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This paper presents a detailed analysis of the development of mystic poetry through dividing its evolution into three eras. To this end, initially, the first era signifying the age of creation and growth of this trend is briefly examined . The paper, than, proceeds to discuss the second era with particular emphasis on the three prominent poets of that interval, Shah Nematollah Valli, Mohammad Shirin Maghrebi, and Shah Qasem Anvar.

More specifically, the stimulus behind this section of the paper is to pursue why this trend in mystic poetry faded away, despite its heydays when those poets lived. Finally, to be more objective, a corpus including ten lyric verses from each of the abovementioned poets is analyzed at linguistic, rhythmic, and rhrtorical levels.

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Mirror is a well- known symbol with deep roots in the world of literature. In Socrates' art, mirror reflects the real world. This distinctive feature of mirror has prevailed through history. This article attempts to trace and scrutinize the symbolic presence of mirror up to Rumi's age. Our discussion incorporatates a subsection on chang, the famous musical instrument, and closes with a hint on the equal and associating role of mirror and chang in Rumi's language.

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In Sufi terminology, Shat'h is a series of aesthetic words expressed involuntarily by mystics during the mystical experiences. There have been multifarious interpretations and judgments concerning these paradoxes ranging from linguistic and epistemic interpretations to religious ones. The Sufis and their opponents have also voiced their diametrically opposing views on  this issue. The present study addresses the traditional Sufi doctrines as well as what has been suggested about the various aspects of  Shat'h including its ambiguity, its relationship to poetry, and its paradoxicality as argued by the contemporaries. The central issue of concern  is whether these aesthetic words carry more emotional or epistemic content. Another impetus behind this research is to probe whether the linguistic expression of these words is indeed a representation of a special form of life. A deep understanding of these words requires a certain affinity and empathy with this form of life without which it's hardly possible to see the hidden meanings of the words. Thus, it is argued that the justification of Shat'h is more importand than its explanation.

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As the title indicates, the main purpose of this paper is to consider how the early mystics dealt with the essential concept of reason. To this end, we have examined forty works either written on or including the ideas of the mystics living in the first five centuries of the Islamic era. The findings are then placed in ten main categories: Reason and one’s knowledge of god; Reason and the Koran; Reason and Riligion; Reason and Ethics; Reason, this world, and hereafter; Reason and Mystical Hierarchies; Reason and Mystical states; Reason and Love; Reason and soul. Each category has then received its due attention. The paper intends to delineate how these mystics discuss divergent issues related to knowledge, this world, the hereafter and mysticism with reference to reason. Also, attempts are made to shed lights on the relationship between them. It must be admitted that these mystics had a limited view of reason; however, the very reference to reason in their arguments points to their concern about this concept. In fact, in their delineating of the limitations of reason in different realms of knowledge, they have resorted to the same notion (i.e reason). Although our main concern here is issues related to reason in one way or another, one can note the extent and diversity of knowledge theses mystics have touched upon in their   works.

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This article makes a general research in the specific features of Shia’s kalam (speculative theology) in irfan’s (Islamic mysticism) views of Ali ibn Inayatullah Bastami, known by the nick-name Bayazid Thani (the Second), especially in his book Rawzat al-arifin. The author has been an arif (mystic) and muhaddith (erudite in Prophet’s traditions) who has lived in X-XI century from Hijra. His purpose for writing this tractate has been to clarify some aspects of monotheism, faith, irfan and the principles of the mystical Way. The article is an effort to give an answer to the following questions: first, how the author as a  sufi, in the perspective of Oneness of Existence, and a Shia’s muhaddith can explore the topics of Twelve Shia’s theology within the paradigm of irfan and deepen in this domain; second, is it convenient and acceptable to the mystical wisdom or not, as a principle, that a sufi can use kalam’s proofs and demonstrations, knowing the negative mystical attitude toward rational discussions and issues of kalam.

After considering the most important features of Shia’s kalam in the book Rawzat al-arifin and comparing them with the kalam’s themes, examined by the greatest Shia’s mutakallimun before the time of our author, we could make the conclusion that he has been Shia’s mutakallim and arif in the same time, dwelling on irfan to make an explanation of kalam’ s subtleties. And it could be said also that as his irfan is demonstrative (kalami), his kalam is mystical (irfani).

