ews on divine knowledge discussed by Suhrawardī are first and foremost Avicennian, which makes it necessary to recapitulate Avicenna’s major teachings on divine intellection. In the light of our presentation, we discover that Suhrawardī is not satisfied with the Avicennian answer on God’s knowledge of particulars. Following the Avicennian-Peripatetic method that Suhrawardī himself presents in some epitomes of Avicenna’s philosophy, he develops an alternative answer using the semantically negative notion of “non-existence of absence” (ʿadam al-ġayba). However, this teaching is not sufficient to answer the question of the nature of knowledge: negative notions cannot explain cognitive existence as a positive reality. Based on the relation between “apprehended”, “manifest” and “light”—a relation that is the basis of the metaphysics of the Philosophy of illumination—, we study paragraphs 160‒163 of the book, devoted to the question of divine knowledge, to present the Philosophy of Illumination as an elaboration of Suhrawardī’s metaphysics, the “science of lights” (ʿilm al-anwār). The study thus allows us to clarify certain essential features of this work: the fundamental question of self-apprehension; the principal notion relating to the discussion on divine knowledge, that of the “relation” (iḍāfa); Suhrawardī’s refutation of the Avicennian notion of providence; and his very specific defence of Platonic Forms. At the end of our presentation, we show that even if some conclusions of Suhrawardī depart from Avicenna, the Avicennian views remain at the foundation of Suhrawardī’s Philosophy of Illumination. It is thus by no means a refutation of Peripateticism or of Avicennism, but rather an endeavour to subsume the Avicenian-Peripatetic philosophy within the framework of a metaphysics of lights.