The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Suhrawardi

1154–1191

Also known as Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, al-Maqtul

Founder of the Illuminationist school, who described reality as a hierarchy of lights and held that the deepest knowledge comes through direct presence.

Open manuscript in Arabic script with a decorated heading
Not a likeness: pages from a copy of his Philosophy of Illumination made in Iran in 1220, less than thirty years after his death.Christie’s · Public domain · See the original

Since there is nothing more evident than light, there is nothing less in need of definition.

The Philosophy of Illumination § 107, translated by Roxanne Marcotte

Trained in the Avicennan philosophy of his day, Suhrawardi developed a new system that he called the philosophy of illumination (ishraq). In it, reality is a hierarchy of lights, and the deepest knowledge is reached not through definitions and inference but through the direct presence of what is known to the knower.

He was executed in Aleppo in 1191, apparently on the orders of Saladin. His works were never translated into Latin, so he remained unknown in the West, but his school was studied continuously in the Islamic East and shaped later thinkers such as Mulla Sadra.

Key ideas

Knowledge by presence
Suhrawardi rejected Avicenna’s view that we know things through a representation or form of them in the mind. The most basic knowledge, starting with the soul’s awareness of itself, is immediate “presence”.
A philosophy of light
Light and its manifestation are the basic principles of reality. Everything shares in light to a greater or lesser degree, and the continuous radiance of the “Light of Lights” creates and sustains the unity of all that exists.
Existence is a concept of the mind
Against Avicenna, Suhrawardi held that concepts such as existence and “thingness” are “merely mental considerations with no corresponding reality”. What distinguishes things is the intensity of their light.
The world of images
Suhrawardi added a fourth level of reality to the traditional scheme, a “world of images” in which imagination plays a new role in the soul’s life after death.
Region
Persia, Anatolia and Syria

Influences

Influenced by

Suhrawardi1154–1191

Influenced

Influenced by

Suhrawardi1154–1191

Influenced

Key works

  • The Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishraq), 1186

Sources

  1. Roxanne Marcotte, Suhrawardi, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy