Prelude

Summary

What does it mean to be a person, a persona, a knowing subject? When a philosopher of bygone age like Suhrawardi puts his own knowing subject at the epicenter of his unknowing world, I find in that moment a moral and philosophical momentum in which I too can locate my own knowing subject at the epicenter of my own unknowing world. I therefore begin this book with a reading of Suhrawardi’s allegorical prose, where we see him telling us when the Former of Truth (Musavver-e beh Haghighat) wanted to create him; let us just say God wanted to create him. Suhrawardi is an Illuminationist philosopher and he speaks his own peculiar language. He created Suhrawardi as a falcon. Have you ever heard anything stranger, more astonishing, more beautiful, more miraculous? Who is talking here? By what authority, what audacity, does he talk this way? A falcon? Really? What happened to that authorial voice, that agential power with which philosophers like Suhrawardi talked? How did we get from there to here, when we are afraid of our own shadow, as my late mother used to say – may she rest in peace? I write as a product of a colonial world, with a postcolonial claim to my subjectivity, reclaiming the moment when I was de-subjected to re-subject myself, at the receiving end of a brutal history of domestic tyranny and foreign domination, who has still managed to stand up and say “I” and place a meaningful sentence in front of that authorial “I.” I wish to find out how did that happen. The fact that Suhrawardi said “I” long before I did has something to do with my “I” too – even or particularly when I write “I” in English in the shadow of his Persian “Man/I.” This book is about “Man/I.”