In this presentation, Aiyub Palmer traces how Sufi epistemology's heart-centered theory of knowledge became intellectually mainstream — made possible only once Ashʿarī theology, culminating with Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, developed a way to describe the self beyond bodies and accidents. He shows how Avicennian and early Sufi models of the soul converged into a distinctly Islamic phenomenology of spirit.

In this presentation, Muhammad Sajjad Qadeer reframes taqwā not as a mere ethical virtue but as a mechanism for testing the reliability of mystical experience. Through close Qur'anic analysis, he shows how murāqaba — sustained self-monitoring — becomes the practical tool by which unveilings, dreams, and inspiration are calibrated against revelation and intellect.

In this presentation, Davlat Dadikhuda challenges the primacy that Sufi and Illuminationist thinkers give to presential, mystical knowledge. Drawing on the Peripatetic tradition of Avicenna and contemporary philosopher Ayman al-Maṣrī, he argues that only discursive, representational knowledge meets the standards of truth-aptness — while mystical awareness, though real, carries more psychological than epistemic weight.

In this presentation, Hashem Morvarid turns to an underexplored archive — Shia ḥadīth and devotional literature — to build a typology of mystical experience. Moving through phenomenology, metaphysics, and epistemology, he examines how texts like Nahj al-Balāgha and al-Munājāt al-Shaʿbāniyya describe heart-based perception, and what marks distinguish authentic experience from delusion.

In this presentation, Zoheir Esmail investigates one of Islamic mysticism's most provocative claims: that dreams of the Prophet offer direct, unmediated access to him. Tracing this tradition across Sunni and Shiʿi sources, he asks what it means for rational, historically-grounded scholarship when a vision seemingly outperforms every conventional method of religious verification.

In this presentation, Arif Abdulhussain reads the famous saying "one who knows his soul knows his Lord" as describing an ontological event, not merely a cognitive one. Weaving together Ibn ʿArabī, al-Qayṣarī, and Mullā Ṣadrā, he builds a constructive argument that self-realisation is the very mechanism by which the Divine comes to know itself through creation.

In this presentation, Omneya Ayad explores spiritual unveiling as the foundation of Sufi Qur'anic interpretation, centered on a rare unpublished manuscript by Ruzbihān al-Baqlī devoted entirely to defending kashf's authenticity. She traces the rigorous criteria Sufi exegetes developed to keep esoteric readings accountable to the Qur'an's literal meaning.

In this presentation, Mehmet Akif Aydin looks past Ibn ʿArabī to one of his most influential early interpreters, Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī. He unpacks Qayṣarī's detailed typology of unveiling — including its five sensory modalities — and shows how this systematic framework helped anchor Akbarian metaphysics within Ottoman scholarly culture.

In this presentation, Lahouari Taleb examines the 19th-century Moroccan Sufi Ahmad ibn ʿAjība's account of how sense experience relates to mystical gnosis. Unpacking Ibn ʿAjība's treatise on the Oneness of Existence, he shows how the perceived divide between the sensory and the intelligible dissolves into a cognitive veil rather than a fixed feature of reality — with striking implications for modern philosophy of mind.

In this presentation, Mohammadmahdi Morvarid uses Mullā Ṣadrā's philosophy of graded existence to explain why religious experiences vary so widely across traditions — not as mere interpretive differences, but as real metaphysical distinctions. He brings Ṣadrā's framework into conversation with contemporary philosophy of religion's debates on the nature and validity of religious experience.