Suhrawardi adopts a familiar ‘pyramidal structure of levels of light being’, from the Light of lights to the sublunary world. He appeals to two (Peripatetic) principles to uphold the existence of a first necessary cause — the Light of Lights — and all the basic classes of beings (light and darkness, substance and state, independent and dependent beings). A first principle, Walbridge notes, “is a form of the principle of sufficient reason, ‘the principle of the most noble contingency’ […] which a