Sufi Aesthetics argues that the interpretive keys to erotic Sufi poems and their medieval commentaries lie in knowing a special perceptual adventure. utilizing cautious research of fundamental texts, Cyrus Ali Zargar explores the theoretical and poetic pronouncements of 2 significant Muslim mystics, Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) and Fakhr al-Din 'Iraqi (d. 1289), lower than the basis that at the back of any literary culture exist natural aesthetic values. The advanced assertions of those Sufis look no longer as summary thought, yet as a fashion of seeing all issues, together with the sensory world.

In this research Zargar responds to a long-standing debate within the research of Sufi poetics over using erotic language to explain the divine. He argues that such language effects from an altered notion of Muslim mystics during which divine attractiveness and human attractiveness are visible as one fact. The Sufi masters, Zargar asserts, shared a classy imaginative and prescient particularly diversified from those that have usually studied them. Sufism's optimal theoretician, Ibn 'Arabi, is gifted from a missed point of view as a poet, aesthete, and lover of the human shape. Ibn 'Arabi actually proclaimed a view of human good looks markedly just like that of many mystics from a Persian contemplative tuition of notion, the "School of Passionate Love," which might later locate its epitome in 'Iraqi, one among Persian literature's so much celebrated poet-saints. Many during this college encouraged the arguable perform of observing at attractive human faces, a subject Zargar additionally discusses.

The exam of principal Sufi texts in Persian and Arabic establishes that the profundity attributed to mystical encounters with the sensory and supersensory has far-reaching extensions in reviews of that that is noticeable, that that is deemed attractive, and that that's expressed for this reason. via this aesthetic strategy, this comparative research overturns assumptions made not just approximately Sufism and classical Arabic and Persian poetry, but additionally different makes use of of erotic imagery in Muslim methods to sexuality, the human physique, and the paradise of the afterlife defined within the Qur'an.