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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Theoretical Gnosis and Doctrinal Sufism and Their Significance Today The Present Day Significance of Theoretical Gnosis Today the Islamic world suffers greatly from the neglect of its own intellectual tradition and yet there are some contemporary modernized Muslim philosophers, especially in the Arab world and to some extent Turkey, who dismiss later Islamic philosophy precisely because of its association with ‘irfān which they criticize pejoratively as mere mysticism.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those so-called fundamentalists who are opposed to both reason and gnosis and turn their backs on and moreover criticize the Islamic intellectual tradition, at whose heart stands gnosis, on the pretext of wanting to save Islam. They are blind to the fact that it is precisely this intellectual tradition of which Islam is in the direst need today, faced as it is with the challenges of the modern world that are primarily intellectual.

Some of the greatest problems facing Islam on an intellectual level today are the invasion of a secularist worldview and secular philosophies; the spread of a science and technology based on a secular view of nature and of knowledge of nature; the environmental crisis which is closely related to the spread of modern technology; religious pluralism and the need to comprehend in depth other religions; the need to defend religion itself against all the secularist or exclusivist Christian attacks against it emanating primarily from the West; the need to understand the principles of Islamic art and architecture and to apply these principles to creating authentic Islamic art and architecture today; to provide an authentic Islamic answer to the relation between religion and science; to formulate an Islamic science of the soul or psychology; and to establish a firm foundation for the harmony between faith and reason.

The role of ‘irfān is central to the solution of all of these problems. It is only in gnosis that the unifying principle of faith and reason can be found. If one were only to understand ‘irfān, one would realize its supreme significance for Muslims today. Furthermore, ‘irfān is not enmeshed in the syllogistic form of reasoning to be found in Islamic philosophy, a form of reasoning that is alien to many people today.