Philosophical Foundations of Spirituality in Islam: (Looking at its Difference with the Non-religious approach)

There are two different approaches in perception of spirituality: religious approach and non-religious approach. In Islam, spirituality is always emphasized as the main element in religiousness and religious education. The modern view to spirituality has a trans-religious approach and pursues spirituality regardless of religion. The aim of the current research is to study the philosophical foundations of spirituality from the perspective of Islam.

The current research has studied the philosophical foundations of spirituality in Islamic thinking with a descriptive-analytical method, and has determined the difference between the philosophical foundations of religious and non-religious spirituality with a comparative method.

In Islamic thinking, spirituality pertains to the realm beyond the material world and the origin and end of the world. This religious spirituality refers to both the existential dimensions of human, and also to human relations. On the contrary, the extensiveness of spiritual experience in modern approaches is such that it includes any kind of human connection with "transcendental reality". The non-religious attitude towards spirituality, causes pluralism in spirituality that faces serious epistemological limitations.

In the ontology of spirituality, Islam considers two domains for beings and all creatures in the universe: the heavenly domain and worldly domain; In contrast, the non-religious attitude, which deals with spirituality without an origin and end, lacks firm ontological foundations. In the epistemology of spirituality, Islamic spirituality brings a person to a special kind of knowledge, which is related to the unseen world, and this spirituality can be acknowledgedat the level of the individual and society. In the positivist and radical scientist approach, on the other hand, only empirical and scientific knowledge is valid, and spirituality is not very recognizable. In the axiology of spirituality, the set of spiritual values that divine religions call to man are mainly different from the spiritual values called for in non-religious spirituality.