یکی از سخنرانان ویژه همایش بین المللی شیخ اشراق و دنیای جدید پروفسور جان والبریج (سهروردی پژوه بزرگ و استاد برجسته دانشگاه ایندیانا بلومینگتون) بودند. در ادامه فایل تصویری و همچنین چکیده انگلیسی سخنرانی ایشان با عنوان «کشف دوباره سهروردی: شواهدی از نسخ خطی و متون» تقدیم علاقه مندان می گردد.

The philosopher Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi represented a decisive turning point in the history of Islamic philosophy with his embrace of mysticism, his Platonism, and his incisive and still debated critique of Aristotelian and Avicennan metaphysics. However, this influence was not exercised immediately. Given that Suhrawardi's life was cut short in Aleppo at the orders of the great Saladin, evidence of philosophical responses from his lifetime and soon after are sparse, almost entirely limited to accounts of his eccentric life. No autograph manuscripts are known. Manuscripts from the decades after his death are few and confined to only a few of his works and a geographical range in northern Syria and central Anatolia, areas where he was known to have travelled during his adult years. About seventy years after his death, there is an explosion of interest in his work, apparently triggered by the Baghdad Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna, followed by the rather mysterious figure Shams al-Din al-Shahrazuri, each of whom wrote commentaries on works of Suhrawardi as well as substantial works influenced by him. We can date his addition to the philosophical canon to no later than the early 1330s, when a comprehensive manuscript of his works, Ragip Pasa 1480, was copied in Baghdad.

The manuscript record also allows us to trace what was and was not read, when, and in what form, thus giving us indications of how Suhrawardi was understood. Two of his major works, The Philosophy of Illumination and the Talwihat, a work written in what he called "the Peripatetic mode," were widely read but usually through commentaries. A short work, Hayakil al-Nur, seems to have used as an elementary philosophical textbook in certain periods. His Persian allegories, widely read today, were almost unknown, in part only through two manuscripts of eastern Iranian provenance. thus providing evidence that these were works of Suhrawardi's youth and thus providing a corrective to modern scholarship that puts them at the center of his canon.