Karl Jaspers and Imam Musa Sadr on Prophet Muhammad: Dialogue Among Intellectuals from Distinct Civilizations

The underlying question in this work is related to the paradigmatic role of Prophet Muhammad and how this paradigm has been understood by both Jaspers and Sadr and why they have come to two different conclusions on this very pivotal issue and furthermore how these differences affected the dialogue among civilizations or more importantly the dialogue among elite intellectuals in Iran (and those intellectuals who work within the paradigm of Sacred Intellectual Tradition in general) and Germany (and those intellectuals who work within the paradigm of the Secular Tradition in general). It is of profound interest to go beyond the journalistic approaches to the questions of 'difference', 'otherness', 'traditions', 'dialogue', 'possibilities of dialogue', and all that which make up the very backbone of contemporary incomprehensibilities across various civilizations, cultures, societies, nations, ethnicities and systems and instead construct common grounds and grounds of commonalities which could touch the hearts of men and women in a meaningful fashion and fashions which are of meaningful depths, i.e. inspired by Revelation (in religious sense), Intellection (in metaphysical sense), and Beautiful (in aesthetical sense). We cannot leave these issues in the hands of politicians or spin doctors who design the relations between human beings based on geostrategical interests of multinational companies rather than interaction between souls which could elevate the quality of human condition by overcoming the boundaries of ignorance or surpassing the predicament of ignoring the suffering of the others based on any illusory justifications.