The Light

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as a niche within which is a lamp; the lamp is within glass; the glass as if it were a pearly star.

24:35 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

Āyat an-Nūr. Nūr is said of Allah as a predicate in construct, nūru s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, the only verse that predicates nūr of Him; the definite an-nūr, thirteen times in the Qurʼan, is never said of Him. Aṭ-Ṭabarī reports three readings: the guide of those in the heavens and the earth, from Ibn ʻAbbās and Anas, which he chose because the verse follows 24:34; the One who orders the affair in them, from Mujāhid and Ibn ʻAbbās; and radiance, from Ubayy ibn Kaʻb, who says it begins with the light of Himself and then gives the light of the believer. Ibn Kathīr adds that some read nawwara, He lit. As-Saʻdī: He is light in Himself and His veil is light, and His Book, His law and faith in the heart are light that returns to Him. Al-Qurṭubī: He is not among the lights perceived by sight. Al-Baghawī carries the same three readings under the same names and adds two more: aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk, who takes it as the One who lights the heavens and the earth, the sky by the angels and the earth by the prophets; and Ubayy ibn Kaʻb with al-Ḥasan and Abū l-ʻĀliyah, who take it as the One who adorned them, the sky with the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth with the prophets, the learned and the believers. He reports it said also that the lights are all of them from Him. Of the likeness that follows he gives three readings, that it is the light of Allah in the believer’s heart, which Ibn Masʻūd read into the words themselves, that it is the Qurʼan, from al-Ḥasan and Ibn Zayd, which aṭ-Ṭabarī preferred, and that it is the one who was sent with it, from Kaʻb al-Aḥbār and Muḥammad ibn Kaʻb; and from Ubayy, that the believer turns about in five lights, his speech, his deed, his going in, his coming out and his end. Ibn Kathīr gives the report behind the guidance reading: from Anas, that Allah says my light is my guidance. He brings to the verse three texts of the root said of Allah’s own light — the supplication at aṭ-Ṭāʼif, seeking refuge in the light of the Face by which the darknesses are lit and the affair of this world and the next is set right; the night supplication that this Name’s own supplication page carries, where the words of this verse are said back to Allah; and the report that Allah created His creation in darkness and then cast upon them of His light, so that whoever was struck by it was guided and whoever missed it went astray, which grounds the guidance reading in a text rather than in the run of the passage. He carries from Ibn Masʻūd that there is with Him no night and no day and that the light of the Throne is from the light of His Face, and from al-ʻAwfī on Ibn ʻAbbās an occasion, that the Jews asked how the light of Allah gets through from below the sky and the likeness was struck in answer. He divides the pronoun two ways, the guidance of Allah in the heart or the believer’s own light, and likens the heart in its clearness to the lamp of jewel-like glass and what it takes of the Qurʼān to the even, clear oil; and he closes on the report of the four hearts, whose first is the bare heart with a lamp in it shining, and its lamp is its light. He prefers, of the sayings on the tree that is neither eastern nor western, that it stands in level open ground with the sun on it from the day’s beginning to its end. Al-Baghawī sets out at length the reading that the likeness is of the one who was sent with it, in three forms: Kaʻb al-Aḥbār to Ibn ʻAbbās, that the niche is his breast, the glass his heart and the lamp the prophethood in it; Ibn ʻUmar by Sālim, that the blessed tree is Ibrāhīm and the light upon light is the two hearts; and Muḥammad ibn Kaʻb al-Quraẓī, that the niche is Ibrāhīm, the glass Ismāʻīl and the lamp the one foretold, with neither eastern nor western read as neither of the two prayer directions. He gives Ubayy’s four traits beside the five lights — if given he gives thanks, if tried he is patient, if he judges he is just, if he speaks he is truthful — and az-Zajjāj on why glass is named, since fire shows in it plainer than in anything and the glass increases the light; and he sets out the three readings of the word for the star with Abū ʻUbaydah defending the one most of the grammarians called a solecism, and asks why a star and not the sun or the moon, and answers that those two are eclipsed and the stars are not. As-Saʻdī makes the likeness turn on the nature a man is made upon, which stands to the light of faith as the clear oil stands to the flame: the oil of the Levant, which the sun reaches at both ends of the day, is clearest, and a nature clear of ill intent and of misunderstanding of Allah takes the light in the same way, so that the light of nature and the light of faith and the light of knowledge gather into the light upon light of the verse. Aṭ-Ṭabarī states the guidance reading at the head of his entry as his own and gives the ground for it: the sentence comes straight after the sending down of the clear signs, so it is an account of where that sending down falls among creation, the joining particle left out and the telling of His guidance begun afresh. Under the likeness he sets four positions on the pronoun — the light of the believer, from Ubayy ibn Kaʻb, who read the words themselves as the likeness of the believer, and from Saʻīd ibn Jubayr and aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk; the one who was sent with it, from Kaʻb al-Aḥbār answering Ibn ʻAbbās and again from Saʻīd ibn Jubayr; the guidance of Allah and His Book, from Ibn ʻAbbās, al-Ḥasan, Ibn Zayd and Zayd ibn Aslam; and obedience, from Ibn ʻAbbās, where the occasion of the Jews’ question stands a second time — and he chooses the third, that the likeness is struck for the Qurʼan in the hearts of those who believe in it, as al-Baghawī reports of him. On that choice the niche is the column of the lamp that holds the