A Study of the Role of Gabriel in the Verbal Revelation from an Islamic Mystical Point of View

This paper briefly reviews different views of the nature of revelation (waḥy), and then states that, in accordance to mystical views of the analysis of the stages of being and the manifestation of God in these stages, and thus, the Quran is not necessarily detached from prior stages of being and is present in each stage as appropriate to that stage. Thus, the Quran is present in the “Before-God” and “the Mother Book” stage down to the material stage, existing in condensed (ijmālī) or expanded (tafṣīlī) forms. Given the stages of being, the first expanded verbal presence of the Quran would be in the imaginal world (‘ālam al-mithāl), in which material accidents exist without the existence of the matter itself. Given the missionary revelation and the place of Gabriel (or Jabra’īl) therein, the paper argues that since forms of the imaginal world are present to the angel of revelation, and he is the one to whom the revelation is attributed, the attribution is genuine, indicating his active presence in the revelation, which is the formulation of Quranic words at the stage of detached and attached imagination and sending it down to the heart of the Prophet.