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In verse 172, Aaraf Sura, God covenants with its thrall (servants); but this verse expressed a general concept and did not discuss the details. This resulted in suggesting different views and comments by mystics, scholars, theologians, commentators and jurists. They explicitly pointed to some of the cases of this eternal covenant, such as testament of Adam, confession of people to God and saying "yes" by Adam to God; but commentators and mystics had different and contradictory perceptions. This study analyzed the process of concept formation and different thoughts of "eternity" from the first commentator to the books of Persian literature mystics, and offers a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the issue

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Longing is one of mystical states that appeares in the absence of the beloved and must vanish at meeting the beloved. In mystical texts, longing at the joining moment is elaborated on. Some mystics believe that after joining and at the presence of the beloved, longing increases and converts to a state of desire. The continuity of longing or converting caused by the presence of the beloved, in turn, lead to an unending journey to God. The beloved has a myriad of manifestations and the lover in each stage reaches one of  the beauties of the beloved. So, the lover has reached one manifestation of the beloved’s beauty and is still striving for understanding and uncovering the other aspects. The beloved’s unconditional enthusiasm and presence is stimulated by the lover’s continuous need to love the beloved. Once the journey to God is over, another journey in God starts. This journey never ends because of the the beloved’s unlimited beauty and glory; hence, the lover remains longing and loving the beloved forever.  

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Islamic mysticism and Sufism are among important mental and cultural issues which have influenced Islamic – Iranian culture and Persian language and literature profusely. So the various dimensions of this mental and practical school must be revisited. One way to approach the subject and the end of this school as well as the history and content and changes is to examine the definitions which the pioneers and leading Sufis have provided. In this article, we have a critical look at these definitions in order to know this mental- practical school better and to clarify its hidden dimensions of that. To this end, in addition to referring to the leaders and followers of Sufism, their mental and practical framework will be illustrated.

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Hakim Sanāyi Qaznavi (d. 532 AH) who is one of the most influential thinkers and poets of didactic Sufi poetry has always been followed by other poets and mystics of Iran. This paper aims at making a comprehensive study of his Hadiqah and Divān and also intends to explain his opinions about the questions of transcendence or immanence, eternality and contingency, and whether divine Names and attributes are fixed or not and God's intention of creating the universe. The researchers have attempted to compare these opinions with those of other famous theological sects. Therefore, at first the views of the leaders of the Ash'arites, Mu'tazilites, Matoridites, Karrāmits, and 12-Imam Shiites were presented on these issues and then Sanāyi's opinion was analyzed and classified accordingly. This study shows that Sanāyi has used Islamic texts and rational teachings of his era to prove his claims. He has adopted a transcendent and even a negative approach in theology and his positions, contrary to the current views, have been different from those of the Ash'arites, Karāmits, and adherents of hadith, and have been in harmony with those of the Mu'tazilites, Mātoridites, and Shiites.

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Mantiqu't-Tair, a description of human love for self-scrutiny and meeting with God, is the most significant mystical work of Attar in the form of allegory of birds in search of Simurgh or phoenix. The contradictory presence of the author as a mystic and a historian at the beginning of the book is astonishing. Although the introduction is short and distinct from the mystical text, it is of great importance owing to the interaction of mysticism and history. The historian tries to discover the truth based on the valid documentations and through a retrospective look into the past and carefully analyzing the accuracy of historical quotes and reviews whereas the mystic avoids politics and analysis. In general, history is independent of mysticism but it is the best support for the mystic. Attar is a creative mystic in the sense of innovating mystical symbols and sometimes creating historical characters out of mystical symbols, while he is oblivious to the judgment of history. Symbolizing the historical figures and disregarding the historical documentations, in addition to invalidating his judgment of the individuals, have other outcomes, including a crisis of reasoning and a rejection of mystical principles that Attar himself adheres to. This study is conducted to prove this claim in the introduction of Mantiqu't-Tair.

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The aim of thisarticle is to depict the true, scholarly and deep interest of Iqbal Lahori, the great Pakistani poet,in Iranian culture and Persian Language and civilization. First a couplet out of his renown Ghazal composed on Iranians, which represents the works in verse and prose attributed to Iqbal Lahori , is discussed to show that he was well familiar with the Iranian culture and even with some particular symbols in Persian literature.Thenthe five subjectsof religion, philosophy and theology, mysticism, reason and love, and Persian language, which are the most important constituents of the Iranian culturalare explained and discussed in relation to the work of Iqbal Lahori.It is concluded that the Iranian cultural components,rites and traditions are blendedthoroughly with his literary and philosophical books. 

