Both the content and channels of manuscript transmission of the philosopher Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi’s short Arabic treatise, I‘tiqad al-Hukama’, “The Creed of the Sages,” show that this was an early work written prior to his “conversion” to Platonism/Illuminationism. Nevertheless, the concern with the compatibility of Sufism and philosophy is already present. Combined with parallel evidence from content and transmission of his Persian allegories, this provides evidence of his early philosophical and religious standpoints. The I‘tiqad al-Hukama’ is a short treatise of about ten printed pages defending the position that doctrines held by the ancient philosophers were compatible with revealed religion in general and Islam in particular. The account given of philosophy is Avicennan and covers cosmology, the relationship of God and the universe, the nature of the human soul, the basic structure of the physical world, and the religious topics of the immortality of the soul and the nature and powers of prophets and saints. The text argues that while the doctrines of the philosophers may appear to differ from those of revealed religion, the underlying meaning is the same—for example, that the philosophers’ notion of the contingency of the universe is essentially identical with the religious idea of its being created. The I‘tiqad contains none of the distinctive ideas of Suhrawardi’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Illumination: light as the fundamental reality, four rather than three metaphysical levels, the Platonic Forms, the critique of Avicennan ontology. This points to an early origin in Iran prior to his philosophical conversion and later journeys in Anatolia and Syria. This impression is reinforced by the evidence of the ten known manuscripts, which indicate that the work initially circulated in Iran and then in Iraqi Shi’ite circles. It was seemiongly unknown to the Sunni circles reviving Suhrawardi’s works in the later 13th century in Iraq and Anatolia. The now-famous Persian allegories show similar origins, as well as indicating that Suhrawardi himself came from a Sufi family and that his intellectual arc moved from childhood Sufism to a philosophy that held the compatibility of philosophy and religion to his mature thought in which Avicennan philosophy was modified in a strongly Neoplatonic fashion. Thus, analysis of content and manuscript tradition can be used to give a clearer picture of Suhrawardi’s early intellectual position.