ignoring conscience. It introduces a psychoanalytic bridge: ’s superego is presented as a secular model of conscience, with “id” analogized (speculatively) to Satan. 
This is rhetorically effective for inter-worldview dialogue, but two scholarly cautions are needed. First, mapping “id” to “Satan” risks conflating a metapsychological construct with a theological agent; the Qur’anic category structure (nafs, shayṭān, qalb) is not isomorphic with Freud’s structural model. Second, the blog’s translation “By the soul and how He evolved it” is linguistically provocative but exegetically non-standard: classical tafsir glosses sawwāhā as creating/proportioning/making upright, and major translations render it as “proportioned/fashioned,” not “evolved.” 
A defensible charitable reading is that the blog uses “evolved” metaphorically (developed/formed), but as a scientific term of art it invites confusion with Darwinian evolution, which the Arabic does not require.

The second post (January 9, 2026) proposes an “architecture of virtue” centered on Qur’an 2:177 (Ayat al-Birr), arguing that righteousness is not ritual formalism but holistic ethical integrity, and it connects “sovereignty of conscience” to ’s aphorism: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” It then juxtaposes this with the prophetic hadith on birr and ithm (“seek the guidance of thy soul… even if people endorse it”). 
The intertextual move is theologically plausible: in Islamic tradition, birr is not reducible to outward direction or ritual; it relates to inner moral tranquility and good character. The hadith “Virtue is good character, and vice is what rankles in your heart…” is explicitly about internal moral experience and social concealment—strongly conscience-adjacent. 

However, the Lincoln comparison is rhetorically and ethically interesting more than exegetically determinative. The Qur’an’s account is covenantal and God-centered; Lincoln’s aphorism is an inward moral phenomenology that can be interpreted theistically, deistically, or psychologically. Its value in this report is as a comparative moral phenomenology: it illustrates how conscience-talk tends to compress ethics into interior affective-moral self-awareness, which Qur’an 91:9–10 also does (“successful is the one who purifies it”). 

The phrase “fa-alhamahā fujūrahā wa-taqwāhā” and the fitra debate

The most textually conservative synthesis of the tafsir evidence is:

• 91:8 affirms a divinely granted moral capacity: God has given the soul access to a moral contrast (good/evil; taqwā/fujūr). 
• This does not necessarily imply that humans possess exhaustive innate moral knowledge; rather, they possess an innate moral orientation and a capacity for moral recognition that revelation clarifies, stabilizes, and protects from distortion (a theme emphasized in modern moral-expository tafsir). 
• The Qur’anic emphasis that the soul can be “purified” or “buried” implies moral formation and deformation are real processes: conscience is not a static “installed app,” but a dynamic interior witness subject to cultivation and suppression. 

Within Islamic theology, this framework supports a robust account of moral responsibility: even if God is the ultimate ground of the soul’s capacities (and even if divine decree is affirmed), humans are nonetheless addressed as agents whose destiny aligns with what they do with the soul. Classical tafsir’s willingness to preserve multiple strands (clarification vs implantation) may be read as an exegetical strategy that honors both divine sovereignty and lived responsibility. 

Beauty and conscience as “leading to God”

The user’s aesthetic claim—“beauty leads to God, and conscience at its best does the same”—can be analyzed as two related arguments from experience:

1. Argument from beauty: experiences of beauty disclose an order, radiance, or fittingness that seems to exceed mere utility, and this may be interpreted as a sign of a transcendent source. The Qur’an itself uses aesthetic-cosmic signs as rhetorical oaths in Surah Ash-Shams (sun, moon, day, night), which plausibly supports an aesthetic orientation to the divine. 
   In Islamic tradition, the hadith “Allah is beautiful and loves beauty” situates beauty within divine attribute discourse and moral formation (the hadith explicitly defines pride as denying truth and despising people, thereby linking beauty to truth and ethics). 
2. Argument from conscience: the felt authority of moral obligation and the interior witness of guilt/shame/tranquility may be interpreted as pointing beyond social preference to a higher moral source. This is powerfully expressed in prophetic hadith language defining sin as what “rankles” in the heart and virtue as what produces inner tranquility, even against social approval—an almost phenomenological theory of conscience. 

In Christian tradition, ’s famous prayer “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient, ever new…” frames beauty as a path that can either distract (created beauty) or lead (to the Creator as ultimate Beauty). 
Newman’s “aboriginal Vicar of Christ” similarly casts conscience as an interior authority that mediates the divine claim upon the person. 

