Shahāb ad-Dīn Yahya ibn Habash ibn Amirak as-Suhrawardī | |
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Religion | Islam |
Other names | Sohrevardi, Shahab al-Din |
Personal | |
Born | 1154 Sohrevard (present-day Zanjan Province of Iran) |
Died | 1191 Aleppo (present-day Syria) |
Senior posting | |
Based in | Suhraward |
Title | Shaykh al-Ishraq, Shaykh al-Maqtul |
Period in office | 12th century |
"Shahāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī (Persian: شهابالدین سهروردی, also known as Sohrevardi) was a Persian philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy and mysticism that drew upon Zoroastrian and Platonic ideas. The "light" in his "Philosophy of Illumination" is a divine and metaphysical source of knowledge. He is referred to by the honorific title Shaikh al-ʿIshraq "Master of Illumination" and Shaikh al-Maqtul "the Murdered Master", in reference to his execution for heresy.Mulla Sadra, the Persian sage of the Safavid era described Suhrawardi as the "Reviver of the Traces of the Pahlavi (Iranian) Sages", and Suhrawardi, in his magnum opus "The Philosophy of Illumination", thought of himself as a reviver or resuscitator of the ancient tradition of Persian wisdom.
Suhraward is a village located between the present-day towns of Zanjan and Bijar Garrus in Iran, where Suhrawardi was born in 1154. He learned wisdom and jurisprudence in Maragheh (located today in the East Azarbaijan Province of Iran). His teacher was Majd al-Dīn Jīlī who was also Imam Fakhr Razi’s teacher. He then went to Iraq and Syria for several years and developed his knowledge while he was there.
His life spanned a period of less than forty years during which he produced a series of works that established him as the founder of a new school of philosophy, called "Illuminism" (hikmat al-Ishraq). According to Henry Corbin, Suhrawardi "came later to be called the Master of Illumination (Shaikh-i-Ishraq) because his great aim was the renaissance of ancient Iranian wisdom". which Corbin specifies in various ways as the "project of reviving the philosophy of ancient Persia".