Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The notion of a “World of Images” located somewhere between the immaterial and the material world was a mainstay of eschatological speculation in late medieval Islam. As has been recognised before, the concept was launched by al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). However, its more properly philosophical underpinnings, in particular the notion of “suspended” images – images which somehow have an objective, rather than just a mental or subjective, status – merit further clarification, which this article attempts to provide. Since the concept of “suspended forms”, while applied to eschatological matters in the last treatise of the <jats:italic>Philosophy of Illumination</jats:italic>, makes its first appearance in a discussion of mirror vision, I examine in some detail Avicenna's understanding of mirror vision as presented in the <jats:italic>Shifāʾ</jats:italic>, to which al-Suhrawardī reacts. I then undertake a detailed reconstructive analysis of two paragraphs of the <jats:italic>Philosophy of Illumination</jats:italic>, paying particular attention to the question of the ontological status of “suspended” or “self-subsistent” images as well as to the idea that mirrors serve, not as loci in which images inhere, but as loci at which they become manifest (singular <jats:italic>maẓhar</jats:italic>).</jats:p>