Ma`rifat Falsafi

Shaykh Shahab-al-din Suhravardi is the first Muslim philosopher to look into the Qur’an and hadith for evidences for his philosophical theories. In this way, he tries to find the most reliable knowledge of the ultimate truth. In this article, the authors analyze Suhravardi’s viewpoint on hermeneutics (ta’wil) of religious texts. They argue that based on his theory of imagination in the domains of epistemology and ontology, Suhravardi finds it necessary to go through a process of ta’vil in order to attain and observe esoteric truths. He considers such a process to be multi-leveled and hierarchical, and by such understanding he solves the problem of the contradiction between the oneness of truth and the plurality of ta’vils which rely on one’s pre-understandings.