The Islamic world · 1154–1191
Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī
Persian founder of Illuminationism, executed in Aleppo
Reality is light in degrees of intensity, from the Light of Lights down to darkness; the self knows itself by direct presence, not through definitions, which the Peripatetics wrongly relied on.
Life and thought
Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī was born in 1154 in Suhraward, in north-western Iran, studied philosophy in Maragha and Isfahan, and travelled as a Sufi through Anatolia and Syria. In Aleppo he won the friendship of the governor, al-Malik al-Ẓāhir, a son of Saladin, but the city’s jurists accused him of heresy, and on Saladin’s orders he was put to death in 1191, in his thirties. He is often called al-Maqtūl, “the one who was killed”.
Trained as an Avicennan, he came to think that the Peripatetics’ method could never reach a thing’s essence: a definition only lists features we already know. Real knowledge is “knowledge by presence”, the way the self is aware of itself without any concept in between. In The Philosophy of Illumination reality is light, graded in intensity from the Light of Lights down to the dark barriers of bodies, with lights governing each species in place of Plato’s Forms. He drew on Plato, Persian wisdom and Sufism, and his school continued in Iran to Mullā Ṣadrā.