Suhrawardi and Illuminationism (Ishraq)
Shaha-b ad-Dı-n’ Yahya ibn Habash as-Suhrawardı- (1154–91), or Suhrawardi for short, possesses the honourable title of Shaykh al-Ishraq, the ‘Master of Illu-mination’. Suhrawardi is a well-known figure in the philosophical and mystical tradition, considered to be the founder of a school of philosophical thought known as the Illuminationist (Ishraqi) or, more traditionally and somewhat unhelpfully, ‘Oriental’. Suhrawardi was a prolific writer who aimed to bring together Islamic thought with that of Platonic, Neoplatonic and Persian phi-losophy. What many readers of his work, of which a great deal has thankfully survived,find appealing is not just the content, but his sophisticated and poetic writing style, which, in Arabic anyway, allows the reader to engage personally with the material. This is helpful given the often abstract and complex nature of the topic of Illuminationism itself.
Suhrawardi wrote four major works of philosophy: The Intimations, The Oppositions, The Paths and Heavens and the The Philosophy of Illumination. Suh-rawardi stated that these should be studied in the order they were written because they progress from a more discursive, empirical form of philosophy to the latter works that are more concerned with intuitive knowledge. By reading these works in this order, the reader engages in the same path of knowledge.
Suhrawardi also wrote, in both Persian and Arabic, collections of symbolic narratives, short treatises and prayers and invocations.
At the time, however, many of his writings were regarded as heretical, and, as a result, he was executed at the age of 37. Exactly what led to his execution is unclear, although a fair amount about his life is better known. He was born in northwestern Iran (near Azerbaijan) in the town of Suhrawardi, hence his name. It is not, as the reader of this book may have observed, unusual for well-known figures to be named – usually given years after their death – after the place of their birth, which can sometimes be confusing if it is a place that has a habit of producing greatfigures. In fact there is also the founder of the Suhra-wardiya Sufi order, Shihab al-Din ‘Umar b. ‘Abd Allah al-Suhrawardi (1144–
1234), and also an acknowledged authority on hadith, Abu Najb Suhrawardi (d. 1168). As a result, ‘our’ Suhrawardi is also known as Suhrawardi Maqtul:
‘the executed’!
As a very young man he travelled, in a quest for knowledge, amongst the regions of the ruling Seljuk dynasty of the time. In the city of Maraghah in Azerbaijan he studied under the great mystic Majd al-Din al-Jili, who was also the teacher of another great philosopher we have come across in this book, Alrazi (see Chapter 3). Suhrawardi travelled much further afield, to southwest Anatolia (today, mostly Turkey) where he was fortunate to receive the royal patronage of several of the Seljuk princes and rulers. In 1183 he moved once more, this time to Aleppo in Syria. He was able to indulge in his writing and research thanks to further royal attention, this time from Prince al-Malik al-Zahir Ghazi, whom he tutored. This patronage was, however, to prove his downfall, and we are presented with a familiar story here (look back, for example, to Chapter 3 and the problems for Alkindi and Alrazi) of jealousy amongst the courtly entourage and annoyance from the traditional ulama. By all accounts, Suhrawardi presented an interesting figure in court, adopting the Sufi attire of a simple woollen cloak called a khirqa. He was, however, regarded as self-effacing, preferring when possible to engage in such ascetic practices as solitary retreat, meditation and strict fasting. Nonetheless, he was a fearsome opponent when it came to philosophical and theological debate.
Prince Ghazi was very fond of him, but it seems that he also relented to Suhrawardi’s execution as a result of pressure from his opponents, who would regularly write to the prince’s father complaining that Suhrawardi was a dis-ruptive and corrupting influence on the prince and, by extension, on the court and the region. The prince’s decision was also no doubt affected by his father telling him that he should accede to these requests. The prince’s father was not a man one would want to cross for he was the renowned Seljuk sultan Ayyubid Salah al-Din, better known in the West as Saladin, the great opponent of England’s King Richard ‘the Lionheart’ in the battles of the Crusades.
