Nafisa (نفيسة) is the Arabic word for "precious, valuable." Sayyida Nafisa al-Tahira (762-824) — "Nafisa the Pure" — was the great-granddaughter of Hasan ibn Ali and great-niece of the Prophet Muhammad. A renowned female Islamic scholar in Cairo, she famously taught the great Imam al-Shafi'i (founder of the Shafi'i madhhab), who said: "I have not seen anyone more knowledgeable in the sciences of the Quran than Nafisa." Her mosque-tomb in Cairo is among the holiest sites in Egyptian Islam.
Featured throughout classical Arabic-Islamic biographical dictionaries.
Nafisa does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Nafisa reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.