The argument from religious experience in Islam

Sufism, the mystical wing of Islam, has produced the richest first-person religious-experience literature in any Abrahamic tradition. From Rabi'a al-Adawiyya's love-mysticism in the eighth century through al-Junayd's sober path, al-Hallaj's ecstatic utterances ('Ana al-Haqq' — 'I am the Truth'), and the great literary exponents Rumi and Ibn Arabi, Sufi masters have both had and written about states and stations (ahwal and maqamat) leading toward fana — annihilation of the self in God.

The epistemic argument drawn from these experiences in Islamic theology is somewhat different from Alston's Christian version. al-Ghazali, in his spiritual autobiography al-Munqidh min al-Dalal (Deliverance from Error), described how rational theology failed to give him certainty and how direct taste (dhawq) of religious truth through Sufi practice restored his faith. For Ghazali, religious experience is not one argument among others for God — it is the domain in which the question of God is decisively settled, in a way discursive theology cannot match.

Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) gave the tradition its most ambitious metaphysics: wahdat al-wujud, the unity of existence, which holds that all of reality is a self-disclosure of the divine names. His influence was enormous — and contested, with orthodox critics like Ibn Taymiyya charging him with pantheism. Contemporary religious-experience arguments face the same challenges in Islam as in Christianity: cross-cultural diversity of reports, physiological correlates, and the gap between phenomenology and metaphysics. But the Sufi tradition's own emphasis on the insufficiency of words renders it somewhat more philosophically modest — the experiences are what matter, not the propositions one might build from them.