Approaching the concept of the Imaginary in Arab and Islamic culture

Abstract

This research attempts to approach the concept of the imaginary in the Arab and Islamic culture. The imaginary is often used in the sense of imagining, and in order to remove the confusion surrounding the use of these two concepts, we considered the imaginary to include all that is symbolic culturally available from myth, religion, science, mysticism, beliefs, philosophy, ideology... and others. While imagination remained linked to language and its suggestive dimension, it works on simile, metaphor, metonymy, symbol, icon and poetic image. Through these mechanisms we practice escaping from the cocoon of normative, and we mean here normative language, the more intensively employing metaphor and simile, the stronger the imagination. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researcher used an analytical approach aimed at dismantling the phenomena and studying them in a detailed study. The research reached a number of results, the most important of which is that the imaginary is more general than imagining, and that the theory of the imaginary in the Arab heritage is indebted to the Greek culture that the Arabs embraced, and they elaborated in its interpretation and addition to it, and that the theory of imagination is Arab and Islamic creativity and innovation.