O Soul at Peace: Surat al-Fajr in Jali Thuluth

Few passages of the Qur’an are written out by calligraphers as often as the closing verses of Surat al-Fajr. They speak to the soul at the end of its journey, and for Sufis they describe the final stages of the inner path. This panel, completed in 1447 AH (2025–26), sets the four verses in bold jali thuluth.

Text	Qur’an, Surat al-Fajr (89), verses 27–30
Script	Jali thuluth (celî sülüs), in a stacked istif composition
Calligraphy	Arif Özdem (signed عارف)
Illumination	Hale Nur Bakkal (tezhip in the halkâr gold style)
Date	1447 AH (2025–26 CE)
Form	Framed calligraphic panel (levha)

The verses

يَا أَيَّتُهَا النَّفْسُ الْمُطْمَئِنَّةُ ۝ ارْجِعِي إِلَىٰ رَبِّكِ رَاضِيَةً مَرْضِيَّةً ۝ فَادْخُلِي فِي عِبَادِي ۝ وَادْخُلِي جَنَّتِي

Yā ayyatuha n-nafsu l-muṭmaʾinna. Irjiʿī ilā rabbiki rāḍiyatan marḍiyya. Fa-dkhulī fī ʿibādī. Wa-dkhulī jannatī.

“O soul at peace, return to your Lord, well pleased and well pleasing. Enter among My servants, and enter My Garden.”

The script and the composition

Thuluth is the tall, sweeping script of mosque inscriptions and title pages. Its large form, jali thuluth, is written to be read from a distance, on walls, gateways and framed panels. In an istif composition the calligrapher does not set the words out in a line. Instead the letters are stacked and interlaced into a single balanced shape, so the eye first takes in the whole and only then reads the text. The halkâr illumination around it is painted in washes of gold, in the Ottoman tradition of book and panel decoration.

The soul at peace

In Sufi teaching these verses name the highest stations of the self (nafs). The soul that is at peace (al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna) no longer pulls against God. It is well pleased (rāḍiya) with whatever comes from its Lord, and it is well pleasing (marḍiyya), the soul with which God is pleased.

Sufi teachers describe the path to that peace as a series of stages, each named from the Qur’an:

1. The commanding self (al-nafs al-ammāra): the ordinary ego, ruled by desire, anger and habit. “The soul surely commands to evil” (Surat Yusuf 12:53).
2. The blaming self (al-nafs al-lawwāma): the self that has woken up enough to reproach itself. “And I swear by the self-reproaching soul” (Surat al-Qiyama 75:2).
3. The inspired self (al-nafs al-mulhama): the self that begins to receive glimpses of something higher, named from the verse “and inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness” (Surat al-Shams 91:8).
4. The self at peace (al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna), then the well-pleased (rāḍiya) and well-pleasing (marḍiyya) self: the stations of the verses in this panel (Surat al-Fajr 89:27–28).

Many later Sufi teachers add a final station, the complete self (al-nafs al-kāmila). The term is not found in the Qur’an, but it describes the soul that has passed through all the others.

The movement is from sleep to wakefulness. A saying often attributed to the Prophet ﷺ, and by some to Hazrat Ali, puts it simply: “People are asleep, and when they die, they wake.” The Sufi path, through remembrance (dhikr), self-examination and grace, is an attempt to wake before then.

Read more

• Sufism in Kashmir: Origins, Orders and Saints
• The Dhikr Book of Kashmir, a collection of prayers of remembrance
• The artwork on Ketebe: ketebe.org/eserler/8671