خرید و دانلود فایل پاورپوینت کامل تجربه دینی اسلامی (۱)

Islamic Religious Experience^(۳)

The concept of religious experience is a foreigner in the Muslim world. In the West, it has two major lines of development: one line is connected to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and the other to that of William James (1842-1910). Some sort of amalgamation of the two concepts is prevalent in this article is not to retrace these lines in order to criticize or elaborate the concept of religious experience per se. Instead, I will assume that the concept is extant, and ask how well it travels.

The employment of the concept of religious experience in studies of Islam raises several questions worthy of scrutiny.

First, there is the question of the legitimacy of using the concept in an area so far from its origins. In principle, this need cause no difficulty, as, for example, the fact that tungsten was first isolated from wolframite does not prevent us from identifying it as such when extracted from scheelite. Likewise, the appearance of the concept of religious experience in a Christian context in itself should not prevent applications of the concept to various aspects of the religious lives of Muslims. On the other hand, the assumptions underlying the concept of religious experience seem to be more culturally sensitive than those that might be unearthed through inquiries into the social construction of different types of minerals (Rocks, 1999, p:186-206).

Secondly, assuming that we are able to justify the application of a concept of religious experience to events in the lives of Muslims, we should ask whether there are any important differences between the religious experiences of Muslims and Christians. Are there types of religious experience that Muslims have that are unknown to Christians Are there any types of specifically Christian religious experiences unknown to Muslims Even if Christian and Muslim religious experiences range over the same types, are there not more subtle differences to be found between Christians and Muslims

Thirdly, even if Christians and Muslims have the same basic sorts of religious experiences, the role of these experiences in religious life may be expected to differ. Are the same sorts of religious experiences central to the lives of Muslims and Christians If the most important religious experiences of Muslims are significantly different from the most important religious experiences of Christians, what does this tell us about the differences between Islam and Christianity, or between Muslim and Christian religious life

As a result of the attempt to respond to the issues mentioned above, we should reach: (1) a judgment about the applicability of the concept of religious experience to Islam, that is, an analysis of what sense, if any, can be given to the term religious experience by which it can be employed to further our understanding of Islam; (2) a typology of Islamic religious experiences; and (3) an account of the functions of Islamic religious experience in the religious lives of Muslims. In fact, my ambitions are not so high. In this paper I will only examine a few of the basic problems with the concepts of religious experience found in the works of Schleiermacher and James, particularly as applied to Muslim religious life; but I do hope that we can take a few preliminary steps toward all three of these goals.

Although it might be considered pedantic to question the legitimacy of the concept of religious experience in the context of Islam, serious questions have been raised about religious experience in general, and in particular within the context of the same Christian culture that has given rise to the idea in the first place. Even if we grant the legitimacy of employing the concept for the sake of understanding Christian religiosity, this would not license the application of the concept to Islam. On the other hand, by taking issue with the application of the concept to Islam, we might well find reason to question the ideas associated with the use of the concept to the extent that the application of the concept to Christian life may also become dubious, despite our initial assumption to the contrary.

First of all, the concept of religious experience as it is used in Western philosophy of religion is a very broad concept. It covers all sorts of feelings, and occurrences of religious ideas, and not merely the visions and unveilings of the mystics. In the Muslim world, however, people will not readily consider feelings of divine beneficence during prayer, for example, as religious experiences. This may be a matter of terminology. There is nothing to prevent the philosopher of religion from defining religious experience so broadly as to include the occurrence of relatively mundane thoughts about one”s present relation to God. In doing so, however, we must remember that there are many people who we will consider as having religious experiences, but who would not describe themselves in this way. The face that people do not consider their religious experiences anyway. However, since experiences have the peculiarity of being constituted, at least in part, by how they appear to us, our description of a person”s experience cannot be allowed to stray too far from what they themselves would affirm. One could always deny someone else”s account of one”s experience by saying that it was not like that.

In both Schleiermacher and James, the emphasis on religious experience grew out of dissatisfaction with theological theory and credal statements. Both thinkers felt that the study of dogma missed the essence of religion. Both introduced the concept of religious experience as an alternative to the dominant focus of religious studies on apologetics. Schleiermacher”s discussions of religious feelings and intuitions are conducted against the background of German Romanticism, while the religious experience of which James writes was influenced more by the psychology of Wundt and the pragmatist ideas he was soon to develop. The importance of the differences between James and Schleiermacher, however, must not be allowed to make us overlook the importance of their similarities. Both find the essence of religion in its most inward and personal manifestations. Both rebel against attempts to capture religion in theological theory and moral exhortation. For both thinkers, religion cannot be properly understood unless due attention is given to feelings and emotions.

