Basic Difference between Revelation and Poetry (A Criticism of Dr. Soroush's View Regarding the Essence of Revelation)

One of the complicated discussions which has always drawn the attention of scholars who research on religious subjects is the essence of revelation. Due to various reasons, this discussion has not remained an intellectual and theoretical subject, rather it has became a social-political challenge. A group of recent Christian philosophers consider revelation as a kind of "religious experience". Affected by these philosophers, Dr. Abdol-Karim Soroush tried to introduce this view regarding Islam's revelation about a decade ago which simultaneously provoked some discussions in relatively specialized centeries. He has recently pointed out the same discussions with a more impertinent and stinging literature and in a more common level. The only point he has added to his previous discussion is the analogy he draws between prophecy (and the process of revelation) and poetry.His discussions can be investigated from two aspects: first is how theoretically reasonable and defendable are his propositions and second is what is the position of his discussions from the social-political aspect and what are its results. The first area is mainly mentioned in this article: does his view have enough theoretical stability or not? In this article his theory is first written in the form of four main claims which are: impossibility of receiving letters and adequacy of understanding the content by Prophet (PBUH); drawing an analogy between revelation and poetry; the effect of the culture of Prophet's (PBUH) times on the content of revelation thus fallibility of revelation; lack of necessity to accept and be faithfulness to all of the content of revelation. Besides criticizing the claims, their origin and theoretical foundations are mentioned in each case.