Revelation and Religious Experience in the Islamic Tradition

Abstract

Abstract All great theistic religions rest their belief systems on faith in divine revelations which are commonly recorded and preserved in sacred texts and writings. However, while such religions share this common starting point about revelation, they differ between themselves in regard to how this claim should be properly conceived. These differences include, among other things, distinct responses to such questions as to whether God Himself is the author of the sacred texts or whether they are written by humans who are merely inspired by Him; the sense in which God has spoken those words and the role that the prophets have played in the ensuing process. In Islam, God is regarded as the sole author of the Quranic verses, which are said to have been dictated to Prophet Mohammed. This ‘dictation model’ of revelation (waḥy) raises, however, a host of problems. In addition to the metaphysically oriented questions just noted, it also raises the spectre of the epistemological problem of error and accuracy. This chapter aims to elucidate the Islamic view of revelation from both the historical as well as the modern perspective as it is principally understood by such Muslim thinkers as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Ghazzālī, and their modern successors such as Mohammad Iqbal, and to show how it has been progressively enriched by the different philosophical disciplines that have been brought to bear on it.