 About half a century earlier than Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240), Suhrawardi introduces an independent ‘world of images’ – what Corbin labelled the mundus imaginalis, a fourth ontological level (later rejected by Mulla Sadra, see Landolt 2017). Van Lit (2017, 7) prefers the translation ‘world of images’ (or ’imaginable world’) over Corbin’s ‘imaginal world’ to render Suhrawardi’s concept of ‘ alam al-mithal. This fourth world lies alongside the three worlds (i) of the intelligible or of the dominating (qahira) lights, (ii) of the spiritual, i.e. a soul associated with a body, either human or celestial, or the managing (mudabbira) lights, and (iii) of the material or the ‘barriers’ (barzakhiyan) (PI, §246). This independent ‘world of immaterial shapes’ (ashbah murajjada) or images (suwar) operates like an ‘isthmus’ or an ‘intermediary realm’ of “dark and illuminated suspended images (suwar mu‘allaqa)”. It lies somewhere between the physical world of darkness and the world of the ‘Lords of the species’ (arbab al-anwa‘), i.e. the world of the Platonic Forms of ‘pure Lights’ (horizontal lights). This fourth ‘world of images’ is where new entities – the ‘suspended forms’ (muthul mu‘allaqa) – exist and which post-mortem souls grasp with their imagination. Suhrawardi actually expands on Avicenna’s suggestion that imagination has an important eschatological function to explain the fate of souls in the Afterlife (cf. van Lit, 2017, 20–47). 