The Niche of Lights by al-Ghazali: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Mishkat al-Anwar, the Niche of Lights, is a short treatise in three parts, written near the end of al-Ghazali's life, probably in the first years of the twelfth century.

It presents itself as an answer to a question from a friend or disciple, asking for an explanation of two texts: the Light Verse of the Quran and a saying attributed to the Prophet about seventy veils.

The first part establishes that the word light applies properly only to God. The second interprets the images of the verse, the niche, the glass, the lamp, the tree and the oil, as symbols of faculties in the human being. The third classifies humanity by the veils that stand between each kind of person and the divine.

The whole runs to around fifty pages in English. It is dense, and it says more per page than anything else he wrote.

Who al-Ghazali Was

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born in Tus in northeastern Persia in 1058 and became, by his mid-thirties, the most prominent scholar in the Islamic world.

He held the chair of law at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, the most prestigious teaching post there was, and taught hundreds of students while producing an enormous body of work in jurisprudence, theology and philosophy.

His attack on the philosophers, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, argued that the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic system as developed by Avicenna could not be proven and in places contradicted revelation, and it shaped the subsequent course of Islamic thought.

He then, in 1095, walked away. He left Baghdad, his post, his family and his fame, and spent roughly a decade in retreat, in Damascus, Jerusalem and elsewhere, practising as a Sufi.

His return to teaching, and the works of his final years, come after that decade, and this treatise is one of them.

The Crisis That Produced It

The autobiographical background, which he wrote about himself and which frames everything late.

In his spiritual autobiography he describes a breakdown. He could not teach; his tongue dried up; he could not eat. He had come to see that he taught for reputation and that his knowledge was of things rather than of the thing itself.

He describes examining every path to certainty available to him: the theologians, the philosophers, the esoteric sects, and the Sufis. Only the last, he concluded, actually reached what the others talked about, and they reached it by practice rather than by argument.

The Sufi decade is what gives this book its authority and its problem. It is written by someone who had, on his own account, tasted what he was describing. It is also written by someone whose earlier reputation rested on having refuted a good deal of what the description now requires.

The Light Verse

The text under commentary, and it is worth having before the argument.

Quran 24:35 reads, in outline: God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The likeness of his light is as a niche in which is a lamp; the lamp in a glass; the glass as it were a glittering star, kindled from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost shine even if no fire touched it. Light upon light. God guides to his light whom he will.

The verse has been commented on more than almost any other, and the image is unusually concrete: a specific arrangement of objects, each nested in the next, with a source of fuel and a source of flame.

Al-Ghazali's reading takes each element as a faculty of the human being and the whole as an account of how knowledge of God arrives.

Light as the True Name

The first part, and the book's foundational move.

He begins with ordinary usage. Light is what is visible in itself and makes other things visible. The sun is light in that sense, and a lit lamp, and by extension the eye that sees.

He then argues that each of these is light only relatively. The sun's light depends on something perceiving it. The eye's light is full of defects. The intellect's light is better and still derived.

Only one thing is light without qualification: that which is visible in itself, makes everything else visible, and receives its being from nothing. That is God, and every other use of the word light is a borrowing from that primary sense.

The philosophical structure here is Neoplatonic, whatever al-Ghazali would have said about the label. A single source, and everything else real to the degree that it participates.

The Seven Defects of the Eye

The passage that most rewards close reading, and a good example of his method.

He lists the failures of bodily sight. The eye cannot see itself. It cannot see what is very far or very near. It cannot see what is behind a veil. It sees the surface of things and not their interior. It sees only part of what exists, since it cannot see what is intelligible rather than sensible. It sees the large as small and the distant as tiny. It sees the still as moving, as the stars, and the moving as still, as the shadow of a sundial.

Each defect is a real feature of vision, stated precisely. Al-Ghazali is not disparaging the senses rhetorically; he is cataloguing exactly where they fail.

The purpose is comparative. Having established what sight cannot do, he can show that the intellect does each of these things, and therefore deserves the name of light more than the eye does.

Why the Intellect Sees

The counterpart, and the point of the comparison.

The intellect sees itself and its own attributes. It grasps what is far in time and space. It penetrates to the inner nature of things. It sees the intelligible, which is most of what exists. It is not deceived by size or distance. And it sees the world as a whole rather than one surface at a time.

Al-Ghazali's conclusion is that the intellect is the truer light, and the eye a dim imitation of it.

He then complicates this in a way that separates him from the philosophers. The intellect too has a veil over it, made of imagination, of sensory habit, of the inherited assumptions a person cannot see past. It is light, and it is also veiled light, and there is a further seeing beyond it that the Sufis reach.

This is where the book turns from epistemology to mysticism, and he does not linger on the transition.

The Hierarchy of Lights

The cosmology that follows from the first part.

If light is borrowed by degrees, then there is an order of borrowers. The lights nearer the source are brighter and lend to those further away. He describes a sequence of luminous beings, angels in his vocabulary, each receiving from above and transmitting below, down to the human intellect and the bodily eye.

The structure is explicitly emanationist. Light descends through intermediaries, and what reaches the human level has passed through a chain.

He uses the image of moonlight: the moon shines with borrowed sunlight, reflects it into a house through a window, and the reflected light illuminates a wall. Nobody would say the wall is lit by itself, and yet it is lit.

The hierarchy will matter enormously in the third part, because it raises the question of where the chain stops and whether what people worship is the top of it.

The Lamp, the Glass, the Tree

The second part, in which the verse's imagery is decoded.

Al-Ghazali proposes five faculties or spirits in the human being, ascending: the sensory, which receives what the senses deliver; the imaginative, which retains and combines images; the intellectual, which grasps universals; the reflective, which reasons from premises to conclusions; and the holy prophetic spirit, which receives what reasoning cannot reach.

