Suhrawardi Quotes

IF words come out of the heart, they will enter the heart, but if they come from the tongue, they will not pass beyond the ears.

Who anyway can define the borderline between gnosis and poetic knowledge? The two modes are not identical, and yet they interpenetrate one another. Are we to call the gnosis of Novalis, Blake, and Shelley a knowledge that is not poetic? In domesticating the Sufis in our imagination, Corbin renders Ibn 1 Arabi and Suhrawardi as a Blakl· and a Shelley whose precursor is not Milton but the Koran.

از هر طرفی که روی، اگر راه روی، راه بری

God enjoins you to treat women well, for they are your mothers, daughters, aunts.

ای برادران بر مثالِ کژدُم باشید که پیوسته سلاحِ شما پسِ پشتِ شما بُوَد که شیطان از پس برآید.‏

Bengali leader, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (who served as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1956) had noted as early as March 1948 that Pakistan’s elite was predisposed to ‘raising the cry of “Pakistan in danger” for the purpose of arousing Muslim sentiments and binding them together’ to maintain its power.

بدان که اول چیزی که حق بیافرید گوهری بود تابناک. او را "عقل" نام کرد. و این گوهر را سه صفت بخشید: یکی شناخت حق و یکی شناخت خود و یکی شناخت آن که نبود، پس ببود. از آن صفت که به شناخت حق تعلق داشت حُسن پدید آمد - که آن را "نیکویی" خوانند. و از آن صفت که به شناخت خود تعلق داشت عشق پدید آمد که آن را "مهر" خوانند و از آن صفت که نبود پس به بود تعلق داشت حُزن پدید آمد - که آن را " اندوه " خوانند.

Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.

مادام كه مرد به "معرفت" شاد شود، هنوز قاصر است و آن را نيز از جمله ى شرك خفى گيرند. بل كه آن وقت به كمال رسد كه "معرفت" را نيز در "معروف" گم كند؛ كه هر كس به "معرفت" شاد شود و به "معروف" نيز، همچنان است كه مقصد دو ساخته است. مجرد آن وقت بود كه در "معروف" از سر "معرفت" برخيزد.

In the eastern part of the Iranian world there arose various schools of Sufism, some of which contain barely disguised Zoroastrian concepts. Figures such as Rumi, Suhrawardi, Mansur al-Hallaj, Nurbakhsh, and even Omar Khayyam all convey essentially Iranian mystical thoughts in Islamic guise, often expressing themselves in their own Persian language rather than Arabic.

Suhrawardy, who was barred from politics by Ayub Khan, challenged the concept of Pakistan as an ideological state. Emphasis on ideology, he argued, “would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.

That is, through his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).

Gandhi was one such bad parent who rewarded the ill-behaved and punished the well-behaved. He was harsh on the polemical but non-violent Swami Shraddhananda, and kind to the Swami’s murderer, about whom he stated in public: ‘Abdul Rashid is my brother.’ In settling his succession, he spurned his loyal and obedient friend Sardar Patel, and favoured the conceited and un-Gandhian Anglo-secularist Jawaharlal Nehru. His dealings with Suhrawardy were also read by the Muslim agitators as a sign of deference to Muslim aggression, an encouragement to continue on the chosen path of provocation and violence.

Once he has recognized his invisible guide, a mystic sometimes decides to trace his own isnlld, to reveal his spiritual genealogy, that is, to disclose the "chain of transmission" culminating in his person and bear witness to the spiritual ascendancy which he invokes across the generations of mankind. He does neither more nor less than to designate by name the minds to whose family he is conscious of belonging. Read in the opposite order from their phenomenological emergence, these genealogies take on the appearance of true genealogies. Judged by the rules of _our historical criticism, the claim of these genealogies to truth seems highly precarious. Their relevance is to another "transhistoric truth," which cannot be regarded as inferior (because it is of a different order) to the material historic truth whose claim to truth, with the documentation at our disposal, is no less precarious. Suhrawardi traces the family tree of the IshrlqiyOn back to Hermes, ancestor of the Sages, (that Idris-Enoch of Islamic prophetology, whom Ibn rArabi calls the prophet of the Philosophers) ; from him are descended the Sages of Greece and Persia, who are followed by certain �ofis (Abo Yazid Bastlmi, Kharraqlni, I;Ialllj, and the choice seems particularly significant in view of what has been said above about the Uwaysis}, and all these branches converge in his own doctrine and school. This is not a history of philosophy in our sense of the term; but still less is it a mere fantasy.

