 A combination of religious and political factors led to Suhrawardi’s downfall, namely the fact that he succeeded in alienating the powerful religious elite of Aleppo, on whom the Ayyubids depended for the legitimacy of their rule over the city, by always gaining the upper hand when he debated with the learned of the city, none of whom were able to keep up intellectually with him, and seemingly behaving in such a manner as to display a condescending arrogance for the scholars of Aleppo (Marcotte, 2001, 400–401). On the one hand, he was accused of holding heretical beliefs, a vague charge easily supported with the pre-Islamic Persian names and symbols that some of his works contained, his claim to divine-like inspiration, and his questioning, in light of God’s omnipotence, the logical finality of Prophethood. On the other hand, his association with al-Zahir, the Ayyubid ruler, and his earlier relationships with the recently conquered Artuqids, one of the local rulers of southwest Anatolia to whom his Tablets to ‘Imad (written in Aleppo) was dedicated, may have been interpreted as political intrigue or, at worst, holding Isma‘ili views: Suhrawardi’s views regarding the ‘Caliph of God on Earth’; the hierarchical conception of being structured around the ‘victorial domination (qahr)’ relation of ‘irridiations’ (shuruq) of light in terms similar to the Arabic ‘Empedoclean’ views found in the works of Sijistani (d. after 971) or the Ikhwan al-Safa’, etc. (Landolt, 2008, 242–244). 