The Periphery in Mysticism: From Summoning the Periphery to Going Beyond the Binary of the Center and the Periphery

Socio-religious discourses, based on polarist epistemology, form the epistemic world into a system of Center and the Periphery and then subject the periphery to suppression and silence. This practice has extended to most signifying systems, including literary genres. Among the literary genres, the super-genre of Iranian-Islamic mysticism, titled love mysticism displays a different account of the construction of the periphery and the binary system governing that construction. In this paper, along with introducing the construction of the margin and its examples in the dominant Socio-religious discourses, the different accounts of the mystics are classified and interpreted with the reasons for each of them. The result shows that the mystics apply a deconstructive reading, building their argument on the unitarian discourse of love mysticism, the ontological requirement of the existence and presence of margins, the necessity of a romantic relationship, the denial of mediation, and similar reasons, to take the three fixed categories of the peripheral, including humans in the general sense, the un-prostrating, and the unreasoning, from the margins of the system to its center. Then, on another level, via a dialectical reading and the suspension of the objectifying process, they go beyond the binary of the center and the periphery. The suspension of the objectifying process in mystics’ representations is the equalization of the center and the periphery, such as the equality of disbelief and belief, the world and the hereafter, and so on. Although the function of these readings in the social context is a change ...