Mishkāt al-Anwār · The Niche of Lights

Ghazālī's commentary on the Light Verse — a short book that reads the niche, the glass, the lamp and the oil as levels of the human faculties and of reality, and ends with a veiled account of a light so absolute that everything else, called light, is only borrowing the word.

The clearest single text for the light-metaphysics rhyme, by the man who had the authority to say it safely. Read it beside the Zohar's opening pages and the family resemblance is startling and, so far as anyone can show, unrelated.