It was Suhrawardi who established the ideas, the language and the metho-dology of what is called the Illuminationist school, which, in turn, became a highly influential school of thought upon Islamic philosophy, mysticism and, to some extent, even politics. However, as it has already been hinted, Illumina-tionist philosophy– despite the aid of Suhrawardi’s writing prowess – is not the easiest of schools of thought to get to grips with, and it is made more difficult if the reader is unfamiliar with the philosophical tradition in which it belongs, notably Greek and Persian thought, and also the work of Avicenna (see Chapter 4). The reader, at this point, is advised to go over Chapters 3 and 4 once more before going on.
Like any ‘-ism’ the term ‘Illuminationism’ refers to a collection of different ideas within a philosophical system, but nonetheless sharing certain features that allow it to come under an umbrella title. The finer details of what actually qualifies as Illuminationist are disputed, not least by Suhrawardi himself, who argued that – although he was influenced by the thought of his predecessor Avicenna – he was not an Illuminationist but a ‘peripatetic’ (in Arabic, mash-sha’i), which is really another word for a Neoplatonist. Curiously, Avicenna himself did not wish to be referred to as peripatetic but an Illuminationist! We Faith versus reason 65
need not burden ourselves here with such intricacies and, while it is a multi-faceted discipline, its relevance for this chapter is the impact it has had on epistemology (theory of knowledge).
If we go back, very briefly, to Neoplatonist thought and consider this in relation to epistemology and that key philosophical question, ‘What can we know?’ (and by ‘know’ we mean genuine knowledge, truth), the answer would at first seem to be ‘not a great deal’ from a Neoplatonic perspective, because in the hierarchy of emanation– the world of matter – mankind seems to be as far removed from the One, or from God, or from ‘the Good’, as it is possible to be. However, recall that the Neoplatonists believed that mankind was possessed by a soul and so is not purely matter: the body is tied to matter and all its negatives such as plurality, evil and so on, but the human also has a soul which is a ‘spark’ of the One’s ‘light’. The use of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ with reference to knowledge is not an uncommon one; think of Plato’s own ana-logy in Republic of the sun to represent the Good, for example, for the sun is both light in itself but it also allows us to see what is in front of us and so avoid being deceived. Darkness tends to represent ignorance and evil, whilst light represents what is true and good. We can, therefore, see why the term ‘Illu-minationist’ is appropriate here, and why Suhrawardi refers to the ‘One’ at the top of the tree and emanator as‘Light of Lights’.
Suhrawardi’s view of the soul is that, in a very Platonic sense, its natural home is the immaterial world of pure light and that, when the individual soul enters the material body, it is divided into two parts: one part remaining in the immaterial world and the other trapped within the physical body, yearning to become whole once more. It is the function of the human to engage in the practice of purifying this half of the soul so that it can return to its other half.
This quest to purify the soul is essentially the path of the philosopher, and results in self-awareness. This requires physical practices such as fasting and retreating from the distractions of the world, but these are all tools towards the mental awareness of objective truth. The peripatetic view of knowledge is that it is ‘acquired’ (al-’ilm al-husuli); that is, you gain knowledge through empirical experimentation, reading books and so on, whereas the Illuminationist view is that it is far more intuitive, that it is knowledge‘by presence’ (al-’ilm al-huduri al-ishraqi). For Suhrawardi, the acquisition of knowledge is very much a sub-jective experience, which includes dreams, visions, ‘flashes’ of illumination and even out-of-body experiences. This raises questions concerning what con-stitutes knowledge, for in the more ‘empirical’ world of the twenty-first cen-tury, Suhrawardi’s emphasis on these forms of intuitive knowledge would not be regarded as knowledge at all because it is simply too subjective. However, for Suhrawardi, the form of knowledge‘by presence’ is higher than the peripatetic
‘acquired’ knowledge because the former consists of the most fundamental kind of knowledge, that of self-awareness. He would dimiss the criticism that because this form of knowledge is acquired subjectively, then it is not possible to know that it is genuine knowledge (i.e. access to objective reality) by stating that the subject knows intuitively that it is genuine knowledge.
