Prophetic Revelation and the Challenge of Religious Experience

One of the important challenges regarding the revelation of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) that has been raised in recent decades due to the influence of Christian theology is the view based on which the revelation is not specific to the Prophet (PBUH) and the prophetic experiences continue in different people after the Prophet of Islam (PBUH). The theoretical basis of this view is the religious experience of revelation. In general, there are two main views about the nature of revelation, which are propositional revelation and experiential revelation. Based on propositional revelation, God reveals truths and propositions to the Prophet, but based on experiential revelation, the Prophet has an encounter with God and conveys the interpretation of that encounter and his religious experience to others. After describing the view of religious experience and its basic concepts, the article points out the grounds for the emergence of this theory and after criticizing this view, it states the differences between revelation and religious experience. Considering the criticisms that have the perspective of religious experience and also the fundamental differences that exist between revelation and religious experience, we cannot accept the above point of view, i.e. religious experience, regarding revelation and especially the Islamic revelation that was revealed to the Holy Prophet (PBUH). The experiential and materialistic view on the phenomenon of revelation caused religion and its divine teachings to be reduced to mental phenomena related to the brain structure of the prophets, and the result of this thought was that religious teachings are the result of transitioning from the circle of conceptual awareness to meta-conceptual awareness, and the prophets also achieved this type of awareness by doing meditation. This type of attitude towards religion causes us not to consider revelation as the true word of God, but to consider it as the prophet's words from his religious experience, and these words do not express the truths that were revealed to the prophet personally, but they are interpretations of intuition in metaphorical language. This view was neither the only possible solution nor the best solution, Christian theologians have followed different ways against these problems. For example, for the problem of the conflict between science and religion, many different answers have been given. Or other theological schools appeared in front of the critics of the Holy Bible. Also, despite the failure of rational theology in Christianity, in the modern period, various rational schools emerged and founded different theologies.