A Comparative Study of Soroush’s Views on Prophetic Experience and the Avicennian Study of Divine Revelation

Over the past two decades, subsequent to the Muslim thinkers’ encounter with Christian theology and for the purpose of explaining some theological issues, some new theories on revelation have appeared in Iran's intellectual and cultural spheres. One of these theories has been formulated as the prophetic experience. The founder of this theory claims that his theory is not new and was in fact borrowed from Farabi and Avicenna. In order to evaluate this claim, we first review Avicenna’s views on revelation and then compare the views of the two philosophers. It appears that although some of Avicenna’s views bear resemblance to Sroush’s theory, there is a major difference between the two in the sense that fallibility of revelation has not been the conclusion reached by Avicenna.