A philosophically cautious synthesis is: beauty and conscience do not logically compel theism, but they provide a potent interpretable phenomenology. Under theistic interpretation, beauty becomes a sign of divine radiance and conscience becomes a sign of divine moral address; under strong naturalism, both become products of evolved affect and social cognition. The Qur’anic strategy in Surah Ash-Shams is to conjoin them: cosmic beauty (oaths) and moral conscience (soul/ilhām) together point to accountability and meaning. 

Critical synthesis: strengths and weaknesses of the accounts

Strengths of the Qur’anic-theological account (91:7–10): It unifies moral psychology with teleology: conscience is not only described but normatively directed (purify, don’t bury). It anticipates moral formation dynamics recognized in psychology (habituation; suppression; moral emotions) while grounding normativity in divine reality. 

Strengths of scientific accounts: They provide detailed mechanisms for moral judgment, emotion, and social norm processing; they explain variation across development and pathology, and they offer testable models (e.g., lesion and TMS evidence) that refine simplistic pictures of “pure reason” moral agency. 

Weaknesses / limits: Theological accounts can become underdetermined when translating ilhām into precise metaphysical claims (implantation vs disclosure vs providential guidance), and they risk overconfidence if they ignore psychological and neurobiological constraints on moral agency. Scientific accounts, by contrast, often describe how moral judgments occur without fully explaining the “oughtness” of moral obligation; genealogical explanations may even intensify skepticism about moral realism (Street/Joyce) unless supplemented by further meta-ethical argument. 

A coherent interdisciplinary reading faithful to Qur’an 91:7–10 is therefore possible: the verses can be understood as a theological claim about the soul’s moral constitution (a divinely given capacity and moral polarity), coupled with an existential-ethical imperative (purification) that is intelligible alongside scientific accounts of moral development and moral emotion—so long as one distinguishes proximate mechanism from ultimate meaning.

Thematic epilogue

Surah Ash-Shams presses an austere but hopeful anthropology: the human interior is not morally neutral territory. It is shaped (sawwāhā), morally oriented (alhamahā fujūrahā wa-taqwāhā), and destiny-bearing (aflaḥa vs. khāba). In modern terms, the surah insists that ethics is not reducible to external compliance; it is a project of interior formation—making the self truthful, lucid, and responsive rather than muffled and self-deceived.

When placed in interfaith dialogue, 91:7–10 can function as a shared moral grammar. Christians speak of conscience as an interior witness; Jews speak of prophetic inwardness and moral seriousness; Muslims speak of nafs, fitra, taqwā, and tazkiyah. The traditions differ in metaphysics and soteriology, but each struggles with the same human drama: the capacity to recognize moral truth, the temptation to bury it, and the hope that purification restores clarity.

Finally, the surah binds conscience to beauty without collapsing one into the other. The oaths at the beginning are not decorative: they invite moral seriousness by awakening aesthetic wonder. Beauty, in this reading, does not merely charm; it summons. Conscience, at its best, does something similar: it is an inner call toward truth, integrity, and the hard ascent of moral purification—an ascent whose failure is exemplified by Thamud’s arrogance and whose success is promised to the one who refuses to bury the soul’s moral light. 

Endnotes

1. On “conscience” as a translation choice: No single Arabic word in 91:7–10 equals “conscience.” The report uses “conscience” analytically to denote (i) moral discernment, (ii) felt moral accountability, and (iii) interior moral witness, drawing on tafsir glosses of ilhām as clarification/casting into the heart. 
2. On Qutb citations: The Qur’an Wiki “Tafsir Zone” is used as an accessible English presentation of a Qutbian-style reading emphasizing moral psychology and responsibility; it should be treated as mediated presentation rather than a critical edition of Fi Ẓilāl. 
3. On textual variants: This report did not locate accessible, detailed cataloguing of qirāʾāt variants for 91:7–10 that materially affect meaning; the focus is therefore on translation and exegetical variation rather than documented alternate readings. 
4. On blog material: The two blog posts are used as secondary sources; their exegetical assertions are evaluated against mainstream translations and tafsir ranges. 
5. On science-and-theology compatibility: “Compatibility” here means logical and explanatory non-contradiction under layered causation; it does not mean scientific “proof” of divine inspiration. 

