Reassessing spiritual hermeneutic : a post-colonial reading of Ibn Arabi’s tafsir

Abstract

This paper considers epistemological precedents of Quranic hermeneutics through a reclassification of Ibn Arabi, not simply as a mystic, or a metaphysician, but as a mufassir in whose esoteric exegesis radical intervention in Islamic intellectual history. In contrast to the mainly monolithic background of colonial modernity and institutional postenlightenment rationalism whose systematic disenfranchisement of mystical knowledge has generally excluded such methodology of hermeneutical expression as that of Ibn Arabi, grounded in tajallî (divine disclosure), kashf (unveiling), and hayrah (bewilderment)—as a paradigm of spiritual epistemology. Upon developing a critical engagement with postcolonial and post-secular thinkers like Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Charles Taylor, the research uncovers the ways in which the subjugation of tafsîr indicates the prevalence of structure of epistemic violence. Hermeneutics in the works of Ibn Arabi is non-closural, rejecting encoding of divine meaning in either linguistic or historical determinism. Rather, meaning is enabled by ontological-experience, and inner witnessing. Therefore, this paper becomes the postcolonial interpretation of tafsir by breaking and resituating the hegemony of modernist and reformist frameworks through the lens of Ibn Arabis’s tafsîr, reinstating the validity of spiritual knowledge in Islamic and scholarly discourse.