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The early mystics were actively involved in Jihads wherein they strove for social and political activism and alsofought the enemies of God. Because of the Islamic conquests and wars against the infidels in the early centuries AD, many Sufis lived in conventson the borders and participated in the war against enemies. Among them the names of Hassan Basri, SufyanSauri, Ibrahim Adham, ShaghighBalkhi, Hatam Assam, Abdullah IbnMubarak, Mohammed ibn Karram and the followers of the Karramiyeh are noteworthy. Also,when Sufis began to write books, many of them concentrated on the issue of Jihad; among these writes we can refer toKolabazi, Tirmazi, Neffari, Sarraj, Makki, Khargushi and Sollam .This article is a library based research and draws on the major primary sources on Mysticism. It aims to study the quality of the presence of the Sufis in Jihads, and the issue of Jihad in books by the Sufis.
 

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Gnostic prose works cover a wide range of subjects, contents, styles, structures, languages, and manners of expression. They might, therefore, be all categorized under one single literary genre. Applying the general term "gnostic prose works" to these oeuvres hinders our understanding of their true nature. Despite that many gnostic prose works belong to Gnosticism, they have special characteristics that make these works different from other gnostic texts. The present study has been done comparatively and analytically and with the help of library sources such as books and pamphlets on central topics, such as "Love". While examining the common characteristics, this subset was introduced as another literary genre like theosophical and lyrical prose texts. The purpose of this study is not to divide Sufism into theosophical and romantic, but it intends to study theosophical works according to their ways of expression, structure, language, figures of thought and subject to exhibit their real identities. The study indicates that they are closely comparable on three grounds: 1. In being prose and related issues (mixing oral and written tradition and interpretation), 2. In being Gnostic and in issues related to epistemology, ontology, irregularity, love, beauty, and influence from earlier works, 3. In being romantic and poetical in expression regarding questions related to musicality, imagery, and poetic logic.
 

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Since human soul seeks excellence, he continuously hunts for answers to his questions. Therefore, he works towards tools to help him achieve a better life, create a dream world (Armanshahr) or utopia; a nowhere; his desired world. The Sufis has been more attentive to the local realities of their society, and they saw the society full of shortcomings and sought to lead their people into a desirable world by knowing the existing society and understanding its shortcomings and failures. The mystic understanding of Sanaei, Attar and Rumi of utopia is different from the perception of philosophers and scholars. In this way, scholars, poets and writers attribute some features to utopia, and although these features share some commonalities, they are different in some aspects as well. In this research, we have tried to study the main literary works of the 6^th and 7^th centuries through descriptive-analytical methods to, on the one hand, explore the evolution of the concept of utopia in the works of the elders of Persian mystic poetry, and on the other hand to explore the characteristics of their utopias and their differences according to the socio-political characteristics of that period.

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Qotol-al-Qolob is an organismic and rich text that has been very effective in stabilizing the Sufist discourse. This is because of the flow of Sufism articulated in the late second century in the context of religion and passed through contradictory discourses such as jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy and then emerged in a period that radical rationalism, jurisprudential controversy, philosophical conflicts as well as political and social quarrels spead over the entire Islamic world. The ideologues of Sufism highlighted absent and separated propositions with the help of the logic of discursive difference and by studying and recognizing dominant approaches. They were gradually able to successfully integrate and dominate the Sufist discourse. This is visualized in Qotol-al-Qolob which we consider to be the confluence of two scholarly and insightful discourses. To achieve this important point we use the method and discourse analysis of La Clau and Mouffe and we show how Abutaleb Makki could renovate the absent, excluded, and depleted propositions of the jurisprudential discourse by the use of interpretation model.
 

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Literature includes comprehensive areas and covers various topics and issues. It relates to the numerous studies and we can use different methods for analyzing and studying it. In other words, most of the issues of literature are “multi-ethnic” and have been firmly rooted in diverse sciences such as psychology. The concept of spiritual intelligence is encountered with the issues followed by meanings and values that because of them our intelligence will be shaped in a more enriched context and background of meanings. Although the term “spiritual intelligence” is not considered to be one of achievements in the area of mysticism and it is discussed in the field of psychology, it does not mean that this issue is totally abandoned in mystical works. To be fair, concepts related to spiritual intelligence and their equivalents are represented broadly and fruitfully in our mystical literature. The elements of religion and spirituality, especially spiritual intelligence, are of great significance in the era of mystical poem in Persian literature and Rumi’s poetry. The present study is library-based with a descriptive-analytical method which indicates that faith, peace, altruism and its practice in life and also the tolerance of the adversities of real world, are the prominent elements of spiritual intelligence in Rumi’s Mathnavi.