Bibliography (Chicago-style orientation; URLs omitted where citations provide access)

Primary Qur’anic and tafsir sources

• Qur’an. Surah Ash-Shams (91), verses 1–15. English translations as cited (Sahih International; Yusuf Ali; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem). 
• Al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Tafsir al-Tabari (Jāmiʿ al-bayān), on 91:8. 
• Ibn Kathir. Tafsir al-Qur’an al-ʿAẓīm, on Surah 91 (fitra; ilhām; tazkiyah; dass). 
• Al-Qurtubi. Al-Jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-Qur’ān, on 91:7. 
• Mufti Muhammad Shafi Usmani. Maʿārif al-Qur’an, on 91:8 (ilhām; free will; destiny discussion). 
• Asad, Muhammad. The Message of the Qur’an, translation choice on 91:10 (burying in darkness) as presented in translation comparison. 
• Qutb, Sayyid. Fi Ẓilāl al-Qur’an (In the Shade of the Qur’an), mediated presentation (“Tafsir Zone”) on 91:7–10. 

Prophetic hadith on conscience, birr, and beauty

• Sahih Muslim 2553a: “Virtue is a kind disposition; vice is what rankles in your heart…” 
• Nawawi’s Forty Hadith (Hadith 27 as presented): “Consult your heart… righteousness is what the soul feels at ease with…” 
• Sahih Muslim 91a: “Allah is Graceful/Beautiful and loves Grace/beauty… pride is disdaining the truth and contempt for people.” 

User-specified blog posts

• Shah, Zia H. “Surah Al Shams – The Sun: Evolution of the Human Conscience.” The Glorious Quran and Science, August 2, 2017. 
• Shah, Zia H. “The Architecture of Universal Virtue: A Definitive Exegetical Analysis of Ayat al-Birr and the Comparative Theology of Conscience in the Prophetic and Lincolnian Traditions.” The Glorious Quran and Science, January 9, 2026. 

Christian and Jewish theological sources

• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae I, q.79 (synderesis; conscience). 
• Newman, John Henry. Conscience as “aboriginal Vicar of Christ” (secondary scholarly presentation with Newman quotations). 
• Luther, Martin. Diet of Worms conscience formulation (historical presentation). 
• Augustine. Confessions, Book 10 (“Beauty ever ancient, ever new”) as presented in public-domain/archival resources. 
• Heschel, Abraham Joshua. On prophecy/pathos and moral seriousness (selected accessible texts). 

Philosophy and meta-ethics

• Street, Sharon. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109–166. doi:10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6. 
• Joyce, Richard. The Evolution of Morality. MIT Press, 2006 (access via archive listing and publisher description). 
• Kahane, Guy. Critiques of process/content mapping in moral psychology (philpapers overview). 
• Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 205 (1979): 581–598. 

Psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry

• Greene, Joshua D., et al. “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment.” Science 293 (2001): 2105–2108. doi:10.1126/science.1062872. 
• Koenigs, Michael, et al. “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements.” Nature 446 (2007): 908–911. doi:10.1038/nature05631. 
• Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–834. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.814. 
• Moll, Jorge, et al. “The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2005): 799–809. 
• Decety, Jean, and Jason M. Cowell. “The Complex Relation Between Morality and Empathy.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 7 (2014): 337–339. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.04.008. 
• Young, Liane, et al. “Disruption of the Right Temporoparietal Junction with TMS Reduces the Role of Beliefs in Moral Judgment.” PNAS (2010). 
• Blair, R. James R. “Applying a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective to the Disorder of Psychopathy.” Development and Psychopathology 17 (2005): 865–891. 
• Kohlberg, Lawrence. “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization.” In Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. D. Goslin (1969). 
• Turiel, Elliot. The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention. Cambridge University Press, 1983 (excerpt and bibliographic entries). 

Evolutionary biology and cooperation

• Hamilton, W. D. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1–16. doi:10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4. 
• Trivers, Robert L. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57. doi:10.1086/406755. 
• Nowak, Martin A. “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” Science 314 (2006): 1560–1563. doi:10.1126/science.1133755. 
• Richerson, Peter J., et al. “Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role…” (BBS in press PDF). 

Modern Islamic ethics and conceptual bridges

• Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Qur’an (PDF). Emphasis on taqwā as conscience when conscience is properly oriented. 

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