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WorkAl-Ghazali

The Niche of Lights

A late commentary on the Qurʾān's Light Verse, in which God is the one true light and every other light is borrowed.

by Al-Ghazali58 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Original title
مشكاة الأنوار
Original language
Arabic

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Overview

A verse of the Qurʾān (24:35) calls God the light of the heavens and the earth, and compares his light to a lamp set in a niche, the lamp in a glass, lit with oil from a blessed olive tree. A friend asked al-Ghazālī to explain it, together with a saying of the Prophet that God has seventy veils of light and darkness, and this short book in three chapters is his answer: a commentary on the verse and the saying, written late in his life, after the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Light, it argues, is what is seen and makes other things seen. The eye's light is weaker than the intellect's, and the prophets are lamps from which others take their light. In the strict sense only God is light, because everything else has its light, and its very existence, from him. Some mystics saw this so fully that nothing else remained in view, and in that intoxication one of them claimed to be the Truth; once sober, the book says, they knew that what they had seen resembled union with God but was not identity. The third chapter sorts human beings by what veils them — darkness, light mixed with darkness, or pure light — up to those who pass beyond al-muṭāʿ, the Obeyed One who moves the heavens, towards a God beyond every description. Most of the dispute over the book has concerned that chapter. The Damascus jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) attacked the work, and in the twentieth century the historian W. Montgomery Watt argued that the veils chapter was a forgery. Hermann Landolt, a scholar of Sufism, answered him with parallels from al-Ghazālī's other writings, and a collection of his works copied four years after his death contains the whole text.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by “light”?

Light, in its first and plain sense, is what is visible in itself and makes other things visible, as the sun and a lamp do. The book then follows the definition upwards. Whatever lets things be seen or known more fully deserves the name more fully: the seeing eye more than the lamp, the intellect more than the eye, and in the end only God, through whom everything is disclosed and exists, deserves it without qualification.

What are the visible world and the unseen world?

The book divides reality into two linked worlds. The visible world is what the senses reach and everyone shares. The unseen world, which it calls the world of dominion, is the realm of spiritual realities, angels and causes, reached only by inward sight. The visible world is its effect and likeness, as a shadow is of the thing that casts it, so visible things can serve as a ladder towards the unseen.

What does tawḥīd mean in this book?

Tawḥīd means affirming that God is one, and the book describes stages in grasping it. Most people affirm that there is no god but God. Some mystics go further and see that there is nothing real except God, since everything else exists only by borrowing. At the summit some lose sight of everything, themselves included. The book calls that state union only loosely; its true name is tawḥīd, the seeing of one.

What are the five spirits of the human being?

The book names five spirits, or powers, that make a human being able to know. The sensory spirit receives what the senses bring; the imaginative spirit keeps images; the intellectual spirit grasps universal truths; the reasoning spirit combines them into new knowledge; and the holy prophetic spirit, found in prophets and some saints, sees the unseen directly. Each is a kind of light, because each discloses something.

What is the difference between taste, proof and trust?

The book ranks three ways of knowing a truth. Taste, the most direct, is experiencing it oneself. Below it comes knowledge by proof, reached through reasoning. Lowest is belief on trust, accepting what a reliable person reports. The book’s image is fire: one can hear news of it, see a burning brand and infer it, or warm oneself at it. Only the last is taste.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

An Eye Truer Than the Eye

If light is what lets us see, which of our powers deserves the name? The first chapter ranks the eye below the intellect by listing everything sight cannot do.

Light, the book begins, is what is seen and makes other things seen, and the name belongs most to whatever does the seeing. That makes the intellect a truer eye than the eye. Sight cannot see itself, cannot see far, cannot see behind a veil, sees only surfaces and misjudges size, taking the sun for something the size of a shield. The intellect knows itself and its own knowing, reaches past every distance and grasps causes and purposes. When it errs, the fault lies with imagination or false belief passing for understanding.

  • perception
  • intellect
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • imagination
  • reasoning
  • human nature

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Every Other Light Is Borrowed

What does it mean that God is the light of the heavens and the earth? The second half of the first chapter answers that nothing but God shines by itself, and draws a startling conclusion about everything else.

