A study of the Essence and Cognitive Value of Religious Experience according to Ibn Arabi and Schleiermacher

As a thinker who created a movement in Islamic Mysticism, Ibn Arabi holds a special position. Regarding the essence of religious experience, he believes that religious experience (or according to him inward revelation and mystical intuition) is a cognitive state that is devoid of all intermediaries like thought, reasoning, understanding and intellectual forms; in other words, religious experience is a unified, uncommon, trans-sensational and trans-intellectual cognizance that is bestowed and achieved through struggle and spiritual wayfaring. In this unified cognizance there is no intermediary between the mystic and the object of his cognizance, which continues in a gradational process from the lowest level to the highest extent of  it which is complete unity with the object of cognizance. With this definition it will be clear that according to cognitive value too, religious experience according to him is considered as one of the sources of cognizance and rather the most important of them and has the highest place in relation to all other sources of cognizance because it is a cognizance that is unified, mystically intuitive, intellectual, gifted and bestowed from God Almighty which allows for no mistakes or errors. But Schleiermacher (who is also known as one of the thinkers who created a movement in Religious Philosophy in the West), in contrast to Ibn Arabi believes that the foundation and essence of religion and religious experience is feelings and emotion. He considers this feeling to be “a feeling of absolute attachment to a higher power”; absolute attachment is a one sided relationship in which man does not have any free will in the face of the object of attachment (i.e. God) and is unconditionally attached. But amidst this feeling and connection, he believes there is a type of direct awareness and cognizance that is devoid of all types of conceptual and intellectual distinction and in this respect is different from man’s other recognitions. although many criticisms apply to this theory which we will address at the end of this research.