Educational Values in the Psycho-Spiritual Journey of Repentance: A Freudian Psychoanalytic Reading of Abu Nuwas's "Al-I'tiraf" (Īlāhī lastu lil-firdawsi ahlan)

Abstract

This study examines the educational values embedded in the psycho-spiritual dynamics of "Al-I'tiraf" ("Ilāhī lastu lil-firdawsi ahlan"), the celebrated penitential poem attributed to the Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas (756–814 CE), through the lens of psychoanalytic literary criticism grounded in Sigmund Freud's theory of the psyche. Although the poem is widely received as a devotional text of confession and repentance, its six stanzas encode both a complex psychodynamic progression—in which moral self-reproach, primordial fear of punishment, and the yearning for spiritual equilibrium interact—and a coherent set of educational values: self-awareness, honesty in self-assessment, emotional regulation, moral responsibility, humility, and resilience of hope. Employing a qualitative library research design, the study integrates close reading with qualitative content analysis and hermeneutic interpretation to map Freudian constructs—the id, ego, and superego; topographic layers of consciousness; anxiety; defense mechanisms; catharsis; sublimation; and the dual drives of Eros and Thanatos—onto the poem's stanzaic movement, while identifying the educational value carried by each psychodynamic stage. The findings show that the poem dramatizes a complete intrapsychic arc—the ego's paralysis between the superego's condemnation and the id's terror; the cathartic discharge of repressed guilt through confession; the raising of unconscious memories into awareness; a confrontation with Thanatos as life-time diminishes while sin accumulates; and the collapse of ego-omnipotence into surrender before the Divine—through which neurotic guilt is transmuted into constructive faith and psychic homeostasis is restored. Each stage yields a distinct educational value for character and moral education. The poem thus functions not merely as religious verse but as a literary enactment of psychological healing and as a durable medium of moral education, offering enduring insight into repentance as both an intrapsychic and pedagogical process.