wick, the counterpart of the unpierced recess in a wall; the lamp is what the heart holds of the Book and its clear signs; and the glass is the breast, likened to a star for its clearness of unbelief and of doubt. He carries the preference through to the end: the oil that nearly shines is the proofs of Allah, which nearly shine of themselves for whoever considers them, and light upon light is the Book laid upon the proofs He had set up before it came down. Al-Qurṭubī opens on the word before he opens on the verse. Light in the speech of the Arabs is the radiance grasped by sight, and is used of whatever among the meanings is sound and shows, so that one says of speech that it has light, and the people say so-and-so is the light of the town, and a line his editor gives to an-Nābighah tells a king he is the sun and the kings are stars; and so the word may be said of Allah by way of praise, because He brought the things into being and the light of every thing is from Him, while He is not Himself among the radiances that are perceived. Then a doctrine answered by name: Hishām al-Jawālīqī and a party of those who hold Allah a body said He is a light not like the lights and a body not like the bodies, and al-Qurṭubī answers that this is impossible of Allah by reason and by transmission, and that the saying undoes itself, since to call Him a body or a light is to judge Him by the reality of that, and to add not like the bodies and not like the lights is to take back what was affirmed. What drove them to it, he says, was the outward of this verse, of the night supplication, and of the answer I saw a light when he was asked whether he had seen his Lord. He gathers the readings of the Name under their names and prefers the first of them, that by Him and by His power their radiances shone and their affairs stand, as one says the king is the light of the townspeople — a figure said of a king and the plain truth said of Allah — and calls it the most general in meaning and the soundest with the interpretation. That is not aṭ-Ṭabarī’s choice, and the two entries part here. He adds that Allah named His Book a light and named His Messenger a light, since each of them guides and makes plain. He gives the stopping place each reading asks for: Ibn al-Anbārī counts the sentence of the Name a good stop, after which the likeness begins afresh. He reports that Ubayy and Ibn Masʻūd read the likeness of His light in the heart of the believer, and from Muḥammad ibn ʻAlī at-Tirmidhī that no one else read it so in the revelation, though others agreed with them in the meaning; and he carries the argument of the party who will not let the pronoun go back to Allah, that there is no limit to His light. Of the olive he gives Ibn ʻAbbās on its uses — oil to burn and to eat and to dress with, a stuff for tanning, wood and husk for fuel, nothing in it without a use, down to the ash that washes silk — and that it is the first tree that grew and the first after the flood, that it grows in the dwellings of the prophets and in the holy land, and that seventy prophets asked blessing on it. On the tree that is neither eastern nor western he adds two answers: Ibn ʻAṭiyyah refuses the report of a tree hemmed in by a thicket, because fruit in that state spoils and that is seen in the world; and ath-Thaʻlabī holds that the Qurʼan is explicit that the tree is of this world, since the olive stands in place of the tree. Under the reading that takes the likeness of the one who was sent with it he names what al-Baghawī leaves unsaid, that the two directions denied are the Jews’ prayer toward the west and the Christians’ toward the east, so that the sense is neither Jewish nor Christian but upright and submitting. He ends where the book’s own argument ends. Ibn al-ʻArabī, reporting that some of the jurists made the whole likeness a figure of Ibrāhīm and of the Messenger and of ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib and his son, calls that a departure from the plain sense, though a man is not forbidden to range wide in the striking of likenesses; and al-Qurṭubī says of all the sayings that they have no hold on the verse but the first, that this is a likeness struck for His light, and that a likeness can be struck for a light so great only out of His creation, because creatures in their shortfall understand only by themselves and from themselves, and but for that none would know Allah but Allah. Ibn ʻĀshūr takes the sentence of the Name as a parenthesis set between the sending down of the clear signs and the likeness, and the likeness itself as the explaining of the clear signs rather than of the Name — which is why it is not joined to what is before it, and why most of the commentators, who read it the other way, treat it as an apposition. He argues the word first: it is a bare noun for a meaning and stands to the verbs of lighting as a verbal noun stands to its own, so that to predicate it carries the force a verbal noun carries; and to predicate it of Allah must be a figure, because the root of the creed is that He is not a body nor a substance nor a quality borne by one, and the reality of light cannot be free of being one of those. That is the conclusion al-Qurṭubī reaches by refuting the men who held Him a body, reached here from the other end, and the two entries agree without touching. He quotes al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār by name — that the light is the Manifest by which every manifesting is, by which things are uncovered and to which and from which, the true light with no light above it — and takes the Name to mean the bringing of all things out of the dark of not being into the showing of being, so that it comes back to making plain in creation, in guidance and in law; and he says Ibn Barrajān of Seville followed him in his commentary on the Beautiful Names and made the Name return to the attributes of act. He reads the night supplication this Name’s own supplication page carries with the further words, and of whoever is in them, and argues that the joining shows the heavens and the earth there to be themselves and not