What is Shia Islam? - Twelverism
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Irfan or Sufism in Shiism
In Sunni Islam we talk about Tassawuf or Sufism in Shiism the preferred term or tradition came to be something that is called Irfan which is sometimes translated as Gnostic knowledge or Gnosticism. Mullah Sadra combined the peripatetic teachings of Ibn Sina the illuminationist thought of Sufrav already and the mystical doctrines of Ibn Arabi to create a philosophy that he called El Hekmatel muta aliyah ( transcendent wisdom) In 1989 Khomeini actually sent a letter to the then Soviet leader Gorbachev and basically invited him to convert to Islam as a better ideology than the communism of the Soviets at the time.
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