Abstract
Abstract This chapter explores the approaches taken to ‘the virtues of greatness’ in the Islamic world. There are in fact two Arabic concepts that can be identified as counterparts of the ancient virtue of megalopsychia. The focus of one (kibar al-nafs) was on the right attitude to the self and its merits, and it bore a strong affinity to Aristotle’s configuration of the virtue. The focus of the second (ʿiẓam al-himma) was on right desire or aspiration, and some of its key architects parsed it specifically as a foundational virtue of aspiration to virtue. Unlike the first concept, which failed to establish itself in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture, the second spread like wildfire through several genres of ethical writing. This reflects the roots this virtue strikes—more directly than in the Greek tradition—in the values of pre-Islamic Arab society and its heroic ethic, an ethic which it perpetuates but also transforms.
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