Sufism

The soul is a stranger in this world of darkness, exiled from its true homeland of light

In this allegorical tale, Suhrawardi casts the human soul as a captive taken far from home, and the entire spiritual path as the long journey of remembering where home actually is.

The Tale of the Occidental Exile is one of Suhrawardi's visionary narrative works, in which the soul is depicted as a traveler originally from the Orient of pure light who has been captured and imprisoned in the dark Occident - matter, the body, the physical world. The geographic language is symbolic rather than literal: east represents the world of immaterial light and true origin, while west represents the realm of darkness and forgetting the embodied soul must struggle to escape. The narrative form itself is significant - rather than laying out the teaching as abstract argument, Suhrawardi tells it as a story of imprisonment and eventual awakening to one's true homeland, a genre he used elsewhere to make illuminationist philosophy experientially vivid. This allegory of exile and homecoming became one of the most frequently cited images summarizing Suhrawardi's philosophy of light for readers unfamiliar with his more technical works.

The Tale of the Occidental Exile (Qissat al-Ghurba al-Gharbiyya)

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• What Sufism says about longing and separation

  Suhrawardi tells the soul's story as a kidnapping. Home is a country of light, the place of exile is matter and the body, and the whole path is remembering which direction home is in.