ABSTRACT
Our previous studies of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ai-Suhrawardī, commonly known as the Shaykh al-Ishrāq, have put us in a position to appreciate the full importance of his work. In an imaginary topography, this work is situated at a crossroads. Al-Suhrawardī died just seven years before Averroës. At that moment, therefore, in western Islam, 'Arab Peripateticism' was finding its ultimate expression in the work of Averroës, so much so that western historians, mistakenly confusing Averroës' Peripateticism with philosophy pure and simple, have overlong persisted in maintaining that philosophy in Islam culminated in Averroës. Yet at the same time in the East, and particularly in Iran, the work of al-Suhrawardī was opening up the road which so many thinkers and spiritual seekers were to follow down to our own days. It has already been suggested that the reasons for the failure and disappearance of 'Latin Avicennism' were in fact the same as those which lay behind the persistence of Avicennism in Iran; but from the background of this Avicennism the work of al-Suhrawardī, in one way or another, was never absent.