Lights take their light from other lights, as a moon from the sun, and the chain cannot run on forever; it must end in a light that shines of itself. Only that first light is light in the strict sense, and everything else, including its very existence, is borrowed, as a borrower is not truly rich. Some mystics saw this so completely that nothing else remained, and in that intoxication said they were God. Once sober, the book says, they knew it had resembled union but was not identity.

  • light
  • divine unity
  • dependency
  • divine transcendence
  • mysticism
  • god
  • divinity
  • metaphysics
  • causation
  • illumination

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Reading the Lamp in the Niche

How should a believer read a verse full of images? The book answers with a theory of symbols in which every visible thing has an unseen counterpart.

The visible world, the second chapter argues, is a likeness of the unseen one, and scripture's images point from one to the other. The verse's niche, glass, lamp, tree and oil stand for five human spirits: the senses, imagination, intellect, reasoning, and the holy prophetic spirit that needs no spark from outside. Reading inwardly never cancels the outward command. Moses was told to take off his sandals, and he did, though the act also meant setting aside both worlds; whoever drops the outward duty for the inward meaning is deceived.

  • symbolism
  • scriptural interpretation
  • analogy
  • prophecy
  • revelation
  • spiritual knowledge
  • spiritual experience
  • angels

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The Seventy Veils

What stands between people and God? The last chapter maps the veils, from greed to subtle theology, and shows that even light can hide him.

The Prophet said that God has seventy veils of light and darkness, and the third chapter sorts humanity by them. Some are veiled by darkness alone: those who live for appetite, money or rank, mistaking a means for an end. Some are veiled by light mixed with darkness: idol-worshippers who see majesty in visible things, theologians who cannot imagine God without a place. Some are veiled by pure light, and the highest pass even beyond the Obeyed One who moves the heavens, towards a God beyond every description.

  • religion
  • theology
  • cosmology
  • desire
  • wealth

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Within this work

passages held
58
distinct concepts
106
by passages held, corpus-wide
#632

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 69 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologyperception5
intellectknowledge5
intellectperception4
knowledgeprophecy4
analogymetaphysics3
lightmetaphysics3
lightperception3
epistemologyintellect2
epistemologylight2
epistemologyknowledge1
intellectlight1
intellectmetaphysics1
intellectprophecy1
knowledgelight1
knowledgeperception1
lightprophecy1
metaphysicsperception1
metaphysicsprophecy1
perceptionprophecy1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Deliverance from Error (المنقذ من الضلال)

    An intellectual autobiography, written at Nishapur after his return to teaching in 1106; Claud Field's Confessions of Al Ghazzali first brought it into English in 1909.

     EN
  2. The Alchemy of Happiness (Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat)

    His major work in Persian, written around 1105 for readers without Arabic, and a shorter companion to the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

     EN
  3. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (تهافت الفلاسفة)

    The book by which he is known in philosophy, finished in Baghdad in January 1095, months before he gave up his chair there and left the city.

     AR
  4. The Just Balance (القسطاس المستقيم)

    One of several answers to the Ismāʿīlīs, this one cast as a dialogue on the road; his autobiography points readers to it instead of repeating its case.

     AR
  5. The Marvels of the Heart (كتاب شرح عجائب القلب)

    The twenty-first of the forty books of the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and the ground for the books on vices and virtues that follow it.

     AR
  6. The Niche of Lights (مشكاة الأنوار) you are here AR
  7. The Standard of Knowledge (معيار العلم في فن المنطق)

    Written after The Incoherence of the Philosophers to explain the philosophers' technical vocabulary to its readers, and to give jurists and theologians a test for their own arguments.

     AR
  8. مقاصد الفلاسفة

    A report before a refutation: Avicenna's system set out without a word of objection, then framed by a short preface and ending that point ahead to The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

     AR
  9. ميزان العمل

    The second half of a pair: having set a standard for knowing in The Standard of Knowledge, he set one here for acting, still in Baghdad, around 1095.

     AR
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