Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi شهاب الدين يحيى السهروردي

Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi rahimahullah (549-587 AH / 1155-1191 AD) was a philosopher and mystic born in Azerbaijan who became the founder of the Illuminationist or Ishraqi school of Islamic philosophy. This school centered on a philosophy of light and intellectual intuition, drawing on Platonic and Hermetic thought as well as the teachings of Persian Sufi masters. Al-Suhrawardi spent most of his adult life in Persia, where he was eventually imprisoned by the authorities on account of his beliefs and died at the age of thirty-eight. He was an extraordinarily prolific thinker, authoring over fifty works in both Arabic and Persian. His towering masterpiece is Hikmat al-Ishraq (The Theosophy of Illumination), which remains the foundational text of the Ishraqi tradition. His work has continued to attract serious scholarly attention and has been recognized as foundational to the period of early Islamic mystical philosophy.