Illuminationism

Illuminationism (hikmat al-ishraq, the "philosophy of illumination") is a school of Islamic philosophy founded by Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi in twelfth-century Persia, who broke with the Peripatetic tradition's reliance on discursive definition and argued instead that reality is fundamentally constituted by light, understood as a self-evident, self-manifesting principle graded by degrees of intensity from the Light of Lights (God) down through a hierarchy of subordinate lights. Suhrawardi held that the highest philosophical knowledge is attained not through syllogistic demonstration alone but through direct, intuitive illumination (ishraq) available to a purified soul, combining rigorous logical training with mystical experience rather than treating them as opposed. Suhrawardi was executed in Aleppo in 1191 on charges of heresy, but his synthesis of Peripatetic logic, ancient Persian wisdom and mystical epistemology was preserved and elaborated by later commentators including Shahrazuri and Qutb al-Din Shirazi. Illuminationist thought became a major current within later Persian philosophy, feeding into the Safavid-era School of Isfahan and Mulla Sadra's transcendent theosophy.