Suhrawardī

Shihāboddīn Yahyā Suhrawardī (1154–1191), called Shaykh al-Ishrāq (“Master of Illumination”) and al-maqtūl (“the Martyr”) after his execution at Aleppo at thirty-seven, is the founder of the Iranian school of ḥikmat al-ishrāq — the Wisdom or Philosophy of Illumination. He is the central medieval figure in henry-corbin‘s genealogy of the imaginal, and the principal subject of Corbin’s editorial labour across four decades: the Opera Metaphysica et Mystica that Corbin edited and translated between 1945 and 1977 remains the standard critical edition of Suhrawardī’s Persian and Arabic works.

Suhrawardī’s philosophical project was to recover the wisdom of ancient Iran — the Platonism of the Ishrāqiyyūn, the angelology of Zoroastrian Mazdaism, and the Hermetic transmission — and to unify these with the Islamic inheritance. His metaphysics is a metaphysics of light: the gradations of being are gradations of luminosity, descending from the “Light of Lights” (nūr al-anwār) through a hierarchy of dominating lights (anwār qāhira) and governing lights (anwār mudabbira) whose structure Suhrawardī explicitly derives from “the Zoroastrian Xvarnah, ‘Light of Glory’” (Corbin 1969, notes to Ch. III, on the Ishrāqiyyūn).

Two technical contributions flow through Suhrawardī into the Seba Lineage by way of Corbin. The first is hurqalya — “the alternate Earth, an Imaginative universe that stands between two worlds, our sensory Earth and the intelligible universe of the Angels” (Bloom, in Corbin 1969, p. xiii, quoting Suhrawardī). The second is the doctrine of the man-of-light — the luminous subtle body by which the mystic perceives and is perceived, and whose colour-phenomenology Najm al-Dīn Kubrā would later map in visionary detail. Suhrawardī’s Recitals of Initiation — the “Purple Archangel,” the “Recital of Occidental Exile” — are philosophical allegories of the soul’s ascent that Corbin reads as precise parallels to the Enneads of plotinus and to the Avicennan visionary recitals.

Suhrawardī stands in the Lineage as the hinge between Plotinian Neoplatonism and the later Sufi-imaginal tradition. Without him the line from plotinus to henry-corbin to james-hillman — recorded as plotinus-corbin-hillman-line — does not close.

Key concepts

Major works

corbin-man-light-iranian (Corbin’s sustained engagement)
corbin-alone-with-alone (extensive treatment in the Introduction and notes)