A Reclassification of al-Ījī’s Akhlāq al-ʿAḍudiyya into a Model of Traditional Islamic Virtues (TIV)

Abstract

While psychologists have only recently become extensively interested in character development and virtue acquisition, such an interest has existed for centuries among Muslim scholars. Islamic scholars have created many typologies and classifications of the virtues building upon the tradition they inherited from the ancient Greeks. Among the most notable works in this genre is the treatise most famously known as al-akhlāq al-ʿaḍudiyyah, written by the 14th century scholar ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756 AH/1355 CE), which provided a comprehensive yet concise manual of the Islamic virtues that synthesized the previous work of Islamic philosophers situated within Islamic scripture. This paper provides a revised classification of the Islamic virtues by adjusting al-Ījī’s classification of virtues in his al-akhlāq al-ʿaḍudiyyah. This revised classification of virtues, referred to as Traditional Islamic Virtues (TIV), adopts the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, temperance, valor, and justice, with the addition of spirituality as an independent chief virtue with accompanying sub-virtues. TIV provides an aggregation of many of the sub-virtues enlisted by al-Ījī due to the degree of overlap between them. TIV also makes minor linguistic revisions and adds a few new sub-virtues. The definitions of each of the TIV sub-virtues are constructed by drawing upon numerous sources in the Islamic tradition while still relying mostly on al-Ījī’s classification. The process of aggregation and revision has produced five cardinal TIV virtues with 31 sub-virtues. This paper further demonstrates that a review and integration of the Islamic tradition into mainstream psychological discourses can greatly enrich the holistic practice of clinical and community psychology.