 

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So far, many thinkers with different approaches have studied the concept of “the other” and its examples in various aspects of human life. Literature has also attracted the attention of researchers and interested scholars as a platform for representing examples of “the other”. In addition to recognizing the place of “otherness” in the worldview of individuals in different eras, studying examples of “the other” in the literary texts has also made it possible to delimit the realm of “I”. In this paper, using an analytical method and adopting an eclectic approach, the researchers studied the potentials of Rumi’s Mathnavi in ​​representing the types of “the other” and in realizing the levels of otherness of “the other” and its place in the mystical worldview so as to gain a relative knowledge of the structures that govern mystical thoughts. To that end, we first explained the concept of “the other” in three intellectual-philosophical systems, namely contrastive, dialectical and intersubjective, and mentioned examples of “the other” in verses of Mathnavi. Then, we presented a reading of the levels of realization of otherness of “the other” and the conditions of their possibility in this text. From a general point of view, due to the contrastive structure of the mystical worldview and the definition of “the other” as an “alien”, the realization of high levels of otherness in the text of Mathnavi cannot be expected, but the narrative of the experience of union and depicting the inability of “I” to understand “the infinite other” can be regarded as representation of the highest level of otherness. Meanwhile, in the distance from the “alien” to “the infinite other” and through dialogue, a level of otherness is also represented in the relationship between the characters in some stories of Mathnavi.
 

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There are some words and phrases in Hāfez’s Diwān (Book of Poems) which merit careful attention as this brings us closer to the world of his poetry and thought. One of these words is “Jām” (“cup”) and its synonyms. The frequency of this word and its synonyms is indicative of its significance in the mind of the poet. To investigate Jām in Hāfez’s Diwān, the importance of Jām in Persian literature and Hāfez’s Diwān, and the opinions of the old and contemporary exegetes regarding the meaning and function of Jām in Hāfez’s Diwān were explained in this paper. The body of the paper contains two distinct parts: the first part deals with Jām in the tradition of poetry prior to Hafez. There are three kinds of Jām or “Mey” (wine): earthly, mystical, and Khayyamian. The second part is concerned with the display of the artistic skills of Hāfez in dealing with Jām in the following subheadings: 1. The repetition and foregrounding of the word Jām and making it a symbolic motif, 2. Creating opposition by Jām and using it as a tool for political and social struggle, 3. Mixing the various and opposing meanings and functions of Jām, and 4. Making paradoxical expression with Jām to create masterpiece couplets. The conclusion of this descriptive-analytical research is that Hafez intentionally repeated Jām to make it prominent and symbolic and mixed its Islamic and Iranian senses to create a prism of which any reader based on their background knowledge and experience could get various meanings.    
 

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Teaching monotheistic topics and trying to understand the ambiguous concepts of epistemology have always been the concern of thinkers. Despite the commonalities in monotheistic teachings, access to rich concepts is not possible for everyone, and there may be contradictions in the understanding of meanings. Hadiqah al-Haqiqah and Masnavi are among the instructive texts that have used figures of speech to express monotheistic concepts. In this article, the teaching style of Sanai and Rumi based on the method of using Monotheistic Images and Corbin’s hermeneutics approach is studied.  The monotheistic language of Masnavi and Hadiqah al-Haqiqah is almost the same. Sanai has expressed monotheism in a general way and at a high level, while Rumi has gone into more details about monotheistic concepts. Hadiqah al-Haqiqah images are mostly designed on the horizontal axis, whereas in Rumi’s Masnavi, many images can also be found on the vertical axis. Rumi has sometimes used Sanai symbols and in many cases has taught monotheistic concepts with completely innovative symbols. The monotheistic images of both mystics are a combination of philosophical teachings and mystical intuitive symbols in Corbin’s hermeneutics. Benefitting from the graphic form of the letters (alphabetical symbolism) and the metaphor of the letters are common to both works.