Portrait · Knowledge · 1186 / 1191
Plate · Generated interpretation
Things Are Lights
A young philosopher reaches Aleppo, finishes a book in which things are ranks of light, and is killed before he can grow old in the argument.
- Aleppo
- Twelfth-century Syria
- 36.20°N 37.16°E
A lamp. Is the light in the brass, in the air, or in the seeing?
Listen · Eve
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Aleppo, 1183. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash al-Suhrawardī is about twenty-nine. He was born in 1154 in Suhraward, a town near Zanjān in the Jibāl of northwestern Iran. He learned logic and philosophy at Marāgha with Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī, who also taught Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. He went on to Iṣfahān. Then west: Anatolia, Syria, a city that in 1183 has a new Ayyubid governor, al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Ghāzī, a son of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn. The young man is received at court. He is sure. He is close enough to the prince that the city’s jurists take notice.
In 1186, at thirty-two, he completes Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Philosophy of Illumination), in Arabic. Ishrāq is a rising light, the hour when night yields. In the book, existence is not first a set of substances with accidents bolted on. Things are lights of different ranks. A stone is a dim light. A mind is a brighter one. Above the ranks is Nūr al-anwār, the Light of Lights, from which the others take. Knowing, in this machinery, is not only a chaining of predicates. It has the character of presence: a thing is known as it is more or less manifest, more or less veiled. Barriers, not empty space, stand between ranks. The system is technical. It is written after Ibn Sīnā’s Peripatetic school, and against parts of it.
Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, completed 1186. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai, The Philosophy of Illumination (Brigham Young University Press, 1999), is a facing-page door. Henry Corbin’s later Suhrawardī, an Iranian theosopher of ancient Persia, is a twentieth-century career of the text, not the 1186 room.
He also wrote in Persian: short allegories, still read as prose. They are not the same book as the illumination treatise, and they are not a diary of the Aleppo years. Do not use them to furnish a last night in the citadel. Al-Ghazālī’s tasting (dhawq) is a neighbor in the wider literature, not a teacher in this room. Ibn Sīnā’s floating man is another neighbor. They are not one Islamic mind. Three men named Suhrawardī circulate in the later handbooks. This one is the slain Illuminationist, not the Baghdad Sufi of the same century.
In 1187 Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn takes Jerusalem. The Third Crusade is the weather of the next years, not a caption on the manuscript. In Aleppo the ʿulamāʾ move against the court philosopher. The charges in the reports are not one charge: corrupting religion, a station that frightened jurists, influence over a prince that looked, to some, like the wrong kind of philosophy-king. Ẓāhir, by most accounts, did not want him dead. A letter from his father, or pressure read as a letter, is what the chronicles keep. In 1191, in Aleppo, Suhrawardī is killed. He is thirty-six or thirty-seven. The manner is not agreed: strangulation, starvation in the citadel, beheading. Later he is al-Maqtūl, the slain, a name that, in some mouths, refuses him martyrdom. His school prefers al-Shahīd, and Shaykh al-Ishrāq, Master of Illumination. The book is not revised in old age because there is no old age.
Light is a technical first fact in this system, not a metaphor for consciousness in English, not a bulb, and not a mood. Distinguishing Suhrawardī from later illuminationist branding, and from Corbin’s revival, is part of staying with the page. The execution is not a proof of the metaphysics.
Whether illumination is a kind of seeing or a kind of being is the book’s hinge.
A word
ishrāq
Arabic. Illumination, rising light. Not a synonym for enlightenment as a product.
Distant echoes
Echo
Abbasid / Seljuk world · Baghdad, then Damascus and Tus
When knowledge would not sit still
Ghazālī tastes. Suhrawardī illuminates. Two inheritances, two techniques.
Echo
Twelfth-century Rhineland · Disibodenberg, then Rupertsberg
A light that did not stay outside
Hildegard’s visio is a seeing given. Suhrawardī’s ishrāq is a metaphysics of degrees of light. Two lights, not one inner glow.
One question remains
Knowledge · What counts as knowing?
If a thing is a light, what is the dark, and who is in a position to name it?