ÀAttar at Nishapur; and in the next generation (and another part of the same
network) Rumi. Their poetic style is at the opposite pole from the arguments
and proofs of the philosophers; it is filled with anecdotes, especially stories of
the spiritual impressiveness and sometimes the magic powers of the Sufi heroes,
along with their cryptic sayings. The message is typically esoteric, delivered
through allegory and metaphor.
In the same period, the intellectual networks are centered on two figures
whose fame came from combining philosophy with mysticism to produce
theosophy: Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi (not to be confused with Abu-Hafs
Suhrawardi in the same generation), and a generation later Ibn ÀArabi. Al-
though their intellectual positions radically shifted from those of the philoso-
phers and rational theologians, nevertheless their network connections are
typical of major intellectuals. Suhrawardi had studied widely with the masters
of the time; his network sibling, so to speak, is Fakhruddin Razi, the leading
AshÀarite and logician of the time, who shared with Suhrawardi the same
teacher (225). Ibn ÀArabi was a youthful acquaintance (Corbin, 1969: 41–43)
of Ibn Rushd (Averroës), in the culminating generation of creativity in the
Islamic west, who migrated east after Ibn Rushd’s funeral and the collapse of
the Spanish networks. And the intellectual networks that remained after their
days largely consisted of the descendants of Suhrawardi, Ibn ÀArabi, and
Fakhruddin Razi.
Suhrawardi drew on the cultural capital of Neoplatonism, which was
still being handed down in medical circles along with the medical writings
of Ibn Sina. His own Baghdad teacher (225) could well have been in the
orbit of AbuÁl-Barakat, a Jewish physician and Muslim convert, who criticized
and combined elements from Ibn Sina and from kalam (Sirat, 1985: 133).
Suhrawardi colored the Neoplatonic hierarchy with a different spiritual tone—
more pantheistic and dramatically visionary. Reviving Zoroastrian religious
images, Suhrawardi set forth a metaphysics of Light and Darkness. The essence
of material bodies is night, death, in themselves nothing more than corpses;
light and life come from above, through a hierarchy of angels. Angels vary in
intensity of luminescence, and these in turn produce the different species which
populate the world. The Aristotelean logical universal is only the dead body
of an angel. Suhrawardi expressed an emotional antipathy to the logical and
conceptual abstractions of the philosophers; he drew upon them to overturn
them for a more palpable vision. Perhaps inspired by the conflict between
“eastern” and “western” logic that went on among the specialists (notably
beginning in the previous generation with AbuÁl-Barakat and his opponents),
Suhrawardi proposed to build an alternative logic (Afnan, 1958: 105). In this
Suhrawardi had no notable success, but the project reveals how much his
greatness came from his combination of ingredients.
For Suhrawardi, the intermediary levels between the world and the divine
426 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths