Religious Epistemology in Molavi's Thought: Methodological Interpretation of the First Narrative of Masnavi

Masnavi is a valuable piece of work. Through contemplating its content, a thoughtful individual can get access to a rich source of civilized human wisdom, philosophy and insight in addition to the deep philosophical concepts. One of the hidden aspects of Molavi’s thought is his careful attention to methodology which is one of the major branches of epistemology. The focus of the present paper is on the issue of methodology in Molavi’s thought which is assumed to have been a neglected issue. To this aim, the first narrative of Masnavi in the first book is analyzed adopting a new approach. The results of the analysis are as follows: first, from Molavi’s point of view religious epistemology is methodologically comprehensive as it confirms all the different methods of knowledge acquisition; second, what is now called scientific method is accurately described in Masnavi; third, restricting the validity of research methods in humanities to the experimental method is not justified and it is more appropriate to use a general and a mixed method; fourth, observing the scientific ethical codes including honesty and loyalty as the most important ones is a necessity; fifth, although wisdom and experience are the two powerful tools of recognition and both approaches are of a high position they suffer from significant limitations in studying the man and the world.