Journal of Interreligious Studies on the Quran and the Bible

Journal of Interreligious Studies on the Quran and the Bible

Imagination in Bible: What It means the Concept for Christian vs. Islamic Philosophy

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Nadia Maftouni
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Theology, University of Tehran, Tehran, IRAN.
10.22034/qb.2025.2053394.1034
Abstract
(Genesis 11:6): "And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do".Imagination for Bible as a gift permits us to see beyond the here and now and visualize a future shaped by faith. However, one might ask basically what the nature or conception of imagination is. I’ll focus on the vantage points of Farabi and Hegel as two avatars of the traditions of Christian thinkers and Muslim philosophers. Imagination, Farabi believes, may well be defined by its three most notable activities of preserving the sensible forms, combining and separating the sensible forms to make new images, and representing sensible beings as well as the intelligible affairs and beings by sensible forms of two former kinds of images, that is, preserved forms in imagination and the forms created by imagination via combining and separating the sensible forms. Imagination keeps forms of a horse, a stone, a wing, a smell, etc. Imagination also makes a horse with two wings, or a stone that is crying, or a wall that is singing. Imagination gets the image of the horse from nature, and the image of the wings from nature too, and then produces a new form by joining them. Imagination represents, for example, the vice of damaging environment by drawing a row of crying trees in a painting. Three stages of imagination according to Hegel include the first stage as reproductive imagination, the second stage as the productive and associative imagination, and third stage as the sign-making fantasy. Three stages mentioned by Hegel very well correspond three activities pointed out in Farabi’s theory of imagination.
Keywords
Christian Philosophy
Muslim Philosophers
Reproductive Imagination
Associative Imagination
Sign-making Fantasy
Bible. King James Version – KJV (1769/2017).
Bates, J. (2004). Hegel’s Theory of Imagination. US: State University of New York Press.
Düsing, K. (1991). "Hegels Theorie der Einbildungskraft." Psychologie und Anthropologie Oder Philosophie des Geistes. (Hespe, F; Tuschling, B. Eds). Frommann Holzboog. Pp. 298–307.
Farabi, A. (2000). Ara-e Ahl-e al-Madina al-Fadhela. Tehran: Ministry of Islamic Culture.
Farabi, A. (2005). Taḥsīl al-Saʻāda. Qom: Dar al-Hoda.
Farabi, A. (1997). al-Sīyāsa al-Madanīyya. Tehran: Soroush Press.
Farabi, A. (2003). al-Fuṣūl al-Muntazaʻa. Tehran: Soroush Press.
Farabi, A. (1996). al-Musiqi al-Kabīr. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1827). Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Vols. 8–10 of Hegel. Werke in zwanzig Banden. Second edition. Heidelberg: Oßwald.
Hume, D. (1969). A Treatise of Human Nature. (Ernest, C. Ed). Mossner. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kant, I. (1977(a)). Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Vol. 3 of Immanuel Kant: Werkausgabe. (Weischedel, W. Ed). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Kant, I. (1977(b)). Kritik der Urteilskraft. Vol. 10 of Immanuel Kant: Werkausgabe. (Weischedel, W. Ed). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Leclerc, I. (2018). The Philosophy of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
Maftouni, N. (2018). "Images of Imagination for Iranian Philosophers." History of Philosophy. Vol. 23, no. 1.
Marcotte, R. (2024). "Suhrawardi," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Summer 2024 Edition). (Edward N. Z; Nodelman, U. Eds). URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/suhrawardi/>.
Schacht, R. (1973). "Kierkegaard on "Truth Is Subjectivity" and "The Leap of Faith." Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2(3), 297–313. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40230394
Schelling, F. (1985). System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Vol. 1 of Ausgewählte Schriften. (Manfred, F. Ed). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Smith, A. (2017). Laruelle: A Stranger Thought. Cambridge, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Suhrawardi, Sh. (2002). Collected Works of Shaykh Ishraq. Vol. 2. Tehran: Humanities and Cultural Studies Research.
Vieweg, K. (2011). "The Gentle Force over Pictures: Hegel’s Philosophical Conception of the Imagination." In: Inventions of the Imagination, Romanticism and Beyond, University of Washington Press.
Journal of Interreligious Studies on the Quran and the Bible
Volume 2, Issue 1 - Serial Number 3
October 2025
Pages 172-188