Henry Corbin – The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism
Preface
He brings them forth from the shadows into the light. Qur’an 11.258.
Anyone who has been moved by the supernal glory of the moment when the Sun emerges from the eastern horizon has an inkling of the spirituality of light.
This inchoate experience of the community of the luminous and the numinous is the point of departure for the Wisdom of Illumination formulated by Shihaboddin Yahya Sohravardi, the great reviver of Hermetic
gnosis in Islam who suffered a martyr’s death in 12th C Syria.
At the heart of Sohravardi’s mystic science is the recognition that the “I”
of every self-aware entity is a pure, immaterial light.
While Sohravardi’s works exercised a profound influence on spiritual and intellectual currents within Islamdom, they were never translated into Latin and thus remained virtually unknown in the West for centuries. Henry Corbin (1903-1978) deserves the lion’s share of credit for the redressal of this state of affairs.
As a young man Corbin was introduced to Sohravardi by his teacher Louis Massignon, who presented him with a lithograph of the martyred shaykh’s Arabic masterpiece Hikmat al-Ishraq.
The penny dropped. In his correspondence with Massignon years later,
Corbin spoke of Sohravardi as “mon shaykh” (my spiritual guide).
Far from merely serving as a research topic, Sohravardi had become Corbin’s initiator.
Tli,inks to Corbin’s lifelong commitment to editing, translating, and (most importantly) interpreting the writings of Sohravardi and liis commentators, the Master of Illumination has increasingly become a source of fresh inspiration for philosophers, psychologists, artists, and mystics in the West.
One might venture to compare Corbin’s contemporary unveiling of the Wisdom of Illumination with Sohravardi’s high-spirited revival of the gnosis of ancient Iran in his own era.
Like that of Sohravardi, Corbin’s work ha rmonizes critical reasoning and visionary intuition, modes of knowing now more than ever out of sync.
In revalorizing imagination as an epistemological category Corbin coined the term “imaginal,” an expression which has quickly gained wide
interdisciplinary currency.
While the presence of Sohravardi inspired and oriented Corbin’s work, it by no means confined his interests. The Wisdom of Illumination has no use for ta’assub, “fanaticism”.
Steeped in alchemy, angelology, color symbolism, cosmology, geosophy, Grail lore, hiero-history, love theory, subtle physiology, sacred geometry,
sophiology and theophanic phenomenology, Corbin’s oeuvre of some two hundred critical text editions, books and articles constitutes a monumental contribution to the fields of Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and Shi’ite esotericism.
In the present volume, Corbin weaves the fiber of Sohravardi’s metaphysics into a tapestry resplendent with the colors of German romanticism, Mazdaism, Manicheism, Hermeticism, and the Sufism of Ruzbehan Baqli, Najmoddin Kobra, Najmoddin Razi, Shamsoddin Lahiji, and Alaoddawleh
Semnani. The awakening of the body of light is the theme.
The transformative experiences of illumination described in these pages
amount to nothing less than the fulfillment of a supplication that resounds to this day in mosques from the Maghreb to Java:
O God, place light in my heart, and light in my soul, light upon my tongue, light in my eyes and light in my ears, place light at my right, light at my
left, light behind me and light before me, light above me and light beneath me. Place light in my nerves, and light in my flesh, light in my blood, light in my hair and light in my skin! Give me light, increase my light, make me light! ~Zia Inayat Khan
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