Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi

"Shihāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī (, also known as Sohrevardi) (1154–1191) was a philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy. The "light" in his "Philosophy of Illumination" is the 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. Suhrawardi provided a new Platonic critique of the peripatetic school of Avicenna that was dominant at his times, and that critique involved the fields of Logic, Physics, Epistemology, Psychology, and Metaphysics. Life Of Persian stock, Suhrawardi was born in 1154 in Suhraward, a village located between the towns of Zanjan and Bijar Garrus in Iran. He learned wisdom and jurisprudence in the city of Maragheh. His teacher was Majd al-Dīn Jīlī who was also Fakhr al-Din al-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".<ref>H.Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran), translated from French by Nancy Pearson, Princeton, 1977. (1:Paris, 1960), pg. 54.</ref> 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. Other traditions hold that he starved himself to death, others tell that he was suffocated or thrown from the wall of the fortress, then burned by some people.