An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, Vol. 4

From the School of Illumination to Philosophical Mysticism

Mehdi Aminrazavi, S. H. Nasr, Mehdi Aminrazavi, S. H. Nasr

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857733429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The fourth volume of the Anthology of Philosophy in Persia deals with one of the richest and yet least known periods of philosophical life in Persia, the centuries between the seventh/thirteenth century, that saw the eclipse of the school of Khorosan, and the tenth/sixteenth century that coincided with the rise of the Safavids. The main schools dealt with in this volume are the Peripatetic (mashsha'i) School, the School of Illumination (ishraq) of Suhrawardi, and various forms of philosophical Sufism, especially the school of Ibn 'Arabi, that had its origins in the works of Ghazzali and 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani. This period was also notable for the philosopher-scientists such as Nasir al-Din Tusi and Qutb al-Din Shirazi.

PART I

The School of Illumination

Introduction

There were several philosophical schools of old including Neoplatonism in which light and illumination have played a central role, but when in the context of Islamic philosophy we speak of the School of Illumination or ishrāq we have in mind a distinct school of Islamic philosophy founded in the sixth/ twelfth century by Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, a Persian who was born in Suhraward near Zanjān in 549/1153, was educated in Zanjān and Isfahan, travelled in Anatolia and Syria and settled in Aleppo where he was put to death around 587/1191. Although influenced by earlier schools of Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of Ibn Sīnā, by Platonism and by certain currents of Mazdean thought as well as Sufism, the School of ishrāq is a distinct philosophical/theosophical school with its own vocabulary, method and doctrines. For eight hundred years it has remained a major philosophical current in the intellectual landscape of the Islamic world especially in Persia and Muslim India and to some extent in the Ottoman world.

The name ishrāq by which this School is known is based on the root sh-r-q which is related to both illumination (ishrāq) and the place where the light of the sun rises or the orient (mashriq). This philosophy is, therefore, both illuminative and oriental in the symbolic and not merely the outward sense. According to this School, the spiritual part of the cosmos is luminous, God Himself being known as Nūr al-anwār, the Light of lights, while the material domain in this world in which we dwell is the abode of shadows and darkness. The intelligible and luminous world, being the place from which light emanates into our world, corresponds to the Orient or the East in a metaphysical, symbolic and not a literal geographical sense, and our world of shadows to the Occident or maghrib. Ishrāqī teachings are oriental because they are illuminative and illuminative because they are oriental. A sacred and symbolic geography accompanies the whole notion of ishrāq and in one of his visionary narratives or recitals Qiṣṣat al-ghurbah al-gharbiyyah (The Tale of the Occidental Exile), Suhrawardī deals directly with this subject in relation to the human condition. He states that by virtue of the forgetfulness of our original spiritual nature, we have fallen into this Occident of the realm of existence, but since our spirit belongs to the world of light, we are not at home here but in exile. The goal of ishrāqī teachings is to make us aware of the fact that we are in exile, to remind us of our real home and to provide the guidance needed to traverse the labyrinths of the cosmic crypt and go beyond it in order to complete our homeward journey.

The School of ishrāq has its own distinct view of the history of philosophy. It considers the origin of philosophy to be prophecy and identifies some of the ancient prophets associated with the Abrahamic world as sages or philosophers and some of the ancient Greek philosophers as prophetic figures. This particular view of the history of philosophy is not only mentioned by Suhrawardī himself, but was elucidated more elaborately by later ishrāqī philosophers, such as Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Shahrazūrī, who wrote histories of philosophy. This conception of the history of philosophy has been refuted by positivistic modern scholars but their criticism is irrelevant as far as the view of the tradition itself and its vision of its own past are concerned. Suhrawardī himself mentions how the earliest treasury of ḥikmah, that is, wisdom or sophia given by God to man and kneaded into the clay of Adam, became crystallized and bifurcated into two main traditions, one located in ancient Greece and the other in ancient Persia. He adds that Islamic civilization was heir to both of these branches that became reunited in him and his new ishrāqī School.

Suhrawardī also considered his School to be the culmination and synthesis of knowledge received through ratiocination as well as intellectual intuition. He calls the first type of knowledge discursive (baḥthī) and the second ‘tasted’ (dhawqī). According to Suhrawardī, the Peripatetic philosophers before him had cultivated the first and the Sufis the second kind of knowledge. Suhrawardī considered himself to be the first person in Islamic history in whom these two modes of knowledge had became synthesized. The School of ishrāq henceforth emphasized that the true philosopher who is ‘God-like’ (mutaʾallih) (a term originally specifically associated with Suhrawardī) must have mastered with perfection both discursive and intuitive or ‘tasted’ knowledge. For the School of ishrāq all knowledge is ultimately related to illumination and light is both knowledge and being.

Ishrāqī philosophy assumes the existence of the teachings of the mashshāʾī School upon which it builds but which it also criticizes. Suhrawardī himself criticized several aspects of Peripatetic logic including the categories, which he reduced to four, and the meaning of logical definition. He also added the concept of iḍāfah ishrāqiyyah (illuminative relation) where the relation between B and A constitutes B itself. This new category plays a major role in ishrāqī metaphysics and cosmology as well as epistemology. The metaphysics of the ishrāqī School is based completely on light. God is pure light, the Light of lights, and the whole universe is nothing but degrees of light which become combined with darkness to the extent that a particular light becomes distanced from the Source of all light and also higher lights in the vertical hierarchy of lights. Suhrawardī describes an elaborate scheme of vertical and horizontal orders of light constituting the angelic world, and it is especially in his angelology that he reveals clearly the integration of Mazdean doctrines and symbols into his ishrāqī metaphysics and cosmology that is inseparable from angelology. Even the name used by Suhrawardī for the highest angel or light below the Lights of lights is Bahman which is a modern Persian version of the Avestan Vohu-Manah. The angelology of Suhrawardī is among the most fascinating features of his teachings and angels play a central role in ishrāqī psychology, epistemology and soteriology as well as cosmology and physics.

