Document Type : Original Article
Author
Shahid Madani uiversity
Abstract
Farid al-Din Attar is one of the most influential mystics of Khorasan mysticism. His influence and acceptability among the Sufis is to an extend that even the mystics of the Baghdad school have paid close attention to his views. One of the representatives of theoretical mysticism is Sheikh Mahmoud Shabestari, who is influenced by ibn Arabi on one hand and Attar on the other. Shabestari in a part of his valuable work, Golshan-i Raz, has set his views on mystical journey in seven stations. Each station is named after one of the divine prophets who have been prominent in an attribute, which is necessary to reach the station of oneness and spiritual perfection. From the station of repentance which is specific to Adam to Muhammad’s station which is the station of oneness, they are reminiscent of Attar’s Valley of the Quest to the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation in the Mantiq-ut-Tair (The Conference of the Birds). Both theories have seven stages, both lead to poverty and annihilation and both have come to the attention of later theorists. Due to the existence of such a capacity between two mystical masterpieces, main emphasis of the present article is on the intellectual and linguistic similarities between Mantiq ut-Tair and Golshan-i Raz to present a theory of mystical journey in order to propose a new approach in restoring the foundations of common mysticism between Attar and Shabestari (a combination of the philosophical mysticism of ibn Arabi's oneness of being and the mysticism of the intuitive oneness of the Khorasan school).
Keywords
)