Imagining the divine: Ghazali on imagination, dreams, and dreaming

Abstract

This study represents a phenomenological analysis of Ghazali's discussion of dreams and dream discourse as it specifically relates to the faculty of the imagination. The imagination is an important, though ambiguous and understudied category, as it is responsible for diverse visual activities such as dreaming, visions, and prophecy. The imagination, then, is responsible for translating the incorporeal divine world into corporeal material images. These images, in turn, represent an integral part of the mystic's experience. The imagination tries to overcome the fundamental aniconic tension in monotheism between God's immanance and His transcendence. As a result, the products of the imagination are very ambiguous: for the philosophers they are chimerical, yet for the mystics they provide an important access to truth. Although this study is devoted to Ghazali, a twelfth-century Muslim, the conclusions are meant to aid in the much needed construction of the imagination as a nuanced and important category in the academic study of religion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.