The Major Relation Between Western Metaphysics and Sufi Literature

Abstract

In the encounters between the Eastern and Western thought and literature, there are some historical moments when one can see both east and West coming closer. For instant, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Western powers’ colonial enterprises in Eastern countries like India, Persia and the Middle East established a strong relation between both cultures but before discussing the colonial encounter between the east and West which was more of a political and cultural nature, we need to look at the close association of Eastern and Western thought in the Medieval period for a greater understanding of their philosophical and intellectual encounter. One can find two ways of thinking within Western philosophical development. One way is towards rational thinking, which is manifested in scientific discoveries from Copernicus in the late Medieval period to the evolutionary naturalism of Darwin in the nineteenth century. It also includes the metaphysical rationalization of Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Voltaire and that of the later analytical thinkers of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. The other way of thinking within this later productive period of critical thought in human history is Romantic idealism and the wonder-struck metaphysical wandering of German and English Romantic poets and philosophers alike. Coleridge’s imaginative poetic thought shows that there always been a window corner away from the cold air of rational intellectualism and conventional dogmatism. People like Dante, Goethe, Coleridge and other Romantics and even Chaucer and his early English poetry have occupied this corner. The question this paper seeks to answer is that to what extent eastern and western major interactions have influenced the western literature and metaphysics.