Life
Suhraward or Suhrabard is a village located between the present-day towns of Zanjan and Bijar where Suhrawardi was born in 1155. This Kurdish inhabited region in present-day northwestern Iran was controlled by the Kurds up to the 10th century and its inhabitants were mainly mystics. He learned wisdom and jurisprudence in Maragheh (located today in the East Azarbaijan Province of Iran). His teacher was Majd al-Din Jaili 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 highly assured works that established him as the founder of a new school of philosophy, sometimes called "Illuminism" (hikmat al-Ishraq). According to Henry Corbin, Suhrawardi "came later to be called the Master of Oriental theosophy (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".
In 1186, at the age of thirty-two, he completed his magnum opus “The Philosophy of Illumination.”
There are several contradictory reports of his death. The most commonly held view is that he was executed sometime between 1191 and 1208 in Aleppo on charges of cultivating Batini teachings and philosophy, by the order of al-Malik al-Zahir, son of Saladin. Others traditions hold that he starved himself to death, others till that he was suffocated or thrown from the wall of the fortress, then burned.
Read more about this topic: Shahab Al-Din Suhrawardi
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