PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The notion of religious experience has been debated by scholars, especially with regard to whether the religious experience is a product of human volition and whether it is universally applied to all humans regardless of their religious affiliations. John Dewey offered an interesting thought stating that religious experience was a product of human deliberation and everybody could have it, even atheists. This notion of the universality of religious experience is relatively new and worth further discussion. Therefore, this article discusses and examines Dewey’s notion of religious experience by using the theory of “knowledge by presence” discussed by Muslim philosophers, ranging from Shihabuddin Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi. In this article, Muslim philosopher’s epistemological explanation of knowledge is applied to understand what universality of religious experience means and how one’s religious experience differs one another. This approach offers a new perspective arguing that religious experience is essentially an immediate experience of experiencing subject without any intermediation, including human volition, and it is existentially universal in the realm of feeling, not on the realm of imagination as Dewey maintained.