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Through ascetic practices the subject will, in time, receive personal revelations and visions, or what Suhrawardi calls a portion of the ‘light of God’ (al-bariq al-ilahi). This may seem a way of avoiding the elitism of acquired knowledge, for presumably we are all capable of obtaining such experiences. However, this is not quite the case, and comparison between the ‘acquired’ empirical approach to knowledge and the ‘by presence’ intuitive approach is stronger here. To illustrate: provided we have all our senses, then all human beings are capable of having empirical experiences: we are all confronted by‘sense data’
which, on the whole, we all share in common, e.g. if there is a blue car that drives by me, then anyone who is at that point will see the same blue car that I do. Therefore, we all have a shared empirical experience. But the next stage is what is done with that empirical experience. In the case of the blue car, it is such a mundane everyday experience that it is promptly dismissed, but there are many other experiences that are subject to further study. For example, we may study newly discovered planets circling a distant star through a tele-scope but not simply dismiss these as ‘mundane’: the desire for humans to know more leads to us engaging in reasoning to find out more about these observations, and this is where the science of astronomy comes in. Similarly, the intuitive approach requires subsequent discursive analysis as a result of the visionary experience, and this requires the skills of the ‘science’ of philosophy.
Whereas the empirical is shared ‘sense-data’ as the foundation for study, the acquired is subjective revelation– which differs from one person to the next – as its foundation for the science of illumination. Whilst these visions will differ from one subject to the next, for some may see visions of angels, or perhaps a historical figure – Suhrawardi himself often had visions of Aristotle – the end result, as in the knowledge acquired, will be the same for all.
Suhrawardi does raise interesting questions concerning what constitutes knowledge that continue to preoccupy us today. We can see echoes of this debate, for example, in responses to Richard Dawkins’ view that only science (and what constitutes ‘science’) gives us knowledge from, for example, some theistic philosophers who argue for the importance of ‘personal explanation’.
Although the origins of the debate go back to Plato and Aristotle in philoso-phy, Suhrawardi also pre-dates the writings of early ‘existentialists’ (using this term loosely here) such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in recognizing the importance of myth, dreams and fantasy in providing us with knowledge of the world that is just as valuable as that provided by scientific views. Illuminationist philosophy continues to be a dominant school of thought in Shia philosophy and, in actual fact, today many philosophers in Iran are often pigeonholed as being either peripatetic or Illuminationist rather like philosophers in the West have often been labelled as rationalists or empiricists.
Mulla Sadra
One philosopher greatly influenced by Suhrawardi was Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Qawami al-Shirazi (c. 1572–1640), better known as ‘Mulla Sadra’.
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Like Suhrawardi, he was named after his place of birth, Shiraz in southern Persia. He came from a wealthy family as his father, a well-known scholar of the time himself, Ibrahim Shirazi, was a minister for the royal court of the Shia Safavid dynasty. Sadra, after completing his elementary studies in Shiraz, con-tinued his education in the capital city of the Safavid dynasty, Isfahan. At the time, Isfahan was a very new capital indeed, only achieving that status in 1598 when the Shah, Abbas the Great, moved it from Qazvin because it was more central. As a result, Isfahan became the cultural centre of Persia and maintained this until it was sacked by Afghan invaders in 1722. Here, Sadra had the opportunity to be tutored by some of the greatest thinkers of that time and place, including Astarabadi (d. c. 1631), better known as Mir Damad, who was a Neoplatonist philosopher and regarded as the founder of the School of Isfahan. Mir Damad himself sang the praises of Sadra for his intellectual pro-wess, and within a few years Sadra had mastered the Islamic sciences and, indeed, had surpassed many of his teachers in expertise. He became expert in what are regarded as the two branches of Shia learning: the transmitted and the intellectual. The ‘transmitted sciences’ (al-’ulum al-naqliyyah) relate to jur-isprudence, Quranic interpretation and hadith scholarship. The ‘intellectual sciences’ (al-’ulum al-aqliyyah) include philosophy and mysticism.
