‘The Master of Illumination’: The Teachings of Suhrawardi

Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

Few philosophers can be said to have been watershed figures, in the wake of whose teachings a tradition of philosophy forever changed its course. Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi was such a figure for the development of Islamic philosophy. Trained in the Aristotelian school of Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), Suhrawardi nonetheless became a mystical philosopher who not only demonstrated the limits of rational deduction, but also insisted there was an alternative mode of knowledge. This he called ‘ilm al-huzuri—literally ‘knowledge by presence’—that derived from our direct experiences. As a mystic, such experiences included not only the commonsensical realm of ordinary everyday experience. It also included the mystical states that he argued allowed human beings to come into the presence of their own true being and in turn the ultimate Being of God. Both, he claimed, were pure light: divine light that that was at once the basis of all existence and the source of all knowledge. Drawing from the famous Light Verse of the Quran, from his philosophical studies, and from his own mystical experiences, Suhrawardi called his teachings the ‘Wisdom of Illumination’ (hikmat al-ishraq). Nile Green talks to John Walbridge, author of God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2010).