Remembrance: A Husserlian Phenomenology of Sufi Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study seeks to answer the phenomenological question: What in essence is religious experience—specifically, the lived experience of “remembrance” (dhikr) in Sufi practice within the schools of Sufism shaped by the “Greatest Master,” Ibn al-'Arabi? The eidetic structure of remembrance is the awakening of the individuated human subject to recollecting the primordial ground of his or her identity as a dynamic instantiation of the Absolute. This is simultaneously experienced as the subject becoming the object of remembrance—that is, being remembered by the Absolute. This transforms the psychological ego's relationship to its own embodied, affective, and cognitive living, as the “center of gravity” of that ego shifts from an egocentric one—that is, an identification with the natural attitude standpoint of the personal ego—to progressively greater centeredness in the transcendental ego as a locus of ongoing world constitution and primordial self-presence, while nevertheless living as a unique individual.