Shahrazūrī on Suhrawardī’s Suspended Images

The chapter discusses how Shahrazūrī developed Suhrawardī’s ideas further. First, this thirteenth century thinker from presumably the border region of present day Iraq and Iran is introduced, paying especial attention to the intertextuality and chronology of his writings. The other sections discuss respectively how Shahrazūrī established his own interpretation, and what that interpretation exactly entails. The how-section details the move from technical term ‘suspended images’, which served an epistemological function, to the term ‘world of image’, which serves a cosmological function. The fact that his main argument is repeated four times in three different works attests to the importance of it for Shahrazūrī’s thinking. The what-section is divided into six topics: the name that Shahrazūrī gives for this world, the position he gives it within the cosmos, the topography of this world, the role it play for eschatology, and finally the assurance of its existence and attribution of the idea to ancient philosophy.

Conclusion

It is said that a stanza was found on Suhrawardī’s grave which reads:1 ~ the inhabitant of this grave was a pearl ~ ~ a hidden one, which God created out of nobility ~ ~ the times did not know his value ~ ~ so he returned it to the shell for the great care he had for it ~...

The Reception of Shahrazūrī’s World of Image up until the Present Day

The idea as Shahrazūrī interpreted it, denoted by the term ‘world of image’, received a reception much wider than the commentary tradition. Searching for this term, however, yields many false positives. Instead, it seems that all discussions that have to do with Suhrawardī and Shahrazūrī include a sentence which Shahrazūrī prominently used in his discussion. This chapter is divided by centuries, discussing the trajectory this discussion took. From the commentators, it went on to be discussed by a handful of philosophers and theologians. From there it enjoyed reception from Istanbul to Hyderabad, and notably entered into texts of Shiʿi traditional thinkers. Dozens of authors and their texts are discussed, with close attention given to how each author slightly alters the wording and thereby contributes to an evolution (as opposed to revolution) of the expression of the idea of a world of image. The chapter closes by discussing how Ibn ʿArabī and his commentators also use a notion called the world of image, but do so fully separately from Suhrawardī and his commentators.

Suhrawardī’s Lukewarm Commentators

The corpus of Suhrawardī inspired dozens of commentaries, written all over the Islamic world, as early as half a century after him until as late as only half a century ago. Scholars have interpreted this to mean there is a ‘school of illumination’, made up of enthusiastic followers of Suhrawardī’s ideas. This chapter shows this is not the case, with regard to the notion of suspended images and the world of image. The first 150 years after Suhrawardī marks the first wave of reception. In this period, many thinkers mentioned Suhrawardī’s ideas without committing to it. The period closes with an anonymous epistle that offers many points of critique on Suhrawardī. The second period consists of thinkers associated with Shiraz around the turn of the 16th century. All of them bring forth criticism and in the end do not accept Suhrawardī’s thinking as their own position. The chapter closes with the way Mullā Ṣadrā, a thinker from the 17th century who was foundational for modern Shi’ism, uses Suhrawardī’s ideas in an entirely novel way.

Suhrawardī’s Recognition of an Additional Realm

In Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, Suhrawardī takes Ibn Sīnā’s ideas in an entirely different direction. Whereas Ibn Sīnā was most concerned with how we can have imagination if we do not have a body anymore, Suhrawardī circumvents this problem by insisting that all particular perception is through non-physical images called ‘suspended images’. He makes these images into a fourth ontological category, next to intellects, souls, and bodies. As such, he is able to speak of a ‘world of suspended images’. Previously, scholars have emphasized the role they play in spiritual experience, but Suhrawardī in fact argues that with every act of particular perception, they play a role, whether it is hearing a sound or experiencing something in a dream. At the end of the chapter, some of the possible antecedents other than Ibn Sīnā are considered.

Introduction

The first two, very short sections introduce the questions this book aims to answer and outlines how the answers are distributed over the chapters. The next section is for those unfamiliar with Suhrawardī and the world of image, giving a primer on what scholars have been able to figure out so far. The latter half of the chapter explains the methodology. Next to conventional close reading, this book also utilizes a form of ‘distant reading’. In general, this approach uses automated searches through a large corpus of texts to detect patterns that would go unnoticed for a normal reader. For this book, it means that especial attention is paid to the intertextuality of all texts within a commentary tradition. By tracing the very same sentence in dozens of texts and mapping their mutations, a genealogy can be established which is a proxy for the trajectory through history of an idea.

From Ibn Sīnā to Suhrawardī: The Contested Idea of Using Imagination after Death

The chapter knows three sections. First, Ibn Sīnā’s thinking on the role of the imagination in the afterlife is discussed. He works from the paradigm that only philosophers who have fully actualized their intellectual capacities will enjoy what can be called Heaven, that is, will join the intelligible world. To allow for more people to have a somewhat enjoyable experience after death, he allows for the possibility that the imagination is used to imagine the delights and punishments as predicted in in the Koran. In the next section, it is proven that no other Muslim intellectual took a liking to this idea; it was universally repudiated. In the last section, the sole exception is discussed, which is Suhrawardī. In his Partaw-nāme and al-Lamaḥāt, he mentions the idea approvingly. In al-Talwīḥāt he discusses it in-depth, openly adopts it, and continues Ibn Sīnā’s train of thought in several regards.