Suhrawardī

Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī was born in 1154 at Suhraward, in northwestern Iran. He studied philosophy and theology at Marāgha and Isfahan, and wandered in Anatolia and Syria, living as a Sufi and writing in Arabic and Persian. In Aleppo he became the companion of the young governor al-Malik al-Ẓāhir, a son of Saladin, but the jurists accused him of heresy, and he was put to death in 1191, aged thirty-six or thirty-eight, on Saladin’s orders. He is often called al-Maqtūl, “the one who was killed”, to distinguish him from Sufis of the same name.

His major work, The Philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq), completed in 1186, criticizes Ibn Sīnā’s Aristotelian philosophy and builds a new one on the metaphysics of light. He also wrote short Persian allegories of the soul’s journey.

Suhrawardī claimed to revive an ancient wisdom shared by Plato, Hermes and the sages of ancient Persia. His school, the Illuminationists (ishrāqiyyūn), became one of the main currents of Persian philosophy, and in the twentieth century the French scholar Henry Corbin made him widely known.

His Persian treatises tell of the soul’s exile in the dark West of matter and its return to the East of light, in stories of birds, angels and a red intellect. Commentators such as Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī explained The Philosophy of Illumination, and Mullā Ṣadrā built on it in his own philosophy.