al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya

« astronomy.

The major portion of al-Suhrawardi's writings is devoted to this last stage of rational analysis andsystematization, although he sometimes relates his visions.

His symbolic narratives in Persian are in some sense arecord of these, although in them al-Suhrawardi, the author, is never explicitly the first person.

The narratives havea pedagogic function, and are guides to the kind of experiences to be encountered by the seeker and to theirinterpretation; indeed a central figure in these narratives is often a guide, the lord of the human species, sometimesthough not exclusively identified as Gabriel.

3 Logic, physics, metaphysics and cosmology The unfolding of reality in Illuminationism is governed by the different ways in which the pure lights interact to produce further levelsof lights and darknesses, and by the subsequent interaction of all these different levels with each other, resultingeventually in a densely populated universe.

The pure lights are the causes of three other categories of entities:accidental lights (actual physical light, and certain accidents of intellects and souls), dark modes (accidentalcategories in bodies excluding accidental lights) and intermediary isthmuses ( barzakhs ) or boundaries (bodies).

The luminous properties of these degrees are also properties of self-awareness; thus for example, an accidental lightsubsists in something other than itself, and is also in need of something else to be aware of itself.

Existence as suchdoes not perform much more than an explanatory role in Illuminationism, quite different from the central position itoccupied in peripatetic philosophy, a major question for which was the nature of the relationship between existenceand quiddity.

However, it is important to notice that light does not merely act as a substitute for existence:existence, and its explanatory function, is rendered totally redundant.

The lights (and darknesses and barzakhs caused by lights) in al-Suhrawardi's system are discrete entities whose interactions in turn bring about other lights.There is thus a primacy of the entity, and al-Suhrawardi regards existence as such to be no more than a mentalabstraction having no external reality.

Furthermore, although lights differ in intensity, there is nothing in this systemto correspond with Ibn al-'Arabi's wahdat al-wujud (unity of being) (see Ibn al-'Arabi ); al-Suhrawardi would not have said that all reality is light, but that it is lights.

It is for these reasons that he was subsequently heldresponsible for the idea of the primacy of quiddity ( asalat al-mahiya ), although he did not use this expression himself.

It was Mulla Sadra who, four centuries later, built upon the insight that reality was in effect a continuum of graded intensities, but a continuum of existence, not of light.

He was thus able to fuse al-Suhrawardi's system withthose of the peripatetics and Ibn al- 'Arabi into a metaphysical theory in which reality was nothing more thanexistence itself, and to turn quiddity into the purely mental abstraction which existence was for al-Suhrawardi.

Hisinsight concerning presential knowledge (which al-Suhrawardi himself declared was vouchsafed to him by Aristotle ina dream) suggested solutions to weaknesses which al-Suhrawardi had detected in Ibn Sina's philosophical system.The most important of these concerned the theory of definition, and the problem of definition as the basis ofscientific knowledge.

First, he objects that it is impossible to give a complete definition, for a complete definitionshould contain all the constituents of the definiendum, and such an enumeration is impossible.

Second, theperipatetics held that definition is a means of proceeding from the known to the unknown; but the essentialconstituents, al-Suhrawardi asserts, are just as unknown as the definiendum, so this cannot be so.

Containedwithin this is also an objection against induction: how can one know if the collection of essential elements of a thingis complete merely by enumerating them? His conclusion is that prior knowledge is always necessary andpresupposed.

Another area of disagreement with peripatetic philosophy was the categories, which were treated byal-Suhrawardi not in his logic, but in his physics.

He reduces the accidental categories to four (quality, quantity,relation and motion), and holds intensity to be a property of substances as well as of accidents.

With change inintensity, there is no change in the essence of an accident (a colour, for example) or a substance (such as causeand effect); the only difference is the degree of perfection.

As is to be expected, al-Suhrawardi's physics alsocontained a new theory of vision.

He not only rejected the idea that the forms of objects were imprinted in the eye,but also the other current theory that light was emitted from the eye and fell onto the object.

Vision is onlypossible, according to al-Suhrawardi, when the soul is illuminated by the light, substantial or accidental, of theobject, and thus he brings vision within the compass of his illuminative theory of knowledge.

The physical orelemental world as depicted by al-Suhrawardi rejects the peripatetic division of matter and form, and substitutes forit a world of bodies composed of varying mixtures of light and darkness, which permit the passage of light todifferent degrees.

Above the physical world the lights are arranged in a vertical array, corresponding to theemanationist scheme of Ibn Sina.

However, these pure, immaterial lights are not restricted to ten as are theintellects of the peripatetic scheme.

Al-Suhrawardi says only that they are limited to the number of stars in thefixed heavens; thus they are indefinite in number, but not infinite.

Moreover, these vertically arrayed 'triumphal'(qahira ) lights interact with each other to produce a horizontal array of similarly immaterial, 'regent' ( mudabbira ) lights.

Each of these horizontally arrayed lights is the lord of a species, analogous to the Platonic Forms, but withthe important difference that they are lights which 'govern' the species under them rather than universals.

Thespecies are depicted as 'idols' ( asnam ) of their archetypes.

It is the interactions of both the vertical and the horizontal lights which give rise to the bodies of the lower world, which are also classified into degrees depending onthe extent to which they receive and transmit light, each being a boundary ( barzakh ) between light and darkness. Al-Suhrawardi also elaborated the idea of the immaterial imaginal world ( 'alam al-mithal ), situated between the physical world and the world of the lords of species.

This is the locus for the kinds of veridical experiencesrecounted in his symbolic narratives, an unmediated account of which can only be given in this way and not throughdiscursive reason.

Al-Suhrawardi's cosmology is a good deal more complicated than this survey has suggested,employing a detailed terminology for the divisions of lights which classifies them in a variety of different ways.

4 The language of ishraq The integrity of al-Suhrawardi's complex philosophy is achieved in no small measure by the elegance and refinement of his means of expression.

His original Illuminationist vocabulary - the Islamic roots ofwhich are sometimes overlooked - is one aspect of this.

Al-Ghazali had set a precedent with his Mishkat al-anwar (The Niche of the Lights) , which commented on the Light verse in the Qur'an (24: 35).

However, al-Suhrawardi also uses a number of other devices to stretch the reader's conceptual boundaries and to convey further dimensions ofhis total vision of reality.

All the lights are related to each other in a downward sense by their being 'triumphal' or'exalted', but cohesion is further maintained by the 'desire' or 'love' which the lower degrees feel for the upper, and. »