what is in them, so that light in that report is the pouring out of being and not guidance: the word, on his reading, does not carry one sense wherever it falls, and each place takes what its own context will bear. He sets down the three senses the philosophers of illumination hold — the proof of knowledge, the perfection of the soul, and that by which the luminous worlds are witnessed — and notes that as-Suhrawardī gathered all three in the opening of his Hayākil an-Nūr, aid us with light and set us firm upon light and gather us to light, as ad-Dawānī showed in his commentary on it. His own reading of the Name is that Allah is the bringer into being of everything the word light is said of, and most of all of the means of true knowledge, of the standing proof and of the guide to sound deeds: the shared word used at once in the several senses it holds. On the likeness he asks why a lamp and not the rising of the sun or of the moon, and answers that what was wanted is a light appearing within a darkness and clearing it over the space meant to be lit; that the moon comes and goes within the night, unlike the lamp described; and that the point is the gear set about the lamp, without which the likeness could not be taken apart piece by piece. He says the lexicographers know no sense of the niche but a recess in a wall that is not pierced through, that ar-Rāghib, the author of the Qāmūs and az-Zamakhsharī keep to that alone and agree the word is Abyssinian taken into Arabic, and that it is counted among the words of other tongues in the Qurʼan, as al-Bukhārī has it where he glosses the words of this sūrah. He carries a long account of glass — what it is made of and how it is blown, its knowledge among the Phoenicians and the Copts and the Hebrews and the Greeks, the fame of Shām for it, az-Zamakhsharī’s bright Syrian lamp, Venice and then Bohemia after them, and the panes set over windows to keep out wind and cold and rain without keeping out the light. He calls the repeating of the lamp and of the glass a showing where a pronoun would have served, done for their weight as the two pillars of the likeness, names the figure in the art of rhetoric and cites for it Laylā al-Akhyaliyyah’s three linked lines on al-Ḥajjāj, and counts it among the excellences of the verse that it does not repeat more than twice. Of the tree that is neither eastern nor western he gives the grammar before the sense: the negative enters both descriptions and so has no place in the parsing, and to deny two contraries is to affirm the middle between them, as they say the pomegranate is sweet and sour, and as the fourth woman of the report of Umm Zarʻ says her husband is like the night of Tihāmah, neither hot nor cold; and this idiom comes with that one negative and no other, which is why al-Ḥarīrī could call the olive by the nickname of the two denials. Then his own answer, which is no one else’s here: the tree faces south, with nothing between it and that quarter, which is best for the life of the tree and the goodness of its fruit and so for its oil. His working of the likeness part by part is his own in the same way — the niche is the exactness of the certainty and the reach of the proof over what it proves, with no wavering and no breach, and the keeping of the lamp from going out is the keeping of the Book; the lamp is the meanings of the guidance in giving sight; the glass is its soundness from doubt and confusion; the blessed tree is the revelation, the Book and the practice together, whose fruit is pressed for the proofs of guidance; the standing of the tree between the two ends of the horizon is the ease of the religion, a middle between a severity that cramps and a slackness that lets go; the kindling is the lasting and the renewing of that guidance; the clear oil is the teaching of the community by the setting out of the Book and the laying down of rulings, plain and near to hand and nearly needing no insistence from a teacher; and the fire’s touching the lamp is the standing up to teach. The tree, he says, points to the need of the learned to press the guidance out of it as the ages pass, since oil comes out of fruit only under the press, and that is the drawing out of rulings. On one disputed reading four of the entries make a single argument and four verdicts. Of the form of the star with the glottal stop and the light vowel, al-Baghawī has most of the grammarians calling it a solecism and Abū ʻUbaydah answering that he sees a ground for it, the word being of the pattern of the intensives said of Allah in glorification, with the weight of its vowels lightened, as in another word they cite. Aṭ-Ṭabarī allows exactly that route and says that without it he knows no ground for the reading, and that some of those learned in the speech of the Arabs called it a solecism. Al-Qurṭubī gives the same defence under the name of Abū ʻUbayd, by way of al-Jawharī, and sets an-Naḥḥās against it, who calls the objection the gravest and severest of errors, since on that ground one would make the like of the intensive itself, and who shows why the other word cited for it is not of the kind. Ibn ʻĀshūr defends the reading from the far end: the pattern is rare, but it is among the structures of their speech according to Sībawayh, and he names three words of it, ʻulliyyah and surriyyah and dhurriyyah. On the kindling the entries divide again: aṭ-Ṭabarī prefers the form that describes the lamp, since kindling belongs to the lamp and not to the glass, and an-Naḥḥās in al-Qurṭubī says the same of the two nearest readings; Ibn ʻĀshūr divides them by tense instead, the one conveying a kindling renewed and never let die, the other a kindling established. And on the tree, aṭ-Ṭabarī’s ground for taking it as reached at both ends is the ground the others give: it is what makes the oil purest. The three answers — reached at both ends, standing in open ground, facing south — are one argument from the quality of the oil, put in three places.

They want to extinguish the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah will perfect His light, although the disbelievers dislike it.

