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Article ID: CBB001552258

Al-Suhraward on Mirror Vision and Suspended Images (Muthul Mu allaqa) (2015)

Sinai, Nicolai (Author)

Arabic Sciences and Philosophy
Volume: 25, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 279-297

DOI: 10.1017/S0957423915000053

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The notion of a “World of Images” located somewhere between the immaterial and the material world was a mainstay of eschatological speculation in late medieval Islam. As has been recognised before, the concept was launched by al-Suhraward (d. 1191). However, its more properly philosophical underpinnings, in particular the notion of “suspended” images -- images which somehow have an objective, rather than just a mental or subjective, status -- merit further clarification, which this article attempts to provide. Since the concept of “suspended forms”, while applied to eschatological matters in the last treatise of the Philosophy of Illumination, makes its first appearance in a discussion of mirror vision, I examine in some detail Avicenna's understanding of mirror vision as presented in the Shif , to which al-Suhraward reacts. I then undertake a detailed reconstructive analysis of two paragraphs of the Philosophy of Illumination, paying particular attention to the question of the ontological status of “suspended” or “self-subsistent” images as well as to the idea that mirrors serve, not as loci in which images inhere, but as loci at which they become manifest (singular ma har).

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