The Murdered Master who rebuilt philosophy out of light
Suhrawardi lived fewer than forty years, finished his masterwork at thirty-two and was put to death in Aleppo on a heresy charge. In that short span he founded Illuminationism, a school that describes all of reality as grades of light and darkness and tried to revive the wisdom of ancient Persia.
Born in 1154 in Suhraward, a village between Zanjan and Bijar Garrus in Iran, he studied jurisprudence and wisdom at Maragheh under Majd al-Din Jili, who also taught Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, then spent years in Iraq and Syria. He began as a defender of the Peripatetic, Aristotelian school shaped by Avicenna, but turned towards Platonism after a mystical experience. The Philosophy of Illumination, completed in 1186, set out his new system. Two honorifics followed him: one hailing him as the teacher of illumination, the other, Shaikh al-Maqtul, remembering that he was killed.
His cosmos pours downward from a Light of Lights. Pure immaterial light descends in steadily weaker intensities, and the interplay produces a horizontal array of lights, something like Plato's forms, that governs the everyday world. Bodies are sorted by whether they receive light. Each soul, he taught, existed among the angels before descent; one half stays in heaven while the other is imprisoned in the body, which explains human sadness and the longing for reunion. He also developed the idea of an intermediate imaginal world.
Suhrawardi saw himself as reviving a lost Persian philosophy of light that Plato and the Egyptian Hermes had shared. He blended Zoroastrian symbols and angel names with Quranic language, calling the supreme light by both Islamic and Mazdean names, and read heroes of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh as manifestations of divine light. Mulla Sadra later hailed him as the reviver of the ancient Iranian sages, and Illuminationist ideas flowed through Shi'ite Iran.
Reports of his death conflict. The usual account says al-Malik al-Zahir, a son of Saladin, had him executed in Aleppo for Batini teachings; others say he starved himself, or was suffocated or thrown from the citadel wall. He left over 50 writings in Arabic and Persian. Scholars still divide over whether his core achievement is logic, a refined Avicennism, or mystical theosophy, the reading favoured by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Source: Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi
