Talk:Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi

Untitled
The founder of the Suhrawardiyya was Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi. See Suhrawardi, The Philosophy of Illumination, ed. John Walbridge & Hossein Ziai (1999: Provo, UT. Brigham Young University), p. 166.

Wrong Information
This is one of the most biased and fabricated articles on wikipedia. Suhrawardi never promoted Zoroastrianism, rather he was a devout follower of Islam.

Shahabuddin Suhrawardy was a Sunni and a devout Muslim. Stop this Iranian nationalist propaganda and lies.

Renamed
I renamed to "al-Suhrawardi" from "Suhrawardi Maqdul" as the first forms seemed slightly mroe common and more "authentic". Maybe the "al" could be dropped? Flammifer 05:47, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I renamed again, from al-Suhrawardi to Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, which seems like a better name. In the meantime, I had created other pages of people called "al-Suhrawardi". Just after moving (While looking around for double redirects), I found that Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi seems like an even more popular way of writing, even though the form with an "a" was more common on wikipedia. If someone's really bored, he can try to convince an administrator to move the page (We want to preserve the history, not just copy-paste the content). Flammifer 13:52, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

interestingly he was from the suhrawad village ,the village name itself is  from sohr[red] and vard[rose].citation:iranvich,bahram frahvashi.Spitman 21:16, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Why
Strange bias to indicate Suhrawardi as a Iranian filosopher. He was a Persian but contributed to Islamic not Zoroastrian philosophy contrary to what this seems to imply here. abdulnr 20:43, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * There is a debate about how much Zoroastrian and how much Islamic Suhrawadi was. I think he tried to synthesize the ideas into one concept.  You might want to look at these google books  and draw your own conclusion.  It seems a Zoroastrian school in India took up his philosophy.  --alidoostzadeh 21:31, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I removed the source by Mohammad Kamal since it erroneously claimed Suhrawardi has Kurdish poetry which he does not unfortunately and he is a quoting a certain Mullah Salih. --Nepaheshgar (talk) 00:17, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

confusion
This was posted on the article page. -Pollinosisss (talk) 06:44, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

"This article creates confusion. There were two Shihab-ud-din Suharwardi. The most famous and prominent Shihab-ud-din Suharwardi was the founder of the Suharwardi Order and the author of Awarif-al-Ma'arif. While the person discussed below in the article is a different Shihab ud Din . He was an Ishraqi Philosopher and not a Sufi. Please clear the article and make it relevant to the heading of the Great Sufi master Shaikh ul Shuyukh Shihab ud din Suharwardi who lied buried in Iraq. He was not murdered."

Kurdish
It seems that it's certainly possible he was a Kurd. What's really dumb though, is that in the text, this is said:

This Azerbaijani inhabited town was then part of Garrus province despite its non-Kurdish population but it is today part of Zanjan province in Azarbaijan region [3] [4] and is inhabited by Azerbaijani people

While the second source that's been stated to support this statement ( http://books.google.be/books?id=EwB7Zo7lVp0C&pg=PA12&dq=%22Suhraward(Suhrabard)+is+located+in+the+municipality+of+Azerbaijan+in+Iran%22&hl=en&ei=UukwTqrDLsnzsga35KigCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Suhraward%20(Suhrabard)%20is%20located%20in%20the%20municipality%20of%20Azerbaijan%20in%20Iran%22&f=false ), clearly states otherwise: We only know that he was born in Suhraward or 'Suhrabard', a Kurdish village between Zenjan and Bijar.

Znertu (talk) 23:40, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

No, What's really dumb is you lie so easily and fabricate stories. I'm from Suhreward. This village has always been inhabited by Azerbaijani people. Also going from Zanjan through to 15km of Bijar (in Kurdistan province) all the villages are inhabited by Azerbaijanis. A simple travel to Suhreward will disproof your story. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Behtaab (talk • contribs) 12:04, 27 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Saying that land has "always been inhabited by Azerbaijanis" is as ridiculous as claiming that Istanbul has always been inhabited by turks. Your people arrived in this region in 1050 AD (Seljuks), long after Suhraward was founded. And Azarbaijan did not magically become turkish as soon as they arrived here, the colonization took centuries. Go read up on the works of Hamdallah Mustawfi, 14th century Arab historian. --Qahramani44 (talk) 9 December 2018

cleaned up
I have coalesced the sources that say Kurd/Persian to Iranian as it cleared in the lead. Also one source, "M. Kamal, Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy, p.12, Ashgate Publishing Inc., 136 pp., 2006, ISBN 0-7546-5271-8 (see p.12)" is quoting a Mullah Salih Ibrahimi, who claims Suhrawardi wrote in Kurdish. . In actuality, he did not write in Kurdish. Anyhow I have kept the source, but this is the wrong information. If we want to be precise, Suhrwardi probably spoke one of the Fahlaviyat dialects  NW Iranian languages..but speakers of such dialects have been called "Kord", "Fors", "Iranian" etc...--96.255.251.165 (talk) 02:12, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

