Suhrawardi

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Philosophy of Illumination, with his Persian allegories and the Temples of Light.

Light needs no definition

Suhrawardi begins with what needs no proof. Nothing is more evident than light, so light needs no definition: it is what is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest. Everything that is, is either light in itself or not. What is not light in itself is darkness, and a body is a barzakh, an isthmus or barrier, dark in itself and lit only from outside.

Light too is of two kinds. There is light that stands by itself, pure and without body, and light that is only a state of something else, like the light that lies on a wall.

The Light of Lights

At the summit is the Light of Lights, with nothing above it and in need of nothing. From it, by its nature as light and not by any choice that would change it, comes a first light, which he calls by the old Persian name Bahman, and from that light others in a long descending order. Each light sees the light above it and is lit by it; each loves the one above and holds mastery over the one below. Seeing and shining, love and mastery, are the whole life of the lights, and the order of the world is the order of their rays.

The lords of the kinds

Beside that descending order stands a level one: lights of equal rank, each the lord and guardian of one kind of thing in the world below. Every species has its lord, a living light that holds it in being, shapes it and feeds it, and the things of this world are its images. He names some of them with the angels of ancient Persia: Khordad is the lord of water, Mordad of plants, Ordibehesht of fire. These lords, he holds, are what Plato meant by the forms: not empty patterns but lights.

The commanding light

The human soul is a light as well, a commanding light that governs the body as a lord governs a fortress. It knows itself without any image, because to be light is to be manifest to oneself, and it longs for the lights it came from. Its misery is to love its dark fortress more than its own nature; its happiness is to turn from the body's pull toward the lights above it. The soul that has turned joins the world of light at death, and the soul held by darkness stays bound to its shadows.

Knowledge by presence

He tells how this came to him. Troubled by the question of knowledge, he saw Aristotle in a dream, who told him to return to his own self. A man does not know himself by a picture or a concept, for any concept could fit another man as well; he knows himself because he is present to himself. That is knowledge by presence, and it is how the higher lights know, and how God knows all things.

The dream ends with Aristotle setting Plato above himself and naming two Sufis, Abu Yazid al-Bistami and Sahl al-Tustari, as the philosophers in truth, because they did not stop at the learning of philosophy but went on to see what it speaks of.

The world of images

Between the lights and the bodies lies a world of images: forms suspended, as he puts it, in no place and in no matter, with shape and colour but no body. Dreams take place there, and the visions of prophets and saints, and the forms seen in a mirror belong to it. Its cities have names, Jabalqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya, and in one of his Persian tales the sage who comes from it says that he comes from the land of Nowhere.

Two wisdoms

Wisdom is of two kinds: the wisdom of search, which goes by argument, and the wisdom of tasting, which sees. The most perfect sage has both. One who sees without arguing stands above one who argues without seeing, and the world is never without someone who sees.

His book is written for both. He asks its reader first to master the philosophy of the schools, and then to keep a retreat of forty days, eating no meat and little else, turned toward the contemplation of the light of God. Such a retreat belongs to a life of prayer kept with a guide; anyone who is unwell, pregnant or on medicine keeps their meals, and a fast is never pushed past the body's strength.

The leaven of the sages

He names his forebears himself. An eternal leaven of wisdom, he says, came down by two lines: from Hermes through Empedocles, Pythagoras and Plato to the Egyptian Sufi Dhu'l-Nun and to Sahl al-Tustari; and from the ancient kings of Persia, Kayumarth, Faridun and Kay Khusraw, to Abu Yazid al-Bistami, al-Hallaj and al-Kharaqani. His philosophy of illumination is the meeting of the two lines, the light of the East joined to the reasoning of the Greeks.

The tales

His tales teach the same in pictures. In The Tale of the Western Exile two brothers are held at the bottom of a well in a city of the West; a hoopoe brings them a letter from their father, they set out by sea toward the mountain where he lives, and the father tells the narrator that he must go back to the prison for a while, but may return, and in the end will stay. The soul is the exile, the body its well, and the East is where the light rises.

In The Red Intellect a falcon caught by hunters meets an elder whose face is red, because, he says, he is white, and white seen through darkness looks red, like the dusk. He tells it of the mountain Qaf, of the jewel that lights the night, of the tree Tuba where the Simurgh nests, and of the spring of life that lies in the darkness, which the seeker who finds it bathes in and is made pure. In The Sound of Gabriel's Wing the seeker meets ten old men, the ten intellects, and learns that the angel has two wings, the right pure light and the left marked with darkness like the spots on the moon; from the one come the lights, and from the shadow of the other this world of appearances.