Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī — often called Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl (“the Slain”) to distinguish him from other Suhrawardīs, and named Shaykh al-Ishrāq · شَيْخ الإِشْرَاق (“the Master of Illumination”) — is one of the most original philosopher-mystics of Islam. He attempted something unprecedented: to found a philosophy of light that would gather Plato, Zarathustra, the sages of Egypt and the Quranic wisdom into one single primordial wisdom.
The child of western Iran
Born at Suhraward, a small village in the north-west of Iran, around 1154, Suhrawardī received a classical education. He studied first at Marāgha under the great Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī (who would also be the master of the great theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī), then at Isfahan. But what distinguishes him is that he did not content himself with the usual Muslim schools (Peripatetic philosophy, Ashʿarī theology, Shāfiʿī law). He travelled across Iran, Anatolia, Syria, in search of shaykhs, of libraries, of ancient manuscripts — and of that primordial wisdom which he sensed had been forgotten.
The central intuition
The founding intuition of Suhrawardī is striking. According to him, there has existed, since the dawn of humanity, a wisdom one and plural — which has been transmitted across the ages and the peoples under diverse names. Hermes among the ancient Egyptians, Zarathustra among the Persians, Plato among the Greeks, Pythagoras before him, the biblical prophets, Muḥammad — all these great awakeners were heirs and transmitters of one same fundamental knowledge.
This wisdom Suhrawardī calls the philosophy of Illumination — ḥikmat al-ishrāq · حِكْمَة الإِشْرَاق. What characterises it is not logical deduction from axioms (as among the Peripatetics), but a direct knowledge through light. The truth is not proved, it is seen, because it illumines.
A metaphysics of light
For Suhrawardī, being cannot be the foundation of metaphysics — it is too abstract, too undifferentiated. The true foundation is light · nūr · نُور. All that is, is more or less luminous; nothing escapes this hierarchy of luminosities.
At the summit: the Light of Lights · nūr al-anwār, which is God Himself — pure clarity in itself, the source of all illumination. Below: a cascade of second, third, fourth lights — angels, archetypes, intelligences, down to the luminous bodies and finally to the dark bodies. The whole creation is a gradation of luminosities.
Every being has within it something of the Light of Lights —
but veiled, more or less, by the matter that envelops it.
To know consists in dissipating that veil, so that the proper light may shine. Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq
The imaginal world
Suhrawardī is also the theoretician of an intermediate world between the sensible world and the world of the pure intelligences. He calls it ʿālam al-mithāl · عَالَم المِثَال — the “world of images,” or imaginal world according to the fine translation of Henry Corbin.
It is the place where the soul accedes to true visions, to prophetic dreams, to the apparitions of the saints, to spiritual landscapes. It is not the fantastical imaginary of modern psychology — it is an objective domain of being, which manifests itself in forms sensible to the prepared soul. This doctrine would be taken up and deepened by Ibn ʿArabī, then transmitted in Shiism by Qūnawī, Mullā Ṣadrā, down to Henry Corbin in the twentieth century.
The visionary tales
A magnificent particularity of Suhrawardī: he did not only write austere philosophical treatises. He also composed some ten short tales in Persian, allegorical and mysterious, which stage a hero (the soul) on a journey through the spiritual worlds. These tales — The Rustling of Gabriel's Wings, The Tale of the Occidental Exile, The Crimson Archangel, The Red Rose — are among the most beautiful spiritual texts ever written in the Persian language.
Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq — The Wisdom of Illumination
His philosophical masterpiece. Five books that expound systematically his metaphysics of light, his critique of Avicennan Peripateticism, his theory of knowledge through illumination. Reserved for advanced students, the work would be abundantly commented upon by the following generations in Iran — notably by Shahrazūrī and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī.
ʿAql-i Surkh — The Crimson Archangel
A visionary tale in Persian: a captive falcon meets a sage of strange beauty, at once young and old, whose face is red as the rose. The sage reveals to him that he is the angel charged with this region of the world, and teaches him the secret nature of being. A short text — a few pages — but of a rare poetic intensity.
Aleppo and death
Suhrawardī travelled as far as Aleppo, in Syria, which then belonged to the kingdom of Saladin. There he met al-Malik al-Ẓāhir, the son of Saladin, who governed the city. The young prince — a cultivated man of spiritual sensibility — was fascinated by the philosopher. He kept him at his court, invited him to debate publicly with the local scholars. Suhrawardī, in his debates, crushed all his adversaries by the subtlety of his arguments.
This success would be fatal to him. The jurists of Aleppo, vexed and alarmed, wrote to Saladin: “This young man is dangerous. His philosophy will corrupt Islam, and your son is under his influence.” Saladin — who was waging war against the Crusaders and needed religious unity — ordered his arrest and his death.
In 1191, Suhrawardī was executed in Aleppo, at barely thirty-seven years of age. According to the chronicles, he is said to have chosen himself his manner of death — fasting until extinction. And so he is called al-Maqtūl, “the slain,” or sometimes al-Shahīd, “the martyr.”
An immense posterity
The tragic death of Suhrawardī could have effaced his work. The opposite occurred. During the following centuries, his philosophy of light spread through Iran and India, became one of the foundations of Iranian mystical thought. In the seventeenth century, the great Mullā Ṣadrā integrated the ishrāq into his own synthesis — the ḥikmat al-mutaʿāliya, the “transcendent wisdom” — which would dominate Iranian philosophy down to our own day.
In the twentieth century, Henry Corbin devoted a major part of his work to Suhrawardī. He translated, edited, commented. He discovered his visionary tales for the French-speaking public. For Corbin, Suhrawardī is the key thinker who allows one to understand spiritual Iran — that unique synthesis of Islam, the Zoroastrian heritage, Greek philosophy and Shiʿi mystical experience.
Suhrawardī attempts the most ambitious of works:
to show that the great wisdoms of the world are but one single Wisdom,
diffracted by the languages and the cultures but identical in its heart. Henry Corbin, En islam iranien
A reading of the Quran in the light
Suhrawardī meditates particularly upon the Verse of Light of the Quran (24:35) — one of the most mystical passages of the holy Book:
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
His Light is like a niche in which there is a lamp.
The lamp is in a glass — and the glass is as a glittering star —
It is lit from a blessed tree: an olive neither of the East nor of the West,
whose oil seems to give light even though the fire has not touched it.
Light upon light. God guides to His light whom He wills. Quran 24:35
For Suhrawardī, this verse is the key of the Quran. It says what his whole philosophy seeks to articulate: God is light; creation is a cascade of lights; and the human soul — the lamp in the glass — is destined to receive that light until light upon light is realised within it.