Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s (d. 672/1273) Maѕnavī-i Maʿnavī is replete with metaphors of love that function as epistemological and ontological instruments, serving both to impart knowledge and to reflect the structure of reality. This study examines how Rūmī employs the language of love as a means to express ineffable mystical realities of divine love and union, and to catalyze the transformation of...
Despite the fact that some of the main followers of the famous Spanish Muslim mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240)2 were well-versed in the discipline of philosophy, the school of Ibn ‘Arabī is often not regarded in Western scholarship as a philosophical school in the usual sense of the term. This is because Ibn ʿArabī’s followers tend to tackle the central problems of philosophy through the medium...
In Islamic studies, Toshihiko Izutsu is well known as a scholar of the Qur’an and Sufism, thanks to his published works in English. As to his image in Japan, however, he is known as a thinker of Oriental philosophy. After his return from Iran to Japan, he published several publications on Oriental philosophy in Japanese. As such, his final achievement, which was his Oriental philosophy, was...