Another point shared by Schleiermacher and James – and more recent writers have often departed from this – is that neither of them tried to prove or justify any particular dogma on the basis of religious experience. Their purpose was to understand the interior life of religious people, not to prove the existence of God or his angels. There is something bold and zestful about Schleiermacher and James, each in a way that seems fitting for the age in which they lived. Both were reacting against the over-intellectualizing of religion. Without trying to prove or justify dogmas, however, both sought to defend religion as they understood it. They sought had encrusted it to reveal the value of faith in its intimacy with the person.

Schleiermacher thought that if religious faith were not uprooted, there would be no need for any argument to prove its claims, for the force of its intuitions would suffice to secure conviction. A person is born with the religious capacity as with every other, and if only his sense is not forcibly suppressed, if only that communion between a person and the universe – these are admittedly the two poles of religion – is not blocked and barricaded, then religion would have to develop unerringly in each person according to his own individual manner (Schleiermacher, 1996, p:59).

In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, James, too, defends the force of inner experience to secure conviction as superior to attempts at rational proof. In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless (James, 1928, p:455).

They [feelings] are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are (Ibid, p:72).

Schleiermacher himself does not use the term religious experience. Instead he uses the Kantian term, Anschauung (intuition), which is contrasted with knowledge and practice. His goal is to present an accurate description of religious awareness or consciousness and thereby to show that religion cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs or moral codes. In this way, he sought to defend religion against the Romantics of his age who were dissatisfied with the moral conventions and dogmas of the European religious institutions. Instead, he would present religion as the inner life of the spirit. Schleiermacher thought that the focus on intuitions would also enable a defense of religion against doubts raised by the Kantian critique of speculative metaphysics and the sort of rationalism that was championed as Enlightenment. These doubts would be declared irrelevant to the truth of religion because religion is a matter of feeling and intuition, while the doubts are about the theoretical claims of theologians.

The chief characteristics of Schleiermacher”s religious feelings and intuitions are that they are immediate and independent of beliefs and practices. Today, there is an active philosophical debate about whether experiences can ever be independent of beliefs and practices as Schleiermacher thought them to be. A quite prominent view in opposition to Schleiermacher”s is that all religious experiences are shaped by concepts, langauge, associations and behavior that occur in the context of some religious tradition. This view has been dubbed constructivism.^(۴) (Proudfoot, 1985).

The concept of religious experience employed by William James, in contrast to Scheiermacher, does not requir experience to be direct to independent of background beliefs and concepts. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of pragmatism is a rejection of the nation of any sort of given epistemological foundations. For James and other pragmatists, experience is an activity through which whatever is encountered is shown to us. This is far from the theory of the British empiricists” view of experience as a passive registry of sensible data. Since the pragmatists” experience was taken to be a human activity, it was also held to depend upon human purposes and interests as one interacts with one”s environment and repeatedly is called upon to interpet what is found there. Pragmatists stressed the social character of experience in place of the older conception of experience as a private content confined to the mind of an individual. Although James called his theory radical empiricism, his ideas about experience went far beyond what traditional empiricists were prepared to accept.

Even though James does not restrict experience to the inner states produced by sense perception, and seems skeptical of attempts to isolate the subjective or inward aspects of one”s life from the rest of life, he does, finally, distinguish objective from subjective elements of experience, and he clearly champions the priority of the inward. This is not mere prejudice, or an unconscious Yankee individualism. James is aware of the criticisms, taken note of them, and sticks to his guns. James contends that it is only by living in the sphere of thought opened up by certain questions about destiny that one becomes profound; and that to live so, is to be religious. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. Compared with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life (James, 1902, p:501-2).

Whether or not one thinks that James adequately defends his individualism here, it has become a flashpoint. Let”s consider how two most eminent critics have responded, Clifford Geertz and Charles Taylor. With reference to the passage quoted above, Geertz writes: Cordoning off a space for “religion” in a realm called “experience” – “the darker blinder strata of character” – seems, somehow, no longer so reasonable and natural a thing to try to do. There is just too much one wants to call “religious”, almost everything it sometimes seems, going on outside the self (Geertz, 2000, p:169).

Taylor, who admits to having “greatly benefited” from Geertz”s lecture voices the same sort of complaint: What James can”t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn”t got place for a collective connection through a common way of being (Taylor, 2002, p:24).

Now, for our purposes, what is especially provocative about the objections raised by both Geertz and Taylor is that they both take examples from the Islamic world as corroboration.

Geertz objects to taking the essence of religion to lie in personal belief, because that would result in leaving religion out of political events in which religion seems to play a crucial role.

Political Islam, as it has come, misleadingly, to be called, …represents an effort on the part of Muslims finally to engage the demands and energies of the modern world (Geertz, 2000, p:173).

Geertz appears impatient with Muslims for not having been able to engage effectively with modernity, and whose efforts now seem rather ominous. But also again, not only are religious self – (and other -) identifications increasingly prominent in public square, “secular” discourse, but some extraordinarily powerful ones, “Hindu”, for example, or “Shi”i”, have taken on an aggressive world – political currency only rather recently (Geertz, 2000, p:175).