In his visionary treatises or recitals fashioned after the recitals of Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi uses marvelous symbol and imagery. In the recital titled ‘Aql-surkh or ‘The Red Intellect’ he encounters a personage whose countenance is red. When he asks why he is this color the personage replies that he is a luminous Elder and is really white, but that he was thrown into a black pit, and when mixed with black, every white thing connected to the light appears red, like the sun at its setting or after the dawn. When asked where he comes from, the personage replies that he resides beyond Mount Qaf, and he tells Suhrawardi, who appears in the recital as a trapped falcon, a symbol of the intellect, that his nest is there too, but he has forgotten it

purposes,’ he insisted. In Suhrawardy’s view, the Muslim League government was not making non-Muslims, especially Hindus, feel safe within Pakistan and questioned the government’s claims to the contrary. ‘Why are the Hindus running away from Sindh [if] they were safe and sound, where they had established business on colossal scales and which they made their homes?’ he asked, pointing to the deep cultural ties of Sindhi Hindus to Sindh. According to Suhrawardy, the rhetoric of an Islamic state was responsible for causing insecurity among non-Muslims. ‘The Pakistan State, if it is to be maintained, must be maintained by the goodwill of Pakistanis of all people, Muslims or non-Muslims whom you consider to be your nationals,’ he stressed. The minorities could not depend ‘merely on the goodwill of the Muslims or on their authority or their strength’.48

Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) founded a school of mystical philosophy at Isfahan, which Majlisi did his best to suppress. They continued the tradition of Suhrawardi, linking philosophy and spirituality, and training their disciples in mystical disciplines which enabled them to acquire a sense of the alam al-mithal and the spiritual world. Both insisted that a philosopher must be as rational and scientific as Aristotle, but that he must also cultivate the imaginative, intuitive approach to truth. Both were utterly opposed to the new intolerance of some of the ulama, which they regarded as a perversion of religion. Truth could not be imposed by force and intellectual conformism was incompatible with true faith. Mulla Sadra also saw political reform as inseparable from spirituality. In his masterpiece Al-Afsan al-Arbaah (The Fourfold Journey), he described the mystical training that a leader must undergo before he could start to transform the mundane world. He must first divest himself of ego, and receive divine illumination and mystical apprehension of God. It was a path that could bring him to the same kind of spiritual insight as the Shii imams, though not, of course, on the same level as they.

بَيني وَبَينَكَ في المَوَدّةِ نِسبَةٌ ... مَكتومَة عَن سرّ هَذا العالَمِ نَحنُ اللّذان تعارَفَت أَرواحُنا ... مِن قَبــلِ خَلق اللَّه طينَةَ آدمِ

According to Suhrawardy, a religion-based state that did not protect its minorities would be one in which ‘there will be no commerce, no business and no trade’. With remarkable prescience, the Bengali leader warned that ‘those lawless elements that may be turned today against non-Muslims will be turned later on, once those fratricidal tendencies have been aroused, against the Muslim gentry’.

As-Suhrawardi writes that the great religions are all revelations of the same truth. Allah, in His wisdom, saw that there are too many people speaking too many tongues for one truth to be revealed in one place at one time. And so there have been many revelations. You believe in the same God as I do, revealed through your own prophet.” “The Christ is not a prophet,

Yeats affirmed his belief in a Platonic order of things in his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which presents the ancient Oriental city (the direction of light in Suhrawardi’s gnostic Platonism) as a symbol of the mundus imaginalis, an archetypal capital of the ‘human kingdom of the imagination’, a hub of the interworld where the incarnate and discarnate, conscious and unconscious self, meet.45 Rejecting the world in which whatever is ‘begotten, born, and dies’ loses itself in ‘sensual neglect’, the poet turns instead to ‘monuments of unageing intellect’. He abjures his ‘dying animal’, his body, the ‘portable tomb’ of the Hermetists, and reaches for the ‘artifice of eternity’: timeless beauty.46

But Margot romanticized uprisings of people in distant lands. She didn’t judge brown rapists and torturers by the same standards she would have applied to white men who drowned children for being the wrong religion. She believed, I think, like Suhrawardy, that ‘bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, from Bengal, who served as prime minister for a brief period under the 1956 Constitution, warned against the preoccupation with ‘segregation of our voters into religious communities’ and the emphasis on Pakistan’s destiny as an ideological state. This, he said, ‘would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of Independence’. He proposed instead that Pakistanis start seeing Pakistan ‘in terms of a nation state’. Suhrawardy saw ‘a Pakistan great enough and strong enough to encompass all of its citizens, whatever their faith, on a basis of true civic equality and by that fact made greater and stronger’.

Meanwhile I found time to read one of the strangest texts I've ever read: Exiled in the West by Suhrawardi (11th century), commented by Abdelwahab Meddeb. It's a small text that has, on a first glance, the shape of tale of Arabian Nights, but with allegorical expressions that give the impression of dreaming it while one reads it. For example "The city of the men that can't forgive", "The region of the central tree". I'm going to return to this text, which has awoken so many vocations and vacations.