By Aziz Esmail
This publication investigates creativity of a specific sort, specifically explorations within the language of symbols and metaphors, which represent the middle principles and imaginative and prescient of a spiritual event. In analyzing the symbolic and creative good points of the poetics of spiritual adventure, the writer attracts consciousness to a couple of serious issues--literary, philosophical, and historical--which lie in the back of quite a few interpretations of Islam and their relevance to the highbrow wishes of the Muslim global this present day. even if those subject matters are addressed within the Islamic context, they're actually of seminal significance to the extra basic challenge of data and interpretation and, within the wider box of comparative faith, human psychology and tradition.
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Additional resources for Poetics of Religious Experience: The Islamic Context (The Institute of Ismaili Studies)
Sample text
This places mystical literature into the category of humanistic literature in general, though as a distinctive tradition within it. To read a work like the poetry of Hafiz without projecting a priori expectations derived from Sufi doctrine onto it, is to appreciate the perspective, characteristic to him, in which he saw all experience. This perspective is humanistic rather than religious in the restricted sense. Rumi's case is more complex. It may be said that it is more easy to categorise: the presence of Sufi doctrine in his poetry is unmistakable.
On the whole, therefore, the Qur'an is an ethical, not a legal text. This is one of the reasons why Muslim jurists in the classical Islamic age had to evolve legal systems afresh, though they attempted to relate these to the Qur'an through various conventions of deductive interpretation. Even then, conventions of authority additional to the Qur'an became essential. This general or open character of the Qur'an's pronouncements is closely related to the charismatic character of the Prophet's authority.
Popular poetry and the collective practice of the tariqas (mystical fraternities) were two of the vehicles through which philosophical ideas were transformed into collective archetypes and symbols accessible to the broader urban-and indeed, rural-population of pre-modern Islamic societies. Ibn al-'Arabi's influence in this respect was especially pronounced. His works were studied by people with the ability and inclination to chase the taxing labyrinths of his thought. But more generally, his influence on popular Islam was probably indirect.