The Murdered Master: Suhrawardi and the Ancient Art of Illumination - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

He discovered that light was not a metaphor. He was killed for saying so.

In 1191 CE, a young Persian philosopher named Suhrawardi was executed in a citadel in Aleppo on the orders of Saladin. He was thirty-six years old. His crime, according to the jurists who petitioned for his death, was corrupting the minds of the young—particularly the mind of a prince who had come to love him. His real crime was something older and more dangerous: he had seen something, and he insisted on saying what he had seen.

The Murdered Master tells the story of Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, founder of the Ishraqiyya—the Philosophy of Illumination—and one of the most original minds in the history of human thought. It is a book about a philosopher who died too young and a philosophy that refused to die with him.

Suhrawardi's central claim was that light is not a symbol for truth but its substance. That the hierarchy of existence is a hierarchy of luminosity. That the human soul, properly prepared, can encounter its own deepest nature not through argument but through direct vision—what he called al-ilm al-huduri, knowledge by presence. He drew on Plato and Aristotle, on Zoroastrian cosmology and Islamic theology, on the ancient Persian concept of xvarnah—divine radiance—and wove them into a system of dazzling coherence.

He also dreamed of Aristotle, who appeared to him shining, and told him that all the Peripatetics had missed the essential thing.

This is a book about that dream, and what it cost him to follow it.

Following Suhrawardi from the village of Suhraward in northwestern Iran through the madrasahs of Maragha and Isfahan, through his wandering years in Anatolia and Syria, to his final months in Aleppo where a prince protected him until he could not, The Murdered Master reconstructs not just a life but a way of seeing. It takes seriously what Suhrawardi took seriously: that the light is real, that it can be known, that the preparation required to know it is both rigorous and available, and that the philosophers and theologians who insisted on keeping that knowledge locked behind institutional barriers had reasons for doing so that were not entirely philosophical.

Seven centuries after his execution, a French scholar named Henry Corbin arrived in Tehran, encountered the manuscripts that had preserved the Ishraqiyya through the Persian philosophical tradition, and recognized—with the shock of a homecoming—that Suhrawardi had been asking questions that Western philosophy was still failing to ask. The Murdered Master traces that recognition and its implications: for the philosophy of consciousness, for the study of spiritual experience, for anyone who has ever wondered whether the light they sometimes sense at the edge of ordinary awareness is real or imagined.

It is real, Suhrawardi said. And then he died for saying it.

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