Modern Mysticism: a New Challenge for Islamic Mysticism (A Revision of Modern Mysticism and a Critique of its Anthropological Aspect)

Modern mysticism is an encounter with the transcendent in terms of an experientialist religiosity formed on the basis of the thoughts and poems of Sohrab Sepehri. Modern mysticism has its own ontological, anthropological, ethical-jurisprudential, political, and social constituents and components. In its anthropological aspect, the “self”-“other” contrast, the problem of annihilation in Allah and the spiritual traveler’s will are conceived of in a different way conflicting with traditional mysticism, including Islamic mysticism. This paper seeks to respond to the question of the annihilation in God within the anthropological aspect of modern mysticism—what does it mean? What are its grounds? And what problems does it have? In this paper, I have focused on, and criticized, the identity and nature of annihilation in Allah and subsistence with Allah in Islamic mysticism as formulated by the theoretical founder of modern mysticism (Soroush Dabbagh). I argue that annihilation in Islamic mysticism does not amount to nothingness. Instead, it is an intuitive annihilation consisting in an emancipation from nonexistential restrictions and limits, existential attachments and determinations, and a migration from plurality to unity which is the same as subsistence with Allah. In Islamic mysticism, mystical annihilation is an expansion and ascent, or an existential extension and development or transcendence, and the spiritual traveler’s will becomes stronger as it integrates with God’s will, culminating in divine unity and wilāya (guardianship).