An Inquiry into the Demonstration of Self-Knowledge on the Basis of the Tradition He who knows himself knows his God

The Prophetic tradition, "He who knows himself knows his God", is one of the well-known traditions that Muslim thinkers including philosophers, gnostics, commentators, and traditionalists often cite and try to shed light on. In expounding the correlation between self-knowledge and Divinity, these scholars strive to understand how these two are correlated and explain why self-knowledge essentially leads to the knowledge of Divinity and how self-knowledge contributes to the knowledge of Divinity. Two interpretation of this tradition have been given impossibility-based and possibility-based. In possibility-based reading, experimental, philosophical, gnostic and religious methods have been adopted to study how self-knowledge is correlated with the knowledge of God. Using a documentary-analytical method, the present paper studies and explains this tradition, and expounds the demonstration of self-knowledge in the light of this tradition.