In the twentieth century, particularly with the intensive and meticulous scholarship of Henry Corbin (1903-1978), the name of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash al-Suhrawardī (549/1155-587/1191) was extended from the margins of Iranian seminaries to the center of modern historiography of Islamic philosophy and mysticism. In this line, the life and legacy of Suhrawardī has often been remembered as a revival of Islamic philosophy in a consistent combination with Islamic mysticism in light of his philosophical innovations in formulating the Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishrāq). My paper will draw attention to a gap in both traditional seminarian as well as the modern academic study of Suhrawardī: the lack of attention to the strong and systematic political aspect of his philosophy.
As part of his philosophical innovation, The mystical ontology and epistemology that he developed in his philosophical system allow for an elaborate role of dreams and vision quests as avenues of acquiring philosophical as well as historical knowledge. Some of these dreams and mystical vision accounts that are focused on his mystical and philosophical system have been subject to a lofty body of scholarly elaboration. In my article, however, I will focus on one of these dream accounts in which he implicitly makes a major political claim: to come to reign over the world as an outright political leader. I will analyze the elements of this dream account and then provide a historical contextualization of it. My historical contextualization will relate Suhrawardī’s rendition of his dream to a widely common pattern of aligning religious knowledge and political legitimacy in the 6th/11th century Levantine and North African Islamic context. I will demonstrate how the elements of this dream account dovetailed with another specific dream account by which Suhrawardī rejected the authority of other Muslim philosophers and introduced his own mystical-philosophical system as the ultimate path to knowledge. Then, I will show, with textual and historical evidence, the way in which this dream repeated a motif in the dream accounts of religious scholars aspiring for political power in the Levantine and North African contexts around Suhrawardī’s time, with emphasis on a dream account attributed to Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad Ibn Tūmart (d. 524/1130) the founder of the Almohad movement. Thus, I will argue, reading a rather overlooked dream account by Suhrawardī in light of two more accounts of the same type, one by himself and one by another religious scholar who also leveraged his religious knowledge to claim political power, can serve as a key to a clearer understanding of the strong but neglected political aspect of the philosophical and mystical teachings of Shaykh al-’Ishrāq (The Master of illumination), as Suhrawardī came to be known.
The legacy of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash al-Suhrawardī (549/1155-587/1191) is often remembered in light of his philosophical innovation in formulating the Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishrāq). His mystical ontology and epistemology allow for an elaborate role of dreams and vision quests as avenues of knowledge. Among such dreams, scholars of Suhrawardī have extensively analyzed, albeit with varying approaches, the ones elaborating his mystical and philosophical teachings. However, in historical accounts of Suhrawardī, there are a number of other dreams attributed to the shaykh and to other figures that flesh out the making and the reception of the political aspect of his philosophy. My paper will provide an outline of Suhrawardī’s political philosophy by historical contextualization of one of such dream accounts and, in the bigger picture, relating it to a specific motif in dream accounts by ‘ulamā aspiring for political power in the same historical period and geographical region.