He then maps the verse. The niche is the sensory spirit, receiving light through openings. The glass is the imagination, which is dense in itself and becomes transparent when polished. The lamp is the intellect, the source of illumination in the person. The tree is the reflective faculty, which branches and bears fruit. The oil is the prophetic spirit, which would almost shine of itself before any fire touched it.

The reading is elegant and it is one reading among many. What makes it his is the insistence that the verse describes a psychology, and that the ascent it pictures happens inside the person.

The Seventy Veils

The third part, and the reason the book is still argued about.

The saying under commentary holds that God has seventy veils of light and darkness. Al-Ghazali reads the veils as classes of people, each veiled from God by something specific, and sorts them.

Those veiled by pure darkness: the ones who deny God altogether and are occupied with themselves and the world.

Those veiled by light mixed with darkness: idolaters who worship something beautiful, dualists who worship light itself, and those whose conception of God is limited by sense or imagination, including many believers who picture him as a body or a form.

Those veiled by pure light: the ones who have passed beyond images and reached a real understanding, and who are still stopped at some intermediary they take to be the goal.

The scheme is a map of religious error organised by what each error mistakes for the source, and it is remarkably even-handed for a work of medieval theology. Dualists and idolaters are veiled; so are pious Muslims with the wrong picture.

The Obeyed One

The passage at the top of the third part, and the one that has generated nine centuries of dispute.

Among those veiled by pure light, al-Ghazali describes a highest class who have understood that God is beyond attribute and beyond likeness, and who have reached the one who commands the heavens and moves the world, whom he calls the Obeyed One.

These people, he says, worship the Obeyed One, taking him for the Lord. But there is a further stage, reached by the ones who arrive, who recognise that even the Obeyed One is not the ultimate, and that the true God is beyond what moves the world.

The difficulty is obvious. If the being who commands the heavens is not God, then God is at a further remove, reached through an intermediary, and the picture is very close to the Neoplatonic hierarchy in which the One is beyond even the intellect that governs creation.

Readers have argued ever since about whether he meant this literally. The passage is brief, he does not elaborate, and it sits at the summit of the whole scheme.

The Man Who Wrote The Incoherence

The tension a reader cannot avoid, stated directly.

In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali had attacked the emanationist cosmology of Avicenna, arguing among other things that a God who creates through a chain of intermediaries is not the God of revelation, and that the philosophers' scheme reduces him to a remote first cause.

In this book, he sets out a hierarchy of lights descending through intermediaries and places at its top a being who commands the heavens and is not, apparently, the ultimate.

The reconciliations proposed run in several directions. That he is describing degrees of understanding rather than degrees of being. That the Obeyed One is an angel or the Prophet rather than a demiurge. That his late thought simply moved. That the passage is not his.

None has commanded agreement. What is clear is that the al-Ghazali of this book is not straightforwardly the al-Ghazali of the public polemic, and that he seems to have known it, since the work presents itself as written for those able to receive it and not for general circulation.

The Authenticity Question

Worth handling carefully, since it is often used to make the problem go away.

The treatise as a whole is attributed to al-Ghazali in the manuscript tradition and is accepted by nearly all scholars as his.

The third part, and specifically the Obeyed One passage, has been doubted by some, on the grounds that it contradicts his stated positions and that a later hand could have added it.

The counter-argument is that doubting a passage because it says something uncomfortable is not a textual argument, that the manuscripts do not support excision, and that the tension with his other works is a feature of his late thought visible elsewhere too.

Buchman's introduction treats the whole as authentic while laying out the case, and that is the majority position. A reader should assume the passage is his and reckon with it.

What It Handed to Suhrawardi

The downstream influence, which is substantial and rarely traced.

A generation after al-Ghazali died, Suhrawardi built an entire philosophical system on light as the primitive term, with a hierarchy of lights descending from a Light of Lights, and with knowledge understood as illumination rather than as representation.

The Illuminationist system is far more developed, philosophically rigorous, and openly Neoplatonic. The seed of it is recognisably here: the claim that light is the true name of the real, that everything else is light by degree, and that the human intellect is a lamp lit from above.

Suhrawardi was executed for a system that al-Ghazali, the pillar of orthodoxy, had sketched in fifty pages a few decades earlier. That is an irony the history of Islamic thought has not entirely absorbed.

The Objections

Three, of different kinds.

The inconsistency. The book does not sit easily with his other works, and the attempts to make it sit require reading it less literally than its language invites.

The compression. Fifty pages carrying this much metaphysics leaves enormous gaps. The transition from epistemology to mysticism happens in a paragraph, and the summit of the whole scheme is dealt with in a few sentences.

The esoteric framing. The work presents itself as for the few and repeatedly declines to say more. That is a traditional posture, and it also means the most important claims are the least argued.

How to Read It

Practical guidance for a short but dense text.

Read the Light Verse and the veils saying first, so that the commentary has something to attach to.

Read Buchman's introduction before the text, since it explains the argument's structure and flags the contested passage in advance.

Read The Alchemy of Happiness alongside, for the practical Sufi teaching this book presupposes and does not repeat.

Read slowly. The book can be finished in an evening and understood in a month.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you know al-Ghazali as the defender of orthodoxy and want to see what he wrote when he thought only a few would be reading.

Read it if you are interested in Sufi metaphysics and want the point where a major theologian committed to it in writing.

Read it before Suhrawardi, so that the Illuminationist system arrives as a development rather than as an invention.

Read the defects of the eye even if you read nothing else, since it is a piece of observation that holds up entirely on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions