Qalb
The spiritual heart: the organ of the knowledge of God, seat of faith, which dhikr polishes like a mirror.
Qalb means heart, and the word’s root (q-l-b) carries the idea of turning over: the heart is what turns, wavers, changes. In the Qur’an it is the organ of understanding and faith: ‘they have hearts and do not understand’ (VII, 179); and only ‘he who comes to God with a sound heart’ (qalb salim, XXVI, 89) is saved.
For Sufism the qalb is not the muscle nor the seat of the emotions: it is man’s spiritual centre, the ‘fine point of the being’ capable of knowing God directly. Tradition describes it as a mirror that rusts with what is looked at, and the dhikr as what polishes it. The full anthropology distinguishes several superimposed centres: the qalb, then deeper the ruh and the sirr.
The whole path rests on this conviction: the heart can be purified, and the guide is the one who knows how. That is precisely why Sidi Mounir’s thesis (EPHE, 2005) bears on the notion of the heart in the first four centuries of Islam. See can you be a Sufi without being Muslim.