61:8 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The light of Allah that they would put out with their mouths; 9:32 says the same, with Allah refusing all but to perfect His light. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: those who called Muḥammad ﷺ a manifest magician meant to undo by that word the truth he was sent with, and Allah perfects His light by making the truth known, His religion prevail and His Messenger victorious; the light here is Islam, and for Ibn Zayd the Qurʼan. He records mutimmun nūrahu and mutimmu nūrihi as two known readings, close in meaning, and al-Qurṭubī and Ibn ʻĀshūr name their readers on both sides. Al-Qurṭubī gives five sayings on what the light of Allah is here: the Qurʼan, from Ibn ʻAbbās and Ibn Zayd; Islam, from as-Suddī; the one sent with it, from aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk; His proofs and His signs, from Ibn Baḥr; and a likeness struck, of a man who would put out the light of the sun with his mouth and finds it impossible. He distinguishes the two words for putting out, the one used of little and much alike and the other only of much. Ibn Kathīr and as-Saʻdī both take the image as the sun: what they attempt is impossible in the same way. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the whole as a likeness of men who want the dark and see a lamp lit for people, and blow at it to put it out and cannot; the mouths are named, he says, because a light is put out otherwise too, by a fan or by bellows, and the mouths are their claim that what was recited is magic. He reads the joining of the light to the divine name as an honouring, a light Allah kindled, and the completing of it as the reaching of its fullest ray, as oil is added to a lamp and what dims it is taken away. Al-Qurṭubī carries from al-Māwardī, on ʻAṭāʼ from Ibn ʻAbbās, an occasion that puts the verse’s own two verbs in an enemy’s mouth: revelation was held back forty days, and Kaʻb ibn al-Ashraf called to the Jews to rejoice, that Allah had put out the light of Muḥammad in what used to come down to him and was not going to complete his affair — and the verse came down and the revelation resumed. He names Ibn ʻĪsā for the fifth of his five sayings, the likeness of the sun, and reads the joined form as on the intention of separation and the other as governing because the completing is still to come. Ibn Kathīr sends the reader to his own treatment of this verse and the next in the ninth sūrah, where the like of them stands. As-Saʻdī adds that the sayings they would put it out with have no reality, and rather increase the discerning in knowledge of the falsehood they are on, and that in blowing at the eye of the sun they neither reach their aim nor keep their minds clear of defect. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the conditional as a concession and its supposing as mockery, since their dislike is certain and not supposed; and he notes that while the word here takes in every disbeliever, the Qurʼān’s usage tends to set it against the word for those who associate, so that this verse annuls the aim of the one party and the verse after it the aim of the other. Al-Baghawī glosses this verse with nothing at all: his entry runs from the naming of Aḥmad to the trade that saves, and passes the light of Allah without a word.

And he to whom Allah has not granted light, for him there is no light.

24:40 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The close of the second likeness of the disbelievers’ deeds, darknesses in a deep sea, after the mirage of 24:39, carried at Name 64. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: the one whom Allah has not provided with faith, guidance out of error and knowledge of His Book has none of them. Light is given to the believer to walk by at 6:122, carried at Name 60, and at 57:28. Al-Baghawī and al-Qurṭubī both carry Ibn ʻAbbās on the closing sentence: whoever Allah has not given a religion and a faith has no religion, and al-Qurṭubī adds his second reading, that whoever is not given a light to walk by on the Day is not guided to the Garden; az-Zajjāj takes the sentence of this world, that whoever Allah has not guided is not guided. Ibn Kathīr and al-Qurṭubī carry Ubayy ibn Kaʻb on the piled darknesses, that the disbeliever turns about in five of them, his speech a darkness, his deed a darkness, his going in and his coming out darknesses, and his end the darknesses of the Fire, which is the exact counterpart of the five lights Ubayy gives on the verse of light. Ibn Kathīr sets the sentence against what was said of the believers, that Allah guides to His light whom He wills; Ibn ʻĀshūr reads it as the seal of the likeness; as-Saʻdī counts the darknesses as four, of nature, of unbelief, of ignorance and of the deeds that come of them, and says they were left in them because He gave them nothing of His light. The six differ first on what the second likeness is a likeness of, and al-Qurṭubī sets the difference out under al-Qushayrī’s summary of it: for az-Zajjāj it is struck for the deeds of the disbelievers, the particle giving the hearer his choice between the mirage and the darknesses; for al-Jurjānī the first verse is of their deeds and this one of their unbelief, unbelief being conjoined to deeds because it is itself one of them; and for Abū ʻAlī the words stand for or like one possessed of darknesses, the elided noun shown by the hand that is put out, so that the likeness is of the disbeliever himself. Ibn ʻAbbās in one narration makes it the likeness of his heart. Ibn Kathīr divides the two likenesses between two kinds of disbeliever and names the division: the mirage is for those who call others to their unbelief and suppose themselves to hold something, the people of compounded ignorance, and the darknesses are for the people of simple ignorance, the dull followers of the leaders of unbelief who do not reason — and he gives the proverb of the ignorant man, asked where he is going and answering with them, asked where they are going and answering that he does not know. As-Saʻdī reaches the same division and leaves it open, saying it may be that both likenesses are for the deeds of all of them, told twice for the number of the descriptions, or that each is for a party, the first for those who are followed and the second for those who follow. Ibn Kathīr also sets this pair beside two others, the pair of fire and water struck for the hypocrites at the opening of al-Baqarah and the pair struck in ar-Raʻd for what settles in hearts of guidance and knowledge. On the working of the likeness the entries hold two readings against each other, and they are opposed. The first makes the sea the heart. Aṭ-Ṭabarī states it as his own: the darknesses are their deeds and the deep sea is the disbeliever’s heart, for he acts on the intent of a heart that ignorance has flooded and error and bewilderment have covered, sealed so that it does not understand, its hearing sealed so that it takes in no warning and its sight veiled so that it sees no proof. Ibn ʻAbbās is given for the same, and Ibn Kathīr carries it from al-ʻAwfī on him, with the sealing verse of al-Baqarah and the verse of al-Jāthiyah beside it. Al-Baghawī gives it plainly, and fills out the parts: the waves are what covers the heart of ignorance and doubt and bewilderment, and the cloud is the sealing and the stamping upon it. Al-Qurṭubī reports it in meaning from Ibn ʻAbbās and others and adds the stain to the sealing and the stamping. The printed text carries an editor’s footnote under aṭ-Ṭabarī’s own statement of it, quoting ash-Shawkānī, who counts that very reading among the oddities of the commentaries and calls it far from the speech of the Arabs; the footnote is the editor’s and not aṭ-Ṭabarī’s, and it stands under his words. The second reading is Ibn ʻĀshūr’s, and it turns the mapping over: the errors are the darknesses, and the sea is not the heart but the deeds themselves, which the disbeliever plunged into meaning to draw near by them; the first wave is what mixes into his good deeds of void ones, the dedicated beasts of the old religion among them; the second and overwhelming wave is the deeds of unbelief proper, slaughtering to the idols, which comes over all of it and spoils it; the cloud is the bewilderment that hems his belief in and keeps him from telling the good from the idle and the ugly; and the hand put out and not seen is his seeking profit from his deed, as a man at sea puts out his hand to right his ship or to take up what he needs and does not see the hand, let alone the thing. He offers the likeness two ways before he chooses: if the two comparisons share one ground, the state pictured is a swimmer in the darknesses of night in a deep sea whose waves ride one another for the swiftness of their following, which happens when the winds are strong, until he can hardly see the hand that is the nearest and plainest thing to him — so how shall he hope for rescue; and if the ground differs between them, the state pictured is a man who put to sea hoping to reach an end and found himself in darknesses through which he can find no way. He prefers the second, because the closing sentence of the verse supports it. Against both mappings stands the plain reading al-Qurṭubī also gives, that the darknesses meant are the dark of the cloud, of the wave, of the night and of the sea, so that a man in them sees nothing, not even a star; or that they are hardships, one above another. Two of the six give the same reason why the cloud is the worst of the four. Al-Qurṭubī makes the fear greater from two sides, that the cloud has covered the very stars a man steers by, and that wind rises with a cloud and rain comes down from it; Ibn ʻĀshūr says simply that it veils the light of the star and of the crescent. He adds that the wave does not break until another overtakes it from above, and that this is what keeps its darkness long. The words themselves were gone over. Al-Baghawī separates three by the hour of the day: the mirage is the shimmer seen at midday in the hard heat in open country, like water running on the ground, which scatters when a man comes near; the second word is for what rises from the ground in the mornings, a shimmer between sky and earth like a sheet in which figures are lifted, the small seen large and the short seen tall; and the third belongs to the evenings, of the shimmer that comes and goes. Ibn Kathīr gives the first two under the same division, the mirage after midday and the other at the day’s beginning, and takes the flat itself through its plurals. As-Saʻdī reads the flat as ground with neither tree nor plant and makes it in turn a likeness of their hearts, in which there is no good and no soundness for deeds to grow pure. Al-Qurṭubī takes the deep sea through its whole family of words — the body of the water, the sea when its waves clash, an affair when it grows great and confused, the ship that ploughs the deep, and the same letters with the other vowel for the voices of people, their noise and clamour, with a line of Abū n-Najm for it — and he carries there, as a lexical illustration and without a grade, a report from the Messenger about riding a sea in tumult, which is not carried here and for which no grading is claimed. Ibn ʻĀshūr takes the wave as a collective of the single wave, which is a measure lifted off the surface by a wind on its side driving it shoreward, and reads the sea’s adjective as a relative form used for holding a description fully, as the Arabs say of a man that he is much in overcoming. On the hand that is hardly seen there are four answers and a judgement. Al-Farrāʼ makes the verb of nearness a filler, so that the sense is he did not see it; az-Zajjāj and Abū ʻUbaydah say he neither saw it nor came near to seeing it, which al-Ḥasan means too; al-Mubarrad says he did see it, but only after great effort, as a man says he could hardly see you for the dark, having seen; and others say he came near to seeing and did not see, as they say the ostrich nearly flew. Aṭ-Ṭabarī sets the difficulty himself — that the usual force of the words affirms sight after effort, and that in a dark far less than the one described a man does not see his hand at all — lays out three of the answers, and judges that the third is the more apparent by the usage of the Arabs while the second is the clearer by way of the interpretation and the more hidden of the senses; and he gives the ground on which it is apt here, that this is a likeness and not a report of something that happened. An-Naḥḥās, in al-Qurṭubī, judges against him: the soundest of the sayings is that he did not come near to seeing it, and if he did not come near to seeing it then he did not see it either far off or close. Ibn ʻĀshūr neither argues nor judges but refers the usage to its parallel, the cow that was slaughtered when they had hardly done it. Three of the six carry the two readings of the cloud, and they do not agree on who transmits them. Al-Qurṭubī and Ibn ʻĀshūr both give them from Ibn Kathīr the reader by way of al-Bazzī, who joins the cloud to the darknesses, and of Qunbul, who keeps the cloud’s nunation and puts the darknesses in the genitive as a substitution for the first mention of them; al-Baghawī gives the same two readings from the same reader by way of al-Qawwās and of Abū l-Ḥasan al-Burrī. Al-Mahdawī, in al-Qurṭubī, gives the grammar of each: the joined reading because a cloud rises at the time of such darknesses, as one says a cloud of mercy for one that rises at the time of rain; the genitive as a strengthening of the first darknesses or a substitution for them; and the nominative as the predicate of a subject left out. Ibn al-Anbārī gives the stopping places, that the pause after the second wave is not complete because what follows is bound to it, that the pause after the cloud is good, and that the darknesses begin afresh. Ibn ʻĀshūr adds a distinction none of the others draws: the darknesses of the opening comparison and the darknesses that begin afresh are not the same plural, the second being a plural of kinds and the first a plural of individuals of one kind. Ibn ʻĀshūr says, in passing and as a thing settled elsewhere, that the word for darkness in the singular does not occur in the Qurʼan. On the pointed text the claim holds exactly: the plural stands twenty-three times, two of them in this verse, and the singular stands nowhere, every word of that shape being the other word of the same letters, wrongdoing. The complement holds with it: light is never plural in the Qurʼan and darkness is never singular, the same shape as the light said of Allah, which is said in construct while the definite form is never said of Him. On the closing sentence the six agree in substance and differ on its reach. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: whoever Allah has not provided with faith, with guidance out of error and with knowledge of His Book has none of the three. Ibn Kathīr: whoever Allah does not guide is ruined, ignorant, bewildered, set against what was said of the believers, and he closes the whole passage on the supplication for light in the heart and on the right hand and on the left. Al-Baghawī and al-Qurṭubī carry Ibn ʻAbbās, and al-Qurṭubī adds the reading of the Day beside the reading of this world while az-Zajjāj keeps it to this world. As-Saʻdī grounds it in the soul itself, which is wronging and ignorant and holds no good and no light but what its Master gave it. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the sentence as the seal of the likeness and draws the doctrine out of it: they came back disappointed of what they sought because Allah did not create the guidance in their hearts when He did not grant them faith, and in it is a notice that He disposes by giving and by withholding according to His will and His wisdom. Three occasions are named for the sentence and none is settled. Muqātil gives a man of Quraysh who sought a religion before Islam and wore haircloth and then disbelieved; al-Māwardī, in al-Qurṭubī, gives his brother instead, who lived as a monk might and wore wool and sought a religion and then disbelieved; and a third naming is of a man who accepted Islam and went out to Abyssinia and afterwards turned Christian. Al-Qurṭubī answers that the first two both died disbelieving, so that it is not far-fetched for both of them and others to be meant; al-Baghawī reports that the greater number hold the sentence general in all the disbelievers. Al-Qurṭubī closes the entry with a report ath-Thaʻlabī carries from Anas on the creation of lights, given there without a grade and without comment, and made there the occasion of this sentence; it is not carried here and no grading is claimed for it. Ibn Kathīr, by contrast, brings to the mirage a report he gives to both Ṣaḥīḥs, which his editor finds from Abū Saʻīd, in which the Fire is shown on the Day to those called to it like a mirage whose parts crush one another, and they hurry into it.

And the earth will shine with the light of its Lord, and the record will be placed.

39:69 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

Aṭ-Ṭabarī: the earth shone with its Lord’s light when ar-Raḥmān appears to judge between His creatures, and the record is the record of deeds; Qatādah: they will not crowd one another in His light, as they do not in the sun on a clear day. As-Saʻdī: the lights that exist will have gone, and Allah gives creatures a strength by which His light does not burn them and they can see Him. Al-Qurṭubī reports it read as the justice of their Lord, from al-Ḥasan, and His judgement, from aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk, and, from Ibn ʻAbbās, as a light Allah creates, not the light of sun or moon, attributed to Him as a possession to its owner. Al-Baghawī gives Qatādah’s crowding image and reports the justice reading from al-Ḥasan and as-Suddī. Ibn ʻĀshūr argues against that reading: the joining of the light to the Lord is an honouring, the light coming from the side of holiness; it is a light Allah created in that earth, not the shining of a lamp or of any star, and because the light is the earth’s own it marks that earth as clear of the darknesses of deeds, as this world, whose light is borrowed from the sun and the stars, carries good and evil mixed. Reading the light as justice, he adds, is both narrower and unnecessary, since justice follows from the honouring by implication and the verse says in its own words that judgement is given between them in truth. Ibn Kathīr glosses the shining as the lighting up of the Day when the Truth manifests to the creatures for the deciding of the judgement, and takes the witnesses as the recording angels over the deeds of the servants. On that one word the six divide four ways: aṭ-Ṭabarī makes them the community of the Messenger this book writes of and rejects the reading that makes them those slain in the way of Allah, saying there is no great sense in it here and giving the sequence of the verse as his ground; al-Qurṭubī records all three, the community, as-Suddī’s slain and Ibn Zayd’s recording angels; al-Baghawī has the first from Ibn ʻAbbās and the third from ʻAṭāʼ; and Ibn Kathīr takes the third alone. Al-Baghawī glosses the light as the light of its Creator and reads the earth as the open grounds of the Rising. Al-Qurṭubī sets a caution beside his three readings that bears on this Name more than any of them: a people went astray here and supposed that Allah is of the kind of light and perceptible radiance, and He is above the likeness of things perceived; rather He is the giver of light to the heavens and the earth, and every light is from Him by creating and originating. He also reports the verse read in the passive by Ibn ʻAbbās and ʻUbayd ibn ʻUmayr, which he calls a reading by way of interpretation, and carries an-Naḥḥās, that this verse explains the sound report of looking upon Allah without crowding, with the four ways that word is transmitted and what each of them means — which is where Qatādah’s crowding image comes to rest. As-Saʻdī, at the end of his comment, gives the reason: were that light uncovered, the glories of the Face would burn whatever of His creation His sight reached. And Ibn ʻĀshūr, having argued that the light is not to be read as justice, closes on the picture of a court lit by the light of justice, and sets the judgement in three ranks, between people, upon every soul for what it did, and upon what it kept hidden.

