In an era of proliferating new spiritualities and growing interest in Eastern traditions, the question of the relationship between “spiritual techniques” and “religious truths” has acquired strategic importance. The book Spiritual Life in Religious Traditions, authored by Dr. Behzad Hamidiyeh (Assistant Professor, University of Tehran), offers an academic attempt to move beyond superficial judgments and penetrate the deeper layers of spirituality in three traditions: Islam, Zen Buddhism, and Classical Yoga.
Published in 2025 by the Islamic Sciences and Culture Academy, this comparative work in Persian treats spirituality not merely as a set of teachings, but as a “lived experience” and “dynamic process.”
In this 288‑page study, Hamidiyeh adopts a phenomenological approach to analyze the structure of “spiritual life” across two Eastern traditions (Zen and Yoga) and one Abrahamic tradition (Islam). The distinctive feature of this research is its avoidance of generalizations and its focus on the details of “practices” and “mental techniques.” By examining concepts such as “purification of mind” in Yoga and “presence” in Zen, the author seeks to answer whether similarity in techniques implies similarity in essence.
In his reading of Islam, Hamidiyeh presents a comprehensive view of Muslim spirituality at the intersection of ethics, mysticism, and jurisprudence. This approach illustrates how concepts such as tazkiya (purification), dhikr (remembrance), and iḥsān (benevolence) transcend ritual formalism to generate a form of “existential awareness.”
