The short answer
Three named readings show why Qur’an 24:35 cannot be reduced to a simple choice between literalism and symbolism.
Observe the image before explaining it
Read Qur’an 24:35, then continue into the following verses about worship and remembrance. The verse moves from God as light to a niche, lamp, glass, olive tree, oil and accumulating brightness. It explicitly presents an image or comparison and speaks of guidance. Its physical objects matter, but deciding what they signify requires interpretation. Calling a reading “literal” can obscure that the text itself asks its audience to understand a likeness.
Ibn Kathir: light as guidance
Ibn Kathir gathers explanations from earlier authorities. One reported reading understands God as guiding the inhabitants of heaven and earth; others connect the image with the believer and the illumination of faith. His commentary moves through the lamp, glass and oil while relating the image to knowledge and revelation. This is a transmitted theological reading, not an assertion that God is an ordinary visible substance. It asks how divine guidance becomes intelligible through the concrete things named in the verse. The different explanations he preserves also show that a classical commentary need not supply just one uniform gloss.
Muhammad Shafi: protect the distinction between God and material light
Muhammad Shafi discusses the ordinary meaning of light and insists that applying the term to God cannot make God a body or material object. He explains the language through God’s illumination and guidance, and relates the lamp image to the believer’s heart. His account draws on earlier authorities, including al-Ghazali, so it should not be treated as independent of the interpretive history he cites. The theological question is how to affirm the verse while avoiding an inappropriate physical description of God. That concern influences what counts as an acceptable reading of the image.
Al-Ghazali: a map of spiritual perception
In The Niche of Lights, al-Ghazali develops the image into an account of human faculties and their illumination. In the section applying the verse, the niche relates to sensory perception, the glass to imagination, the lamp to intellectual understanding and the tree to reasoning that branches into further knowledge. His purpose is more extensive than defining individual Arabic words. He uses the verse within a philosophical and spiritual account of knowing. A reader should distinguish the Qur’an’s own comparison from this developed symbolic architecture, even while recognising its importance within Muslim intellectual life.
A literary question to carry forward
Read the verse aloud in translation, then notice how each image prepares the next. What does the sequence enable a reader to imagine before any commentary supplies a scheme? This literary exercise is the site’s proposed method, not a fourth inherited tafsir. Ask which aspects of the language each named reading explains especially well and which it leaves in the background.
What this establishes, and what it does not
These readings do not represent every Sunni, Shia or Sufi account of divine light. Symbolic development should be attributed to its interpreter, not silently inserted into the verse. Specialist review pending.
Sources & reading notes
- Qur’an 24:35–38Primary Qur’anic passage. Translation is an interpretation of the Arabic; compare the surrounding verses.
- Ibn Kathir on Qur’an 24:35Named Muslim commentary, in the hosted English edition. Evidence for this interpretation, not an independent witness to the narrated event.
- Muhammad Shafi, Ma’arif al-Qur’an, on 24:35Named Muslim commentary, in the hosted English edition. Evidence for this interpretation, not an independent witness to the narrated event.
- Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights, application to the light verseEnglish translation by W. H. T. Gairdner, Part III, especially numbered discussions of the sensory, imaginative, intellectual and reasoning faculties. Translation is dated; paraphrased here.
Sources checked for this editorial draft on 20 October 2026. Specialist review remains pending. A citation identifies a source; it does not make every interpretation uncontroversial.