Typology of mystical experience from the perspective of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi

Religious and mystical experience is one of the most important topics in the West, dating back to the last two centuries. Due to the attention of thinkers and Muslim scholars to religious and mystical experience, these discussions have also entered in the Islamic intellectual discourses. Undeniably, Muslim mystics used terms such as discovery, intuition, knowledge, taste, conscience long before religious and mystical experience were discussed in the West, even though they are in fact equivalent to religious and mystical experience in the West. Western and Islamic thinkers have identified a number of mystical experiences. Among the mystics and theorists of Islam, the great mystic of the seventh century, Ibn Arabi, who is a distinguished figure, is known as the founder of theoretical mysticism.

Given his noble status in Islamic mysticism, his views on mystical experience, its types, and varieties are regarded to be highly valuable.

Ibn Arabi, as the great theorist of Islamic mysticism, has spoken about these experiences in his works, proposing types and varieties for them. He, whose work is based on discovery and intuition, has dismissed theoretical and intellectual science and believes that the field of mysticism is beyond the field of rational arguments and intellectual reflections, and in general, beyond reason. Mystical experience in his view is expressed by terms such as inexistence, survival, conquest, observation, revelation, lecturing, prophesy and the like, and types of mystical experience are referred to using terms such as kinds of observations, revelations, manifestations, and etc. Our method in this research is descriptive-analytical.