Authors
1 . Assistant Professor, Payame Noor University
2 Ph. D. Student of Teaching Islamic Knowledge, Payame Noor University
Abstract
Mohī al-Dīn ibn Arabī in line with the emphasis of the Islamic gnosis tradition on the immediate and intuitive knowledge, bases his mystical viewpoint upon a kind of immediate knowledge to which he refers as ‘intuition’. In contrast to the reality of this cognition which is beyond sense and wisdom, it is known and referred to as the ‘eye’. Ibn Arabī utilizes the expressions ‘eye of the heart’, ‘eye of insight’ and ‘eye of certainty’ in a broad semantic range and nominates certain features for each. In some cases, these expressions represent the general concepts of intellect and reason and in some others the specific meaning of ‘immediate intuition’. Their most specific use is manifested in al-Tadbīrāt al-Elāhīyah. In this text ‘eye of insight’ and ‘eye of certainty’ both stand for heart, while the former looks at the divine light- a divine means for guidance-, the latter looks to another divine light towards which God’s creations are guided. On this basis, heart as a divine being for the vision of compassionate manifestations, in a mystical systematic interaction with the source of light, realizes the intuition of the realities.
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