Religious Imagination as a Basis for Inclusive Religiousity: A Study of Haidar Bagir and Henry Corbin

Abstract

Religious exclusivism in Indonesia's pluralistic society is frequently rooted not in moral deficiency but in a narrow epistemological horizon that reduces religion to formal identity and doctrinal compliance. Existing studies on religious imagination, whether moral-cognitive or symbolic-functional in orientation have not sufficiently addressed the ontological status of imagination within the Islamic philosophical tradition. This study fills that gap by analyzing Haidar Bagir's concept of religious imagination in Religion and Imagination through Henry Corbin's framework of the mundus imaginalis, employing a qualitative library-based approach with philosophical hermeneutics as its primary method. The analysis demonstrates that Bagir's instruments of qalb, fu'ad, and dzawq function as gradational organs of imaginal perception corresponding to Corbin's imaginatio vera, and that inclusive religiosity constitutes an ontological consequence of expanded religious consciousness rather than procedural tolerance. This study contributes a cross-tradition synthesis between 'irfani-Sunni thought and Ishraqi imaginal ontology, offering a philosophically grounded framework for addressing religious exclusivism and transforming religious education in pluralistic societies.