Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi

Who was Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi?

"Shahāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash as-Suhrawardī was a Persian philosopher, a Sufi and founder of the Illuminationist philosophy, an important school in Islamic mysticism that drew upon Zoroastrian and Platonic ideas. The "Orient" of his Oriental Theosophy symbolises spiritual light and knowledge. He is sometimes given the honorific title Shaikh al-Ishraq or "Master of Illumination" and sometimes is called Shaikh al-Maqtul, the "Murdered Sheikh", referring to his execution for heresy. Mulla Sadra, the Persian sage of the Safavid era has termed Suhrawardi as "the Reviver of the Traces of the Pahlavi Sages", and Suhrawardi, in his magnum opus entitled Oriental Theosophy, thought of himself as a reviver or resuscitator of the ancient tradition of Persian wisdom.