Camera or behind Camera: Ibn al-Haitham vis-à-vis Shaykh Ishraq on Vision

Abstract

Developing the empirical method based on observation and experiment, Alhazen is considered the greatest Muslim physicist and the most significant figure in the history of optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century. Inventing a camera obscura, Alhazen rebuilt our conception of eyesight. His theory of vision was enormously prominent and much of our understanding of optics and light is based upon his groundbreaking discoveries. He began his criticism of emission by describing what happens when people are exposed to bright lights. No matter what the light source, the effect of bright lights was always the same. What this indicates to Alhazen is that light entering into the eye from an external source had some serious function in eyesight. Respecting observation, experiment and empirical method, Suhrawardi, the father of Illumination School, argues all theories of vision and rejects them just by mere reasoning. Suhrawardi validates his own Illuminationist method by scientists’ empirical method. So, I will argue, he is not to deny empirical aspect of Alhazen’s theory of vision. In an allegory, I will use the camera, representing the whole process of a human vision, while I use “beyond camera” for the embodiment that allows for the unfolding of a human soul’s position in the process of vision. What Alhazen is speaking of, we might call the process within the camera; while what Suhrawardi is speaking of, we could name the process behind the camera.

Keywords

• alhazen
• suhrawardi
• vision
• emission
• intromission