Their light will proceed before them and on their right; they will say: Our Lord, perfect for us our light and forgive us.

66:8 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The believers’ light on the Day, as at 57:12. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: they ask their Lord to keep their light and not put it out until they have crossed the Ṣirāṭ, when the hypocrites ask to take from their light (57:13, carried at Names 75 and 76). Mujāhid: the believers say it when the hypocrites’ light is put out. Al-Ḥasan: everyone is given light on the Day, believer and hypocrite; the hypocrite’s is put out, and the believer fears for his. Ibn Kathīr and al-Qurṭubī name the same reporters for that, adding aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk and Ibn ʻAbbās, and al-Baghawī sets the running of the light on the Ṣirāṭ and the asking at the moment the light of the hypocrites is put out. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the joining of the light to them not as defining which light is meant but as marking it off as theirs on that Day among all the lights there; the running of it is its spreading, likened to the quickening of a walker, and it hedges them about wherever they go, as banners are carried before a commander. Before them and on their right are named, he says, because a light in front is enjoyed and felt as an honour and because it is with the hands that what is precious is held; the light is a real light, and the asking is for more of it, or the asking of one whose light is less than another’s, and the asking itself is a courtesy toward Allah, as the asking for forgiveness is. This is a verse of the believers’ light, and for four of the entries it is a verse of repentance. Al-Qurṭubī gives the light clause nothing whatever in his own place, sending the reader to the sūrah where he treated its like, and gives the asking nothing beyond the naming of Ibn ʻAbbās and Mujāhid and a second referral to the same place; Ibn Kathīr does the same with the running of the light, and has on the asking only that Mujāhid and aḍ-Ḍaḥḥāk and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and others say the believers say it when they see the light of the hypocrites put out. Ibn ʻĀshūr refers his reader to the same sūrah and then says that what he has set down here is the fuller of the two, which is true. What the four spend the entry on instead is the sincere repentance the verse commands, and al-Qurṭubī says outright that the scholars and the masters of the hearts differ over it in twenty-three sayings. As-Saʻdī is the one who joins the two halves of the verse, and his whole short entry is that joining: the covering of evil deeds, the entry into the gardens and the success are promised for the repentance, and they fall due on the Day when the believers run by the light of their faith and walk by its radiance and are made anxious when the lights given to the hypocrites are put out, and ask that their light be completed, and are brought by the light and the certainty that is with them to the gardens of bliss and the neighbourhood of the generous Lord — and all of that, he says, is of the traces of sincere repentance. On the words the Name is carried for, two of the entries part. Aṭ-Ṭabarī does not read the second phrase as a second quarter in which the light runs at all: he glosses it as their books in their right hands, and gives Ibn ʻAbbās for it, that they take their book and in it is the good news. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the particle as the particle of accompaniment, or else in the sense of from, so that what is on the right is the light itself; and he gives a second reason for the naming of the right beside the first, that it was with their hands that they pledged themselves to the Messenger upon faith and help. Ibn Kathīr sets a report beside both without deciding between them: from Abū Dharr and Abū d-Dardāʼ, that the Messenger is the first permitted to prostrate on the Day and the first permitted to raise his head, and that he knows his community among the nations by the radiance left by their purifying, by the mark of prostration on their faces, by their being given their books in their right hands, and by their light running before them — four marks, in which the book in the right hand and the light in front are two things and not one. Aṭ-Ṭabarī adds two things. He glosses the asking for forgiveness as the asking that their sins be covered and that they not be disgraced by being punished for them, and he refers the closing words of the verse back to the two askings themselves, that He has power over the completing of their light and over the forgiving of their sins and over everything else. And he carries, by Mujāhid, a saying of Yazīd ibn Shajarah, of whom he says that he used to remind them and weep and that his deed confirmed his word: you are written with Allah by your names and your marks and your sittings and your secret talk and your close friendships, and when the Day comes it is said, so-and-so son of so-and-so, here is your light; and so-and-so son of so-and-so, there is no light for you. Ibn ʻĀshūr adds, beside the banners carried before a commander, the steeds led before the caliph; he reads the completing as either the light’s continuance or an increase of it, on the two ways he gives for who is speaking; and he calls the asking for forgiveness a request for the continuance of forgiveness, all of it courtesy before Allah, as is said of