The kurdish descent of al-suhrawardi and the bias of persian scholars.
Shehab a-din al-suhrawardi was kurdish in his descent.this is obious. becous it was a kurdish village, and he wrote in kurdish. there are other kurdish sufis named (al-) suhrawardi, and no one say they where persians.

i respect the persian scholars, but they have bias' they tend to call to important kurds figures -'persian' becaus, they inhabited a region today belong to iran, or was part of imperial iran in some point. delating the difference between descent to citizen. 84.111.157.95 (talk) 14:09, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Suhrawardi did not write in Kurdish. The general term "Kurd" was used for different Iranian tribal groups back then, but it seems Suhrawardi based on the Fahlaviyat of Zanjan spoke a Fahlavi language as his native language, and not modern Kurdish per se. Overall, the terminology Iranian (Iranian people) covers both Kurdish and Persian as an ethnic group, so there should not be a problem. --Khodabandeh14 (talk) 02:32, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Suhrawardi was not a Turkish and ip edit warring
Unfortunately, this is another example of nation building here. A recent ip is adding Suhrawrdi as an Azerbaijani (Azerbaijan was a simple geography in the 12th century but the ip is making him link to the modern Turkish speaking group that has adopted the name Azerbaijani in the 20th century) and another ip has reverted him. The first ip's sources are not valid sources as they are local Azerbaijani republic sources who have tendency to Turkicize pre-Turkish groups and peoples. These sources may be dismissed per Victor Schnirelmann.


 * Victor Schnirelmann, "Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia". National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, 2001. pg 146: "The Azeri revisionists kept emphasizing their early local cultural heritage in order to claim indigenous status, and thus the right to all the local territories, based on the traditional settler principle. At the same time, they gradually began to Turkify the early indigenous inhabitants".  Currently, there are some Azerbaijani embassy sites claiming even Caucasian Albanians, Medes and Sumerians as Turks.
 * Overall, regional sources should not be used and Western specialist sources should be used in topics of ancient history as regional sources have a tendency to bias things. For example, the book by Mustafa Kamal (likely a Kurdish person) claims that Suhrawardi has Kurdish poetry which is also blatantly false.
 * Walbridge, who is alive scholar, has written several books on Suhrawardi and consequently can be cited as a reliable specialist sources.
 * So what matters as usual for Wikipedia is Wesern Scholarly sources. per WP:RS as it is obvious that local and regional historians from the republic of Azerbaijan will try to Turkify Suhrawardi.


 * But besides that, anyone with some knowledge of Suhrawardi can easily dismiss any claim of him being Turkish (i.e. Azerbaijani Turkish). He was immersed in pre-Islamic Iranian philosophy and his ancestry's name "Amirak" is a Persian/Kurdish suffix.  He also wrote in Persian and Arabic, and his name "Suhraward" is a Middle Persian word meaning "red rose".  Also Zanjan at that time had its own Pahlavi language (Hamdullah Mustawafi mentions it even after the Mongol invasion) and Suhraward is mentioned as a Kurdish village before the Mongols.  So he was not Turkish but rather Iranian speaking.  Also his affiliation with pre-Islamic Iranian philosophy which he revived and synthesized with post-Islamic Iranian society shows his Iranian cultural background while he had absolutely nothing to do with Turkish culture.


