From Mystic Defamiliarization to Artistic Creation in Ein al-Qozat Hamadani's Tamhidat

Thanks to a basic relation between art and mysticism in Islamic culture and civilization, many of Sufi verse texts are artistically oriented. Tamhidat, by Ein al-Qozat Hamadani, is a work which can be claimed to have equally important artistic and mystic values. The basis of Ein al-Qozat Hamadani's approach is to break habits and to breathe new and fresh spirit into religion. This is somehow practically similar to the mission of artists to fight with the routinization of the understanding of life and universe and equal to the mottos of Russian formalists. Based on his defamiliaristic view, some traces of the theories of contemporary literature can be seen in his words. Derida's views and formalists and semiotician's ideas about the omission of predetermined meaning in a literary work have a lot in common with this great mystic's words.