The Nature of Revelation: A Comparison of the Ideas of Morteza Motahari and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

The nature of revelation is one of the controversial problems in theology of religions. There are different views on this subject in the Islamic theology. According to the common view, revelation is a set of divine truths in the form of linguistic propositions that are presented to people via the holy prophet. In recent years, another view on the nature of revelation has been introduced. According to this view, revelation does not have a linguistic nature and is under the influence of historical-cultural factors. This paper aims to analyze the views of Morteza Motahari and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd as the advocates for each perspective. According to Motahari, descent of revelation means that the prophet, during a spiritual ascending, receives divine truths and then these truths descendwithin the prophet's existence and are finally revealed in a linguistic form. Motahari believes that revelation is a metahistorical object. Abu Zayd, on the other hand, argues that revelation does not have a linguistic nature and the prophet just receives the divine meanings and shapes them in a linguistic form by himself. According to Abu Zayd, it is the prophet who gives the Arabic form to the revelation, and revelation is a historical object. In this paper the similarities and differences between these two perspectives are discussed.