 * Bosworth, C.E.,"Zanjan", Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Ed., vol. 11:447. "..and also stated that the ihabitants spoke "pure Pahlawi", i.e. a Median or nothern form of Persian".
 * On Suhraward, see again Encyclopaedia of Islam.. it is mentioned as Kurdish village. So either way Suhrawardi spoke some sort of Iranian language (be it Persian or Kurdish), but was not Turkish.  Infact his background as a expositor of pre-Islamic Iranian/Zoroastrian/KayKhusrawian philosophy makes it 100% impossible for him to be of any Turkish background.
 * Suhrawardi was a Shafi'ite Muslim while Turkish nomads that entered the area from the Saljuq era were not sedentary and overwhelmingly Hanafi.
 * Also an Azerbaijani Turkish did not exist during the time of Suhrawardi. That is why you do not see any classical work calling any author "Azerbaijani Turk" or "Azerbaijani".  And no serious source would call a reviver of pre-Islamic Persian philosophy a Turk.
 * (“Transcaucasia in XI-XV centuries” in Rostislav Borisovich Rybakov (editor), History of the East. 6 volumes. v. 2. “East during the Middle Ages: Chapter V., 2002. – ISBN 5-02-017711-3. http://gumilevica.kulichki.com/HE2/he2510.htm. Quote: “In the XIV-XV cc., as the Azerbaijani Turkic-language ethnos was beginning to form, arose its culture, as well. At first it had no stable centers of its own (recall that one of its early representatives, Nesimi, met his death in Syria) and it is rather difficult at that time to separate from the Osman (Turkish) culture. Even the ethnic boundary between the Turks and the Azerbaijanis stabilized only in the XVI c., and even then it was not quite defined yet. Nevertheless, in the XV c., two centers of the Azerbaijani culture are forming: the South Azerbaijan and (lowland) Karabakh. They took final shape later, in the XVI-XVIII cc. Speaking of the Azerbaijan culture originating at that time, in the XIV-XV cc., one must bear in mind, first of all, literature and other parts of culture organically connected with the language. As for the material culture, it remained traditional even after the Turkicization of the local population. However, the presence of a massive layer of Iranians that took part in the formation of the Azerbaijani ethnos, have imposed its imprint, primarily on the lexicon of the Azerbaijani language which contains a great number of Iranian and Arabic words. The latter entered both the Azerbaijani and the Turkish language mainly through the Iranian intermediary. Having become independent, the Azerbaijani culture retained close connections with the Iranian and Arab cultures. They were reinforced by common religion and common cultural-historical traditions.”<
 * Olivier Roy, "The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations", I.B.Tauris, 2000.pg 18:"The concept of an Azeri identity barely appears at all before 1920. Up until that point Azerbaijan had been purely a geographic area. Before 1924, the Russians called the Azeri Tatars 'Turks' or 'Muslims'. Prior to 1914, the reformist leaders of Azerbaijan stressed their Turkish and Muslim identity.


 * And there is not a single Western scholarly book (search google scholar from prominent Suhrawardi scholars in the area) source that mentions Suhrawardi as Turkish.


 * Consequently pushing local non-peer reviewed and contradictatory to Western WP:RS sources is pushing WP:fringe; which should be absolutely discouraged! Thank you.--Khodabandeh14 (talk) 02:36, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Yet More on the Kurdish/Persian Issue
Gomada edited the article to say Suhrawardi was Kurdish (subsequently reverted by HamidRJ), citing a Western scholarly source: M. Kamal, Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy, p. 12, Ashgate Publishing Inc., 2006, ISBN 0-7546-5271-8. That source does indeed say that Suhrawardi was Kurdish, with about a half-page of argument. However, a review of the book I found in a scholarly journal casts doubt on the reliability of Kamal's identification. The review is: Alparslan Açıkgenc, Review, Philosophy East & West vol. 59 no. 3 (Jul. 2009), pp. 385-394 (JSTOR link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40469136). This is what the reviewer has to say about Kamal's claim, on p. 388 of the review: "In the second chapter there is also a claim concerning the ethnic origin of Suhrawardi as a Kurd, and the main reference is to Shahrazuhri's well-known work Nuzhat al-Arwah wa Rawdat al-Afrah fi Tarikh al-Hukama. But it is understood from the footnote that this work was not available to Kamal because he takes his citation from Mehdi Amin Razavi's Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination. I went through almost all the pages discussing Suhrawardi and was not able to substantiate the claim. . . . Kamal claims that according to Shahrazuhri this is the name of the town, which is supposedly Kurdish. But I was not able to find this claim in Shahrazuhri's cited work." Therefore, given all the other undisputed references indicating Suhrawardi was Persian, I don't think Kamal's book is sufficient to warrant changing the article. So I agree with HamidRJ's reversion. Dmvjjvmd (talk) 16:09, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Azerbaijani
For god sake again some Iranian propaganda. Why do Persians hate Azerbaijanis so much? Nizami Ganjavi, Fuzuli, Bahmanyar Azerbaijani and many more Azerbaijani scientists and philosophers were Persified by The English/Persian/Armenian Wikipedian community. Read This: ''Sührəvərdi nisbəsi filosofun Sührəvərdə mənsubluğunu bildirir. Mənbələrdə göstərilir ki, Sührəvərd Zəncan şəhəri yaxınlığında kiçik yerdir, Zəncan isə Azərbaycanda, Cibal (əl-Cibal) nahiyyəsindədir.[21] Tədqiqatçılardan Hilmi Ziya Ülkən Sührəvərdinin Azərbaycanda doğulduğunu [22], V. A. Qordlevski isə onun etnik mənşəcə azərbaycanlı[23] olduğunu yazmışlar. Zakir Məmmədov [2][24] və Malik Mahmudov[1] da filosofun etnik mənşəcə azərbaycanlı olduğunu qeyd etmişlər. Eyni zamanda, müxtəlif tədqiqatçların əsərlərində filosofun fars [25][26] və kürd [27] mənşəli olması da göstərilmişdir.'' Translation: ''Suhrawardi pen name, shows the Suhrawardi identity of the philosopher. Sources indicated that small place near the city of Zanjan, Zanjan is in the Jibal region of Azerbaijan. Researcher Hilmi Ziya Ulken, wrote that Suhrawardinin was born in Azerbaijan, V. A. Gordlevski wrote that he was ethnicly Azerbaijani. Zakir Mammadov and Malik Mahmudov also noted that the philosopher was Azerbaijani. At the same time, various researchers show in their works that he was ethnicly persian and kurdish.'' But for some reason the English Wikipedia (Or let's say Persian Propaganda) showed him as Persian. They can just write "Shahāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī (Persian: شهاب‌الدین سهروردی‎‎, also known as Sohrevardi) was a Persian[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], Azerbaijani or Kurdish philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy and mysticism that drew upon Zoroastrian and Platonic ideas. Please fix this problem. --oyuncu aykhan speak now or shut up forever 1 Haziran 2017 (UTC)


