Abstract
This paper examines the reception of the mysticism of Muḥy al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638 H/1240) among Iranian seminarians from the post-Safavid era up to the present. In various papers, the author has discussed the exposure of Iranian Sufis to the teachings of al-Shaykh al-Akbar, however, an investigation of the ways the people of the seminary (ḥawza) treated him and his theoretical mysticism is still missing. This study is relevant as it sheds light on different aspects of the seminary education system in Iran over the past centuries, including but not limited to the nature of the curriculum, the real weight of mysticism in the traditional education system in the first place, the teaching of Ibn ʿArabī’s primary texts and the considerable bulk of commentaries and glosses that were written on his writings by those in the seminary. The paper will tackle the reasons why theoretical mysticism, despite its popularity in Iran, has never become fully integrated into the education system of the seminaries and has largely remained marginal; a development that can be best explained by the predominance of orthodoxy in the seminaries with jurist-theologians as its guardians. This also explains why the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī have never been exposed to the female students of seminaries, itself an indication of the male-dominated structure of the ḥawza and its curriculum planning. And finally, since many of these seminarians gained political positions after the revolution of 1979, the author will also study the impact of their learnings in mysticism on contemporary politics.