When Henry Corbin arrived in Tehran in 1945 to take up a position at the newly established Institut Français d’Iranologie. He found university philosophy departments teaching almost exclusively Western thinkers, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, while native traditions of Islamic philosophy persisted largely outside the modern academy. Corbin spent the next three decades working alongside major Iranian scholars like Seyyed Hossein Nasr to reverse that situation. The irony is that the man most responsible for insisting Islamic philosophy belonged within philosophy’s canon itself was a Frenchman from Paris. What do we make of that?

The question matters because it sits at the intersection of two urgent concerns: the debate about who gets to represent whom across the divide of East and West, and the less fashionable question of whether Western intellectual life has amputated something from itself that it cannot recover without looking elsewhere.

From Heidegger to the East

Born in Paris in 1903, Corbin was formed in the rigorous traditions of European philosophy. He studied theology and scholasticism and became one of the first French translators of Martin Heidegger, traveling to Germany to meet the philosopher whose work he found electrifying. Heidegger’s project was essentially an attempt to dig beneath the crust of Western metaphysics and recover the forgotten question of “being,” which centuries of rationalist abstraction had buried under procedure and system. Corbin absorbed this method of retrieval and then followed it in a direction Heidegger never anticipated.

The decisive turn came through an encounter with a manuscript. Louis Massignon, the great French scholar of Islamic studies, placed in Corbin’s hands the writings of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi. Suhrawardi’s project, which he called Hikmat al-Ishraq or the Philosophy of Illumination, proposed that reality, at its foundation, was not the kind of thing that syllogisms could fully grasp. Reality was structured like........

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