The Role of the ‘Hadith of Surat’ in the Theory of ‘Superiority of Human Being Over Other Creatures’

One of the most famous intellectual foundations of the Sufis and theoretical mysticism is the “hadith of Surat”. Islamic mystics have used it as the basis for their claims, including “superiority of human being over other creatures”. Being organized by the method of content analysis, this article first aims to examine the hadith documentation to find out if it has been issued by infallible Imams and in the second step, scrutinize its implications for the claim. The research findings indicate that not only the “hadith of Surat” is not authentic and cannot be attributed to an infallible Imam and it has just been appeared in Holy Scriptured of Judaism, Christianity as well as the hadith texts of the Sunnis and Sufis, but also it seems that the hadith cannot prove the claims based on it. Apparanty Sufis has interpreted it in a different ways, so they can considere it as the basis of their arguments. Therefore, although the idea of “superiority of human being over other creatures” could be deduced and obtained from other theological evidences, but the 'Hadith of Surat' cannot be a basis to it; and it is more similar to celebiries in a religious discours that entered to Islamic World from other religions.