Nature and characteristics of Islamic mystical experience

Mohammad Essa Jafari^[2]

Abstract:

The mystical experience is important in terms of belonging to the religious and, in some cases, non-religious domain, and also because of its spiritual and epistemic consequence. This reason appears the necessity of discussing and understanding the Islamic mystical experience. The present paper, by asking the question "What is the nature of Islamic mystical experience and its characteristics," has tried to find an appropriate answer to it by analyzing the content and describing the mystical data. For this purpose, the nature of Islamic mystical experience is explained on the basis of ontology, cosmology, and anthropology of Islamic mysticism, and then its characteristics are defined. Accordingly, Islamic mystical experience is related to the outside world of empiricist. This Feature gives us the attribute of universality, although it has a differential property with respect to the individual capabilities of the empiricist. The equality of the existential levels of man with degrees of the universe yields the characteristic of the possession and realization of these experiences. Difficulty is another characteristic of the Islamic mystical experience, which is sometimes confused with Ineffability. Also, the context-based feature that exists only in formal experiences provides a field of error for the empiricist, but these errors are separated by certain measures. Thus, the present paper, by presenting a specific analysis and explanation of the Islamic mystical experience, provides different characteristics of other mystical experiences.

[1].  دکترای عرفان اسلامی دانشگاه ادیان و مذاهب، mijafari@gmail.com.

[2] . PHD in Islamic mysticism, University of Religions and Denominations.