In the domain of metaphysics, it is important to add that Suhrawardī considered being or existence (wujūd) to be simply an accident added to the quiddities (māhiyyāt) of things that possess reality. His was, therefore, an ‘essentialist’ metaphysics which was to be transformed later by Mullā Ṣadrā into an ‘existential’ metaphysics. Later in Islamic philosophy when the question arose as to whether wujūd or māhiyyah is principial (aṣīl), that is, is the source of reality of an object, Suhrawardī was always identified with the school of the principiality of māhiyyah and Mullā Ṣadrā with the principiality of wujūd. For example, the great founder of the School of Isfahan, Mīr Dāmād, defended the principiality of māhiyyah and was therefore automatically identified with Suhrawardī by later historians of Islamic philosophy and philosophers themselves. In reality the role that wujūd plays in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā is played by light (nūr) in Suhrawardī and if one equates nūr and wujūd in the two grand metaphysical ‘systems’ which have dominated the Persian philosophical scene for so many centuries, then it becomes evident how close the two ‘systems’ are to each other and also how deeply the ishrāqī School has influenced the School of Isfahan and especially al-ḥikmah al-mutaʿāliyah of its most illustrious representative, Mullā Ṣadrā.

In natural philosophy Suhrawardī rejects the foundation of Aristotelian physics which is hylomorphism. For him in contrast to the Stagirite and Ibn Sīnā, physical bodies are not composed of form and matter but are a mixture of light and darkness. In fact bodies are divided into three categories on the basis of the degree to which they are transparent to light. Furthermore, the reality of various species is not determined by the Aristotelian morpha of various species but by the angelic presences or particular lights that dominate over that species or what in ishrāqī language are called arbāb al-anwāʿ or lords of the species, the lord being none other than a particular angel or light located originally in the world above in a horizontal order where are to be found the lords of all the species.

In psychology, Suhrawardī draws heavily upon Ibn Sīnā’s divisions of the faculty of psychology, but here again he substitutes a particular kind of light for the soul or nafs understood in the Avicennan sense. In ishrāqī psychology angels or entities of light play a major role in every domain of human life including protection and guidance of the soul. Even the act of seeing with physical eyes is for Suhrawardī an illumination in which the seer and the seen are united in a single illumination. As for knowledge gained by the soul, at every level it has a relation to ishrāq and even sensible perception is related to illumination. This becomes of course even more central for intelligible knowledge that is intimately bound to illumination.

One of the major doctrines of the ishrāqī School is the distinction between conceptual knowledge (al-ʿilm al-ḥuṣūlī) which is knowledge attained through the intermediary of mental concepts, and knowledge by presence (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī) in which the object of knowledge is present in an immediate manner before the knower without the intermediary of concepts. This distinction is basic and was debated among many later philosophers. This idea, along with that of the unity of the knower and the known in the act of intellection, which Ibn Sīnā had refuted but which Suhrawardī had accepted, was accepted by Mullā Ṣadrā and became a cornerstone of his own ‘transcendent theosophy’ (al-ḥikmah al-mutaʿāliyah).

The writings of Suhrawardī and many later ishrāqīs who sought to follow his example are mostly of high literary quality using a symbolic rather than a purely discursive language. Suhrawardī’s Persian treatises are in fact among the greatest masterpieces of Persian philosophical prose while his magnum opus, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq (The Theosophy of the Orient of Light) marks a peak of Arabic philosophical writings. Ishrāqī works have their own distinct vocabulary and symbolic language. They are usually more poetic and symbolic than other philosophical works and in any case form a very distinct body of philosophical writings in both Persian and Arabic as far as their literary qualities and language are concerned. This high literary quality is to be seen even in many of the didactic works of this School, the best example being the Ḥikmat al-ishrāq itself.

The ishrāqī School has had a continuous life in Persia for over eight centuries from a generation after the life of its founder. As mentioned earlier, it has also had a long history in the Indian Subcontinent and Ottoman Turkey as well as to some extent in Arab countries such as Syria and Iraq. The history of none of these branches of the tree of the ishrāqī School is as yet fully known. But in any case the main trunk of this tree is rooted in Persia and its most salient features have been studied. Following the tragic death of Suhrawardī in Aleppo, a generation of silence followed. Then suddenly in the seventh/thirteenth century there appears the first commentator and after Suhrawardī the greatest figure of this School, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Shahrazūrī, followed by Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī. After these two major figures, the ishrāqī School becomes a main feature of the intellectual life of Persia and soon of Muslim India and Ottoman Turkey. Throughout the centuries that follow, this School ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Reprinted Works
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Contributors
• General Introduction S. H. Nasr
• Introductory Analysis M. Aminrazavi
• Part I. The School of Illumination
• Part II. The Revival of Peripatetic Philosophy
• Part III. Philosophical Sufism
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright