ANDISHE-E-NOVIN-E-DINI
Year:2016 | Volume:12 | Issue:45|Papers Count:9

After the doctrine of monotheism, “prophecy” has had a particular position and influential function in religious system of thought. In regard to explicating the concept of prophet, the Muslim theologians have pointed out to factors such as humanistic, mediating and declarative identity of the prophet. The Imamiyeh theologians have been concerned in defining prophet more than Mu’tazili and Ash’arite theologians; therefore, these factors have been analyzed in Imamiyeh theological works with more explication. Meanwhile, the Muslim’s theologians’ statements in explicating the prophet’s identity as “being human” indicates the significance of this dimension of the truth of prophesy. The secret behind their concern to this humanistic identity that prophet’s human being is inseparable and related to many theological issues in the fields of “prophet” and “prophesy”; including “the possibility of Divine revelation to prophets”, “superiority of the prophets to angels”, “the possibility of prophet’s infallibility”, “free will approach in the prophets’ infallibility” and “the fact that prophets are examples”.

The paper deals with evaluation of masculinity or femininity of human soul from the perspective of transcendental philosophy with an emphasis on Ayatollah Javadi Amoli’s viewpoint. He believes that before entering to this world, soul is void of masculinity and femininity and while he accepts the existence of abstract soul in a world before this world, he sees no contradiction between this perspective and foundation of corporality origination of soul. By comparing and corresponding his viewpoint with Mulla Sadra’s and other Sadrian philosophers’, despite of apparent differences, agreement and lack of conflicts could be observed between them. However, his viewpoint is addressed by some criticisms; such as the one that the effect of physiologic differences on spirits and reason has been ignored. Finally, soul has no gender and gender is formed after formation of embryo in the ecstatic world.

In some of the Quranic verses and also in the holy prophet’s statements, a group has been mentioned as “Ahl ul-Bayt” who are pure from any evilness and have special virtues and positions in Islam. This issue has drawn a special attention of the orientalists to this Quranic word and led to various written works in this field. The paper entitled “Ahl ul-Bayt” written by Moshe Sharon in the Leiden Encyclopedia of the Quran is among these works which is introduced and comes under criticism in this paper. The mentioned paper includes various strengths and weaknesses. The study of the concept of the word “Ahl” in the Quran, mentioning hadith of safineh, pointing to the verses in which the word “Ahl ul-Bayt” is used, and also Hadith of Kasa’ which is one of the most famous narrations mentioned in fariqain’s resources about commentary of Verse 33 of Surah Al-Ahzab are among the positive points of this article. On the contrary, some of its weaknesses include: incomplete study of the concept of the word “Ahl ul-Bayt”, correspondence of that concept with Quraysh tribe, incorrect analysis of some narrations, and a vague commentary of the political message of hadith of Kasa’. The present study provides responses for the mentioned problems.

Schleiermacher interprets the truth of religion as the feeling or intuition of dependency to “the Transcendence”. His followers have proposed considerable details from this thought either. According to this approach, “religion” is an inexpressible perception and it is an interpretation that an experience finds it as mere existence. Therefore, it could be said that the realized perception in religious experience – which belongs to the transcendence – is made of intuitive or knowledge not made of acquisitive or conceptual knowledge. This approach is addressed by this question that whether this perception of the transcendence has enough efficiency to explain and prove religion or its explanation and transfer demands another process and criterion through which religion and prophet should propose and prove religious educations such as theology etc. to their audience. After reporting on explanations from religious experiences, the present paper investigates the existence and the nature of the perception transcendence and evaluates its relation with explaining, proving and rational defending from religious knowledge with a focus on Schleiermacher’s theory.

To explicate the salvation perspectives of the theological denominations, it should be investigated that whether human salvation in the hereafter world is regarded as a human right or a Divine gift and also whether this is related to human worldly wisdom or to Divine eternal destiny. Then, the position of God and human in salvation doctrine of a school could be determined correctly. Study and analysis of the history of theological thoughts indicate that the response of Islamic theology to these questions could be divided and introduced in three perspectives: 1. Asharite’s God-centered perspective; 2. Mu’tazilite's human-centered perspective; and 3. Shiite’s God-human-centered perspective. This paper is an attempt to introduce these three perspectives in brief and explicates the intellectual principles of each one and finally preferability of Shiite’s compound perspective (God-human-centered perspective) has been explained.

Correct perception of the religious resources and texts has always been the main and permanent concern of the Islamic researchers and they have applied certain methods for correct perception of the religious texts. One of the important methods in this field is “interpretation”. In his own two intellectual periods, Ghazali encounters the issue of interpretation by two perspectives. In the first period, like other Islamic scholars, he believes interpretation is the remote meaning of words and only the ambiguous verses are interpretable; however, by accepting the mystical approach in the final period of his life, he sees interpretation as a real and external issue; accordingly, all verses of the Quran including clear and ambiguous ones are interpretable. In methodology of text understanding from the late Ghazali’s viewpoint we realize that by adopting a certain approach in interpretation, he has been able to propose a modern pattern based on which others would also be able to take steps in this path and achieve a systemic understanding of the religious texts. Thinkers such as Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, and Feiz Kashani have enjoyed his research model in text understanding. In addition to explaining the mentioned model with an analytic approach, this study deals with necessity, importance and whyness of using this method from Ghazali’s viewpoint.

Descartes’ viewpoint on God is an infinite essence, eternal, unchangeable, self-existent, omniscient, omnipotent and creator of every other creature. His statement from the ontological argument to prove God is not so new and its attraction refers to the fact that he justifies his mechanistic and geometric viewpoint from the world by resorting to proving existence of God; accordingly, in Descartes’ philosophy, God has no ontological status but His status is epistemic which, therefore, provides a deep gap with the real God. Descartes believes that God has created world as a huge device from moving objects and has released it by its own to continue its movement that is addressed by the opponents’ criticisms. The question about Descartes view about God is that whether God is existential and real, Descartes’s belief is religious or God has been mostly proposed to guarantee the certain knowledge and to illustrate the Descartes’ worldview with a mechanical and geometric method. This paper is an attempt to analyze this question and to criticize Descartes’ viewpoint by some western scholars and Muslim philosophers.

In the history of Islamic thought, there has been different methods for proving religious beliefs and the way of understanding and interpreting the verses and hadiths related to Islamic m’arif. In understanding religion, sometimes it is emphasized on reason, sometimes on narration and sometimes on both. Ibn Taymiyyah, a theologian and jurist of the seventh century, has an extreme approach in denial of reason and its application in understanding Islamic m’arif. This viewpoint is caused by his principles and presuppositions on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is for avoiding rationalist consequences. Ibn Taymiyyah’s ideas were faced with conflict of the majority of his contemporary scholars; but, some of his apprentices extended his ideas that brought about a very significant role in formation of Salafism, Wahhabism and extremist groups. According to Ibn Taymiyyah, there is no credit for reason neither in the stage of proving religious beliefs nor in understanding and interpreting religious texts. He emphasizes on the means of “nature” in proving the religious beliefs; but, he does not provide a right interpretation of it. Also, he puts emphasis on mystic understanding of the Quran’s appearances, tradition, and beliefs of those called salaf-e saleh, and avoids any type of text interpretation even in opposition with explicit judgment of reason. It seems that, not only his intellectual principles in proving and explaining religious m’arif and his extremist reliance on appearances of divine theology and thoughts of the early Muslims, salaf-e saleh,  are void of rational justification, but also they will bring about undesirable results.

Analyzing whatness and conditions of knowledge realization includes ancient questions in logic, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science. In Avicennian ideology, the identity of “knowledge” is merely rational and certain knowledge which demands acquisition. Avicenna does not agree with background and innate knowledge and for him, the foundation of the certain knowledge in two fields of apprehension and judgment is originally based upon the most fundamental units of knowledge. He believes that in the process of acquiring certain knowledge, “belief” is the first factor having psychological identity which is changed into an objective certainty within specific conditions and proof is made by a useful reasoning of certain knowledge. In Avicennian thought, experience is the product of rational deduction and sensory induction. A certain and general knowledge would not be achieved from incomplete sensory induction and it has only a preparatory function. However, experience which is different with induction creates certain and general knowledge. In his philosophical works and by using logical principles and argumentative induction method, Avicenna has dealt with proving God as a theoretical and nontrivial issue. Application of Avicenna’s epistemological principles in proof of God appears to be, to some extent, in conflict and the origin of some controversies in this regard that their compatibility is explainable by a general and comprehensive look upon his epistemological system.