The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the

LMU in Munich, online at W.W.W.

History of Philosophy. Net.

Today's episode, Leading Light, Suhravardi.

The years right around 1190 were busy ones for Saladin, the famous Kurdish sultan of Egypt

in Syria, whose real name in Arabic was Salahadin.

In an assault culminating at the Battle of Hatin in the year 1187, Saladin shocked European Christendom by taking almost all of the Holy Land back

from the Christian rulers who had held it for nearly a century, ever since the First Crusade.

Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem and its surroundings provoked the third

crusade, which succeeded in taking back much of the territory for the Christians, albeit that Jerusalem

itself remained in Muslim hands.

Given how much he had on his plate at the time, the last thing Saladin needed was a

charismatic and brilliant, but religiously unsound, philosopher exerting influence over his son.

So he had the philosopher killed, probably in the year 1191.

The philosopher's name was Chihab-Adin al-Suravadi, sometimes called Al-Machtool, meaning the murdered one.

This dramatic story is an unusual one, and that philosophers seem to have faced remarkably little threat of persecution or political harassment in the Islamic world.

For most of Islamic history, political conditions seem to have encouraged, or at least allowed,

intellectual and scientific experimentation. The early unorthodox thinker Arasi was deemed a heretic by some, and Arizali pronounced Avicena's ideas to constitute

a departure from Islam so grave that it would merit a death sentence.

But neither of these thinkers actually faced persecution for their ideas.

To the contrary, both had high-ranking patrons.

If anything, Avicenna's problem was that powerful men were competing to claim him for their courts.

...