The Nostalgia of the Soul in "The Hymn of the Pearl" and "Exiled in the West"; A Comparative Study

Belief in the descent of the soul to the material realm and its return to its higher state and homeland is the core of the teachings of the Gnostic School as well as Islamic mysticism. This belief is manifested in two allegorical stories: “The Hymn of the Pearl” and “Exiled in the West: The Mystical Narration of Shihab Al-Din Suhrawardi's Recital of the Occidental Exile” The former is a reflection of Gnostic epistemological thoughts and the latter being an expression of Suhrawardi's intellectual-philosophical system. By a comparative analytical approach and using library method, the present article tires to decipher these two stories to depict the basic worldviews of Gnosticism and Suhrawardi through these two treatises, to reread the commonalities and differences between them, and in this way, achieve achievements by comparing and intertextually examining the two stories. Despite the great intellectual differences between these two worldviews, the findings of the research show many commonalities. Among the common themes of two stories, we can refer to spiritual nostalgia, East-West worldview, the presence of an old man and a spiritual guide, being informant, as well as the symbolic and mythological structure of both stories. Themes such as the return and the second birth, the Divine intervention in all things, and the non-dualistic worldview, that are referred in Exiled in the West, are the differences between the two stories.