The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Markiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Islam

AL-SUHRAWARDĪ ON MIRROR VISION AND SUSPENDED IMAGES (MUTHUL MU ʿALLAQA)

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolai Sinai
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Status ◽  
Material World ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Islam ◽  
Reconstructive Analysis

AbstractThe notion of a “World of Images” located somewhere between the immaterial and the material world was a mainstay of eschatological speculation in late medieval Islam. As has been recognised before, the concept was launched by al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). However, its more properly philosophical underpinnings, in particular the notion of “suspended” images – images which somehow have an objective, rather than just a mental or subjective, status – merit further clarification, which this article attempts to provide. Since the concept of “suspended forms”, while applied to eschatological matters in the last treatise of the Philosophy of Illumination, makes its first appearance in a discussion of mirror vision, I examine in some detail Avicenna's understanding of mirror vision as presented in the Shifāʾ, to which al-Suhrawardī reacts. I then undertake a detailed reconstructive analysis of two paragraphs of the Philosophy of Illumination, paying particular attention to the question of the ontological status of “suspended” or “self-subsistent” images as well as to the idea that mirrors serve, not as loci in which images inhere, but as loci at which they become manifest (singular maẓhar).

scholarly journals Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: Light and luminous being in Islamic theology

2021 ◽  
pp. 205030322098697
Author(s):  
Christian Lange
Keyword(s):  
Early Medieval ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Road ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Medieval Islam

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human(oid) body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti (Ash’ari, Egypt, d. 1505) and al-Majlisi (Persia, d. 1699), suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi (Syria, d. 1191) and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought.

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