mohamad khani; ebrahim khani
Abstract
Drawing on Quranic verses, Allameh Tabatabai delineates an ontological dichotomy of the division of worlds called command and creation. From his viewpoint, the world of creation is synonymous with the material world, while the world of command which is the inner essence of the material world includes ...
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Drawing on Quranic verses, Allameh Tabatabai delineates an ontological dichotomy of the division of worlds called command and creation. From his viewpoint, the world of creation is synonymous with the material world, while the world of command which is the inner essence of the material world includes both the world of archetypes and the world of intellect. On the other hand, in Islamic mysticism, there is a dichotomy between the aspect of lordship and the aspect of creation which is very close to the dichotomy between command and creation. In this dichotomy, the independent and relational manifestations of the divine essence are interpreted as the lordship aspect and the trichotomy of worlds (intellect, archetype and material) as the creation aspect. The present paper starts with a detailed explanation of the Quranic dichotomy between command and creation on the one hand and the mystical dichotomy between the lordship aspect and the creation aspect on the other. The paper then concludes that despite the apparent difference between the two dichotomies they are not fundamentally different. Employing the new conceptual tools which are implicit in these thought systems, that is, the dominance of lordship aspect and the dominance of creation aspect we can consider the ontology of both systems simultaneously.