He faults James for equating religion with private experience as if it were an futile method to try to keep religion from taking any political authority. Experience, pushed out the door as a redically subjective, individualized “faith state”, returns through the window as the communal sensibility of a religiously assertive actor (Geertz, 2000, p:178).

Geertz sums up the argument of his lecture in a sentence: [I]n what we are pleased to call the real world, “meaning”, “identity”, “power”, and “experience”, are hopelessly entangled, mutually implicative, and “religion” can no more be founded upon or reduced to the last, that is, “experience”, than it can to any of the others. It is not in solitude that faith is made (Geertz, 2000, p:184).

James himself, on the other hand, uses the examples he draws from the Muslim world to underline the importance of direct experience for religion. In response to the objections of Geertz and Taylor, one could say that James certainly was not unaware of the social and communal aspects of religion, and that he did not mean to deny them. Geertz and Taylor, on the other hand, are justifiably displeased with the way James simply ignores the sociological. When James emphasized the personal, however, his individualism was not pitted against sociology, but against the over-intellectualization of religion, and against what he called the “survival theory” of religion, by which he meant the scientistic vanity that religion is merely a holdover from a time when people did not know any better.

In lecture II of The Varieties of Religious Experience, James explicitly defends his “circumscription of the topic”. He acknowledges that there is more to religion than what he is calling religion in the remainder of the book, and he explicitly states that he is not going to treat the institutional aspects of religion. We could justifiably find fault with James for not paying enough attention to the ways in which personal experiences are subject to the influence of social relations and relations with institution of religion. He is aware of it, but states that his interests lie elsewhere. His point is not to circumscribe religion, but to circumscribe the subject of his own investigations. He even expresses a willingness to give up the name religion for his topic. Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple…

…I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat (James, 1902, p:29-30).

He continues by giving reasons why he thinks that the personal aspects of religion are more fundamental than its institutional expressions (although he admits that the origins of genuinely religious feelings might be found in primitive fetishism and magic). This is something with which one might quarrel, but we should not think of James as though he were so blinded by his rugged individualism that he could not appreciate the fact that religion extends beyond the realm of the personal. His definition of religion has been repeated and criticized on innumerable occasions, but look at the phrasing that introduces the definition: Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine (James, 1902, p:31).

James continues that the relation to the divine itself “may be either moral, physical, or ritual”. He should have added “social or communal – even political”. I don”t think he would have objected to such an addition. He would still finish his paragraph with the same sentence: In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

He should have added that he would hardly consider religious social structures and relations either, not because he would deny their existence or significance, but simply because he was fishing elsewhere. It is true that James sides with the heart against the head and with the maverick against the orthodox, but this taking sides is more a reflection of where James” own sympathies lie, not that there is any argument that religion does not take forms that he does not relish. Even in the personal aspects of religion championed by James, he admits that there are fanaticism and morbidity. His point is not to deny what he finds unattractive, but to insist that religion is capable of taking forms that are free from the features he finds ugly, while religion without some sort of grounding in personal feeling would amount to little more than hypocrisy.

So much for the defense of James. Even if James himself is innocent, the main thesis of his opponents remains: one cannot obtain an adequate understanding of religion of one restricts one”s attention to the personal. Taylor concludes his little book by mentioning three things we might miss if we restrict our view of religion to what James presents: (1) our connection to the sacred might be communally mediated even if it is kept out of politics; (2) religious identity can have social and political importance for people regardless of how spiritual they are; and (3) rigorous spiritual discipline may be adopted as an important way of responding to religious intuitions.

As I reread James, I don”t find myself tempted to forget the points mentioned by Taylor. There seem to be sufficient mention of religious communities and formal spiritual discipline, although politics is certainly neglected. What seems more disturbing about James” view of religion is that it gives religious experience in an epistemically privileged status because of the rather limited view of the sorts of “fruits” by which they could be undermined. It is here that James seems to concentrate too exclusively on the spiritual and psychological benefits or harms that religious experience may bring, without considering communal, political, social, moral and other more theoretical costs and benefits. Religious experiences that lead one to propagate theological rubbish are invalid. The question of the standard we use to distinguish rubbish from sound theology is another matter, but the idea that theological constraints and constraints of reason can overturn the authority of an experience is something one often runs across on the writings of the mystics themselves in both Christian and Islamic traditions.

While James asks his readers to accept his definition of religion arbitrarily for the purposes of the ensuing enquiry, his own choice seems far from arbitary, or at least it is not capricious. James attention to the private inner realms of religious feeling reflects the combination in his own personality of dissatisfaction with the public expressions of religion in rites and institutions, rejection of the philosophical theologies then current, and anti-clericalism together with a strong sense of personal piety.

Given James” focus on the inward and lack of interest in