The motto of NAFIS is:  Promoting Justice and Advancing to Ihsān.

Our motto is derived from verse 90 of the sixteenth chapter in the Qur’an, The Chapter of the Bee: “God enjoins Justice and Ihsān, and giving to relatives. And He forbids shameful acts, evil deeds, and oppressive aggression: He exhorts you, so that you may be mindful.” Ibn Mas’ūd, may God be pleased with him, considered this to be the most comprehensive verse in the Qur’an.

We understand Justice to mean: giving each human being what he or she deserves. This encompasses social, legal, political, and economic justice.

We mean by Ihsān, Islam’s third and highest rung, as expressed in the Hadith of Gabriel on Islām, Īmān and Ihsān. The word Ihsān bears three complimentary meanings: (1) The spiritual, which is to “worship God as if you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, then indeed He sees you;” (2) kind and generous service of all God’s creation; and (3) the pursuit of excellence in all works and undertakings.

We prefer not to translate the word Ihsān for two reasons: (1) just as we cannot translate Islam simply as “submission,” there is no one-word translation that can express the three complimentary meanings of Ihsān; and (2) we would like to revive and make known the original and most comprehensive definition of Ihsān as expressed in the Qur’an and Sunna.

We place Justice before Ihsān in the motto to be in agreement with the sequence of the two words in the above Qur’anic verse. God knows best what the reason behind this sequence is, but we believe that in the exact same manner that Ihsān is a necessary condition for achieving Justice, so is Justice a necessary condition for achieving Ihsān. The two are inseparably intertwined.

In summary, we would like to convey through this motto that promoting Justice and advancing to Ihsān constitute the primary dual-purpose of NAFIS and that they cannot be separated for anyone truly wanting to completely follow the way of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace.

In order to fulfill our mission of guiding to God in a way that serves our primary dual-purpose of promoting justice and advancing to Ihsān, we embrace the core tenets of the Prophetic Method of the Justice ‎and Spirituality School [madrasat al-‘adl wa al-ihsan], founded by ‎Imam Abdessalam Yassine, God have mercy on him.