An Account and Consideration of God’s Manifestation from the Standpoint of the Yārī Denomination (Ahl-i Ḥaqq) and Islamic Mysticism

God’s manifestation is the fundamental basic ground of Yarsanist (People of Ḥaqq) worldview and ontology, which is dealt with in terms of a peculiar philosophy. On this outlook, outstanding people are either manifestations of the divine essence or manifestations of divine attributes. The failure to discriminate the manifestation of the divine essence from its determinations and forms has been the main source of Yarsanist misinterpretations. Drawing on a descriptive-analytic method, in this paper we examine and diagnose Yarsanist beliefs through their main texts, analyzing the problem of the manifestation of the divine essence. We conclude that given the semantic variety of “essence” in theological texts of Yarsanism, the manifestation of the essence differs at the stages of Yāyī, Durrī, and Khwāwandkārī. Thus, the quality of the manifestation of the essence in humans and the system of manifestation in ritual texts is, despite distortions throughout Yarsanist theological periods, all but consistent with the foundation of Ibn ‘Arabī’s school of theoretical mysticism and different from oral beliefs of Yarsanist laypeople and theologians. It also shows that the depth of epistemic texts is not known to their followers.