Constructing a World of Its Own: A Translation of the Chapter on the World of Image from Shahrazūrī’s Rasāʾil al-Shajara al-Ilāhiyya

Even though Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 1310) may have written the more influential commentary on Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191) Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, it was Shams al-Dīn Shahrazūrī (d. ≥1288) who authored the more original one.1 Hossein Ziai made a significant contribution towards this appreciation by publishing his edition of Shahrazūrī’s Sharḥ Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, thereby complementing the earlier publication of Quṭb al-Dīn’s commentary. In the same spirit, we offer here a translation of Shahrazūrī’s chapter on the world of image (ʿālam al-mithāl) from his Rasāʾil al-shajara al-ilāhiyya, whose importance was first pointed out by Hossein Ziai.2 With this translation we aim to follow the example of John Walbridge’s accessible translation of Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s “epistle of the ʿAllāma al-Shīrāzī ascertaining the reality of the world of image.”3 The world of image, or imaginable world (al-ʿālam al-mithālī), was primarily conceived to provide a way to understand from within the medieval philosophical discourse such religious notions as a physical afterlife and divine inspiration. The world of image, in its fullest state of development, was thought of as a world beyond our earthly world. It is a world in the sense of consisting of all kinds of things such as mountains, seas, plants, animals, not as Platonic Forms but as individual entities in all their particular details such as color, taste, and scent. The world of image is beyond our own world in two ways. Firstly, it is not bound to any physical laws; time and space are fluid concepts invoked and revoked whenever necessary, and entities can be of whatever kind they need