al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya

« al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya (1154-91) Al-Suhrawardi, whose life spanned a period of less than forty years in the middle of the twelfth century AD, produced a series of highly assured works which established him as the founder of a new school of philosophy in the Muslim world, the school of Illuminationist philosophy (hikmat alishraq).

Although arising out of the peripatetic philosophy developed by Ibn Sina, al-Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy is critical of several of the positions taken by Ibn Sina, and radically departs from the latter through the creation of a symbolic language to give expression to his metaphysics and cosmology, his 'science of lights'.

The fundamental constituent of reality for al-Suhrawardi is pure, immaterial light, than which nothing is more manifest, and which unfolds from the Light of Lights in emanationist fashion through a descending order of lights of ever diminishing intensity; through complex interactions, these in turn give rise to horizontal arrays of lights, similar in concept to the Platonic Forms, which govern the species of mundane reality.

Al-Suhrawardi also elaborated the idea of an independent, intermediary world, the imaginal world (alam al-mithal).

His views have exerted a powerful influence down to this day, particularly through Mulla Sadra's adaptation of his concept of intensity and gradation to existence, wherein he combined Peripatetic and Illuminationist descriptions of reality.

1 Al-Suhrawardi and the philosophy of ishraq Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash ibn Amirak Abu 'l-Futuh al-Suhrawardi, known as al-Maqtul (the Slain) in reference to his execution, and usually referred to as Shaykh al-Ishraq after the Illuminationist philosophy (hikmat al-ishraq) which he espoused, was born in AH 549/AD 1154 in the village of Suhraward in northwest Iran.

After studying in Maraghah (with Majd al-Din al-Jili, who also taught Fakhr al-Din Al-Razi) and Isfahan, he passed several years in southwest Anatolia, associating with Seljuq rulers and princes, before moving to Aleppo in AH 579/AD 1183.

Here he taught and became a friend of the governor, al-Malik al-Zahir al-Ghazi (son of the Ayyubid Salah al-Din, famous in European literature as Saladin), who later also befriended Ibn al-'Arabi. However, he fell foul of the religious authorities, and was executed in AH 587/AD 1191 on the orders of Salah al-Din, in circumstances which remain unclear but which involved charges of corrupting the religion and allegations of claims to prophecy, and may also have had a political dimension.

Al-Suhrawardi clearly intended his philosophy to make a distinctive break with the previous peripatetic tradition of Ibn Sina, but the significance of this break has been interpreted in a number of ways.

For subsequent Islamic philosophy, he was above all the conceiver and main proponent of the theory of the primacy of quiddity.

While the predominant trend in Western scholarship has been to depict him as the originator of a distinctive mystical and esoteric philosophy, recent Western scholarship has emphasized his critique of peripatetic logic and epistemology and his own theories in these fields (see for example Ziai 1990).

Ibn Sina famously tackled the question of mystical knowledge in the last section of his Kitab al-Isharat wa-'l-tanbihat (Remarks and Admonitions), thus assuring a place for this area of knowledge within the domain of hikma (wisdom).

It was al-Suhrawardi, however, who turned mystical and intuitive knowledge into a paradigm of knowledge in general.

This epistemology then served as a basis on which to construct both a critique of peripatetic philosophy and an original philosophy of lights, or Illumination (ishraq).

Yet, however important it was for alSuhrawardi to stress his radical departure from peripatetic philosophy, he also emphasized the necessity for those who would follow his method to study the peripatetic method closely.

Al-Suhrawardi's writings fall into several categories.

First, there are his four major philosophical works, written in Arabic: Kitab al-talwihat (The Intimations), Kitab al-muqawamat (The Oppositions), Kitab al-mashari' wa-'l-mutarahat (The Paths and Heavens) and Kitab hikmat al-ishraq (The Philosophy of Illumination).

These were apparently intended by al-Suhrawardi to be studied in this order, and roughly follow a progression from a more or less conventionally peripatetic style to one in which the 'science of lights' is expressed through its own technical vocabulary and method, a progression described by alSuhrawardi as a movement from a discursive philosophy (hikma bahthiyya) to an intuitive philosophy (hikma dhawqiyya).

The second group of works contains a set of symbolic narratives, mostly in Persian but a few in Arabic, expounding the journey of the soul through the stages of self-realization and offering striking images of some of the notions of Illuminationism while seeking to cultivate the kind of intuitive vision at its heart.

The remaining works consist of a number of shorter treatises in Arabic, such as the Hayakil al-nur (The Temples of Light), and others in Persian expounding Illuminationist philosophy in a simpler form, a collection of prayers and invocations, and some miscellaneous translations (or versions) and commentaries.

2 Epistemology By basing his philosophy on light, alSuhrawardi was able to introduce two important notions which may be thought of as the seeds of the entire system: that of intensity and gradation, and that of presence and self-manifestation.

It is possible to see his philosophy as experiential, although his notion of experience was not confined to that obtained through the senses but embraced other forms including that of mystical experience.

Ibn Sina's explanation of knowledge is based on the inhering of the form of the thing known in the mind of the knower, but for al-Suhrawardi such knowledge only guarantees certainty and the correspondence of knowledge with reality, because there exists a more fundamental kind of knowledge that does not depend on form and which is, like the experience of pain, unmediated and undeniable.

The prime mode of this presential knowledge (al-'ilm al-huduri) is self-awareness, and every being existing in itself which is capable of self-awareness is a pure and simple light, as evinced by the pellucid clarity with which it is manifest to itself.

In fact, being a pure and simple light is precisely the same as having self-awareness, and this is true of all self-aware entities up to and including God, the Light of Lights, the intensity of whose illumination and self-awareness encompasses everything else.

The main constituent of reality is the hierarchies of such pure lights, differing solely in the intensity of their Illumination, and thus of self-awareness (see Illuminationist philosophy).

How then is the philosopher to realize this self-awareness? The prospective Illuminationist must engage in a variety of recommended ascetic practices (including forty-day retreats and abstaining from meat) to detach himself from the darknesses of this world and prepare himself for the experiences of the world of lights.

The heightened pleasure afforded by this latter kind of experience is emphasized.

Having spiritually purified himself, the philosopher is ready to receive the Divine Light and is rewarded with visions of 'apocalyptic' lights which form the basis for real knowledge.

At this point the Illuminationist must employ discursive philosophy to analyse the experience and systematize it, in the same way as with sensory experience.

The relation between this direct intuitive knowledge and the philosophy of Illumination is compared to that between observation of the heavens and. »