A commonplace view of how many religions approach the right relationship to self-worth is that the less we have of it, the better off we are.

The virtuous attitude to the self requires think­ing poorly of one's merits, and this attitude constitutes the virtue we call humility.This was the view implicitly taken by David Hume when he defended the importance of a “steady and well- establish'd pride and self-esteem” in human life and expressed his expectation that this would draw the animus of a “great many religious declaimers,” who typically placed their loyalties in the “monkish” virtue of humility instead (Hume 1978: 599—600, Hume 1975: 270).

This chapter attempts to answer this question by a selective survey of the approaches taken by a number of key contributors to the discourse on character in the Islamic world.While this “commonplace view” contains an element of truth when applied to the Islamic tradition, it is a blunt instrument for capturing Islamic thinking on the subject. As Muslim thinkers articulate the virtue of humility, it possesses two distinct (though related) dimensions. On the first, humil­ity concerns attitudes to self-worth and self-assessment, which many philosophers and also non­philosophers would consider the proper field of this virtue. On the second, by contrast, humility has a forward-looking or conative quality, and is tied to an attitude of moral commitment that is ultimately co-extensive with the virtue of religious obedience. One of the most distinctive aspects of the approaches to humility and pride in the Islamic tradition, as I will suggest, is the central role played by temporal concepts. Virtuous attitudes to the self look to the past, but, even more importantly, they also look to the future: to as-yet uncertain future outcomes which underline the fragility of virtue. Despite the emphasis on the underestimation of self-worth that shapes these approaches, there is also a more positive attitude to self-worth that can be read out of Islamic works on the virtues.

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