rivages Outils de lecture

The problematic status of the Sufi discourse within the Arab-Islamic culture has
created the need for it to seek theoretical and practical legitimacy. Sufism, as Ibn
Khaldun described in the Muqaddima, is "one of jurisprudence sciences that is new
in religion". This has made Sufism questionable and open to criticism. However, the search for legitimacy would turn into an opportunity to impose its scientific and
spiritual authority through moral and ad- valorem criticism to the Islamic cultural
system that is filled with spiritual inveteracy. This was reflected in the project of
Sheikh Mohiuddin Ibn Arabi, who observed the inadequacy of the doctrinal thinking
to understand the essence of religious experience by focusing on the appearance of sharia and not accessing the essence of religion. Sufism has not stopped at religious and moral criticism but extended its critical perspective to rational sciences: kalam and philosophy. Ibn Arabi’s criticism focuses on knowledge, its limits and the conditions of its possibility. Moreover, Ibn Arabi gave the Sufi experience itself a deep gnostic criticism, in order to shed the light on the limits of theophanies and confirm the dialectic of truth according to the dialectic of existence.