 * You need help. --HistoryofIran (talk) 16:35, 1 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Why would an "azerbaijani" turk base his philosophy on Sassanid Persian beliefs? As for Nezami it's already been established in the article that he was of Persian heritage, you realize that you turks only arrived in the region in 1050 AD, right? Has it occurred to you that city names such as Ganja, Baku, Zanjan, Sohreward, Ardabil, etc. are all Persian words with no meaning in any turkic language? Persians lived in the land of Azarbaijan before any turk stepped foot there, and they didn't magically disappear as soon as turks occupied that land. Your colonization of the region took many centuries, even Arab historians like Hamdallah Mustawfi in the 14th century noted many Persian speakers living in Azarbaijan. And no, we don't hate or even think about you people, except for the times you start trying to steal our historical figures. --Qahramani44 (talk) 9 December 2018 —Preceding undated comment added 02:04, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Ancestry
All the mystics of Sohrevard seem to have been changed to 'Persian' ethnicity. This does not seem accurate; Sohrevard in the Middle Ages, before the Mongol invasion, was described as a Kurdish town.

From 'Lands of the Eastern Caliphate': "To the west of Sultaniyah lay the two small neighbouring towns of Suhravard and Sujas, which were still of some importance when Mustawfi was here in the 8th (14th) century, though now entirely gone to ruin. Ibn Hawkal writes in the 4th (10th) century that Suhravard with its Kurdish population was then as large as Shahrazur, it was a walled town and well fortified, lying to the south of Zanjan on the road to Hamadan. Sujas, or Sijas, lay close to Suhravard, and Mustawfi describes both places as having been ruined during the Mongol invasion, so that in his day they were merely large and populous villages."

Perhaps one can call them 'Iranic mystic from a Kurdish town', since they wrote in Persian, drew on Iranic beliefs, and there's no real contemporary assertions regarding their ethnicity, but outright calling them 'Persian' is a mistake. Additionally, Calling them 'Azeri' is definitely a mistake.

Znertu (talk) 13:36, 21 January 2019 (UTC)


 * The term 'Kurd' still referred to an amalgam of nomadic western Iranian tribes back in the 10th-century. Daylamites are also in some contexts called 'Kurdish' due to their lifestyle being viewed as primitive by medieval Iranian/Arab historians/geographers. --HistoryofIran (talk) 15:08, 21 January 2019 (UTC)


 * This is a simplification, the groups and individuals designated as Kurds in the 10th century included (half-)nomads, dynastic kings, townsmen, muslims and non-muslims, villagers, scholars etc. A legend of origin of the Kurds already existed, as well as instances of Kurdish solidarity. All identities (Iranian, Turk, Arab, Kurd) were still somewhat vague in the Middle Ages. It's definitely not warranted to automatically assume he was Persian foregoing any mention of the Kurds, even though his town was described as a Kurdish one. Znertu (talk) 16:41, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Nationality
Subject's Nationality Should be cited in the lead. since it is relevant to subjects Notability. Removing Nationality from the lead and introduction section is pointless. Researcher1988 (talk) 14:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
 * That's his ethnicity, not nationality. And why is it relevant? --HistoryofIran (talk) 14:26, 19 October 2023 (UTC)