After Sadra had completed his formal studies he embraced Suhrawardi’s idea that the acquisition of knowledge requires contemplation and asceticism by leaving the city of Isfahan andfinding seclusion in a small village called Kahak, which is near the holy city of Qom. Despite this, his intellectual reputation meant he frequently had to decline offers to reside in the royal court. He avoided the trappings of wealth and increased status by preferring, in later life, to return to his hometown of Shiraz to teach at a religious school. Throughout his life he led a humble and pious existence and it is said that he made the pilgrimage to Mecca on foot seven times during his life: a distance of some 1400 miles. He died in Basra while returning from his seventh pilgrimage.
While he may well have shunned the limelight of the royal court, this did not prevent him from being a prolific writer, with over 50 books attributed to him. He wrote commentaries on the works of Suhrawardi, of course, and also of Avicenna, as well as original works on various theological and philosophical topics. His major works are Apprehensions, Breaking the Idols of Paganism and Transcendental Wisdom (better known as The Four Intellectual Journeys).
His Four Journeys is especially interesting in terms of philosophy as here he expresses a concern that philosophy as a discipline is often unfairly neglected, usually in favour of theology and law, and he also presents a case for the ben-eficial compatibility of philosophy with religion. Sadra argues that philosophy and religion present the same truth, which was initially revealed to the first man, Adam, and has been transmitted through time to the prophets of all reli-gions, as well as philosophers and mystics of the past and present. Whilst this attempt to level the playingfield to some extent in terms of who has access to truth may be a worthy one, it was also dangerous as it offended many orthodox Muslims, who accused Sadra of blasphemy and atheism. By not distinguishing 68 Faith versus reason
between the knowledge acquired by the philosophers and that of the prophets, which would include Muhammad, Sadra essentially put philosophers such as Empedocles, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus on the same level epistemologically as the prophets. They are all, in his words, ‘pillars of wisdom’ who have received the ‘light of wisdom’ from the ‘beacon of pro-phethood’. Consequently, prophets and philosophers, Sadra argues, share the same views on such topics as the unity of God (tawhid), the creation of the world and resurrection, despite the fact, as this book demonstrates, that this does not seem to be the case in reality!
Sadra’s epistemology also raises questions concerning how truth is to be accessed. For the theologian, truth lies with God, who reveals this through His prophets. Given the almost universally accepted view amongst Muslims that Muhammad is the final prophet, then how are believers to acquire any new knowledge? The traditional view is that the Quran ultimately provides all the knowledge we should need and that the task of Muslims is to strive to interpret this knowledge. Whilst something of a generalization, this view is more pre-valent amongst Sunni Muslims, but less so for Sufi and for Shia Islam. Sadra accepts that the Prophetic Stage of history has indeed come to an end with the death of Muhammad. There are to be no more prophets. What Sadra, being Shia himself, does state is that the end of the Prophetic Stage is followed by the Imamate Stage: the succession of spiritual leadership by the twelve Shia Imams.
Muslims are still today in this Imamate Stage, for the twelfth Imam, the
‘Mahdi’, is in temporary occultation (ghayba). Whilst the Imams do not have the status of prophets they are what Sadra calls ‘executors’ because they execute the truth that is revealed by the prophets. In the same way that pro-phecy goes back to thefirst man, Adam, the first executor was Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve:
Know that philosophyfirst issued from Adam, the chosen one of God and from his progeny Seth and Hermes and from Noah because the world can never be free of a person who establishes knowledge of the unity of God and of the return [to God]. The great Hermes disseminated it [philosophy]
in the climes and in the countries and explained it and gave benefit of it to the people. He is the father of philosophers and the most learned of the knowledgeable… As for Rome and Greece, philosophy is not ancient in those places as their original sciences were rhetoric, epistolatory and poetry… until Abraham became a prophet and he taught them the science of divine unity. It is mentioned in history that the first to philosophise from among them [the Greeks] was Thales of Miletus and he named it
in the climes and in the countries and explained it and gave benefit of it to the people. He is the father of philosophers and the most learned of the knowledgeable… As for Rome and Greece, philosophy is not ancient in those places as their original sciences were rhetoric, epistolatory and poetry… until Abraham became a prophet and he taught them the science of divine unity. It is mentioned in history that the first to philosophise from among them [the Greeks] was Thales of Miletus and he named it