The Epistemology of Bewilderment in Jāmī’s Works: An Analysis of the Role of Conscious Unknowing in the Seeker’s Passage from Formal Knowledge to Mystical Intuition

Abstract

This study examines the epistemological status of bewilderment in the works of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and explains the role of conscious unknowing in the seeker’s transition from formal knowledge to mystical intuition. Its central premise is that bewilderment in Jāmī’s thought is not merely a psychological state caused by ambiguity, confusion, or insufficient information. Rather, it represents an advanced form of epistemic self-awareness that emerges when the seeker recognizes the limitations of reason, language, and conceptual knowledge. Employing a descriptive-analytical method and a hermeneutic approach, the study analyzes the interconnected concepts of knowledge, reason, ignorance, incapacity, bewilderment, love, annihilation, unveiling, and intuition in Jāmī’s poetic and prose works. The findings demonstrate that Jāmī does not categorically reject formal knowledge. He regards it as necessary for intellectual discipline, instruction, conceptual clarification, and the discernment of the spiritual path. Nevertheless, formal knowledge becomes an epistemic veil when the seeker equates concepts, technical terminology, and rational arguments with the totality of reality. Conscious unknowing does not signify a return to elementary ignorance; instead, it denotes a mature awareness that finite cognitive faculties cannot encompass infinite truth. This awareness weakens intellectual pride and the presumed autonomy of the knowing subject, thereby preparing the seeker for a direct and participatory mode of knowledge. Bewilderment thus signifies both the end of the claim that discursive knowledge is sufficient and the threshold of mystical unveiling. Moreover, bewilderment does not disappear after intuitive realization. It becomes deeper as the mystic encounters the inexhaustibility and continual renewal of divine self-disclosures. Accordingly, a distinction may be drawn between preliminary bewilderment, which results from insufficient knowledge, and transcendent bewilderment, which arises from the perfection and deepening of knowledge. The study concludes that, in Jāmī’s mystical epistemology, the perfection of knowledge consists not in claiming exhaustive comprehension of truth, but in recognizing the limits of human understanding, cultivating epistemic humility, and remaining continuously open to the infinite manifestations of reality.