the Messenger seeking forgiveness seventy times in a day. On the repentance the entries are richest, and one opposition runs through al-Qurṭubī’s twenty-three sayings. Al-Junayd holds that sincere repentance is that a man forget the sin and never call it to mind again, because whoever’s repentance is sound becomes a lover of Allah and whoever loves Allah forgets what is other than Him; al-Fuḍayl ibn ʻIyāḍ holds the contrary, that the sin stand between his eyes so that he never ceases to be as one looking at it, and Ibn as-Simmāk says the like, that you set the sin in which you spent your shame before Allah in front of your eye and make ready for what waits for you. Among the rest: ʻUmar with Ibn Masʻūd and Ubayy and Muʻādh, that a man repent and never return, as milk does not return to the udder, which al-Qurṭubī says Muʻādh raised to the Messenger; Qatādah, that it is the truthful and counselling one; al-Ḥasan, that you hate the sin as you loved it and seek forgiveness of it whenever you remember it; Saʻīd ibn Jubayr, that it is not accepted without three, the fear that it is not accepted, the hope that it is, and persistence in obedience; al-Quraẓī, that four gather it, asking forgiveness with the tongue, desisting with the body, harbouring in the heart the leaving-off of return, and parting from bad companions; Sufyān ath-Thawrī, that its marks are four, littleness and ailment and lowliness and strangeness; Abū Bakr al-Warrāq, that the earth be straitened upon you for all its breadth and your own self be straitened upon you, as with the three who were left behind; Abū Bakr al-Wāsiṭī, that it not be for want of a substitute, since one who sinned for his own ease and repents seeking ease in the hereafter has repented for the keeping of himself and not for Allah; Ruwaym, that you be to Allah a face without a nape as you were to Him at the sin a nape without a face; as-Sarī as-Saqaṭī, that it is not sound save with sincerity toward oneself and toward the believers, since whoever’s repentance is sound loves that people be like him; and Sahl at-Tustarī, that it is the repentance of the people of the Sunnah and the community, since the man of innovation has none. Ibn ʻĀshūr brings from ʻAlī a gathering of six that al-Qurṭubī’s list does not hold: regret for what is past, the repeating of the obligations, the returning of what was wrongfully taken, the seeking of the adversaries’ quittance, that you melt your soul in obedience as you nourished it in disobedience, and that you make it taste the bitterness of obedience as you made it taste the sweetness of disobedience. And al-Qurṭubī gives the word’s own root two ways: from clearness, as one says of honey that it is clear when it is clear of the wax; or from sewing, either because the repentance has made a man’s obedience firm and bound it as a tailor binds a garment, or because it has joined him to the friends of Allah and stitched him to them. Four of the entries name the readers of the form with the heavy vowel and no two name the same set: aṭ-Ṭabarī names ʻĀṣim alone and prefers the light vowel for the agreement of the authority; al-Baghawī names al-Ḥasan and Abū Bakr from ʻĀṣim; al-Qurṭubī names al-Ḥasan and Khārijah and Abū Bakr from ʻĀṣim; and Ibn ʻĀshūr names Abū Bakr from ʻĀṣim only, and adds that al-Akhfash held the heavy vowel to be unknown, answering him that the reading is itself the argument against him. Three questions are raised in these entries and none is closed. Ibn Kathīr asks whether continuing to the death is a condition of sincere repentance, or whether the resolve not to return is enough to cover the past, so that a later fall would not undo the covering; he sets the report that repentance wipes out what went before it against the report that whoever does ill in Islam is taken to task for the first and the last, and inclines to the second by an argument from the greater to the lesser, and ends with the words of one who does not decide. Ibn ʻĀshūr asks whether repentance is broken by a return to the sin — the people of the Sunnah holding that it is broken for that sin only, the Muʻtazilah that it is broken and the old sins return, with al-Bāqillānī agreeing with them — and says plainly that there is nothing in the evidences of the Book or of the Sunnah that witnesses for either side. And he asks whether the acceptance of a believer’s repentance is certain: the greater number of the people of the Sunnah hold it hoped and not certain, and al-Bāqillānī and the Imām of the two Sanctuaries are of them; al-Ashʻarī holds it certain by revelation and the Muʻtazilah certain by reason. He carries from the Imām of the two Sanctuaries one judgement he calls sound, that a penitent’s enabling the prescribed penalty to be carried out on him is obligatory but stands outside the reality of the repentance, since the repentance is already sound with Allah at the regret and the resolve, and the withholding is a fresh sin asking its own repentance — and Ibn ʻĀshūr adds the reason, that such enabling is exceedingly hard on souls and they have an excuse in shrinking from it. Four reports are named in these entries and none is carried here, and no grading is claimed for any of them beyond what its own entry gives: the raised form of Ibn Masʻūd’s saying on repentance, which Ibn Kathīr himself grades weak in its one path and says the halted form is sounder; the report of Ubayy by Zirr ibn Ḥubaysh giving the definition from the Messenger; the report of Abū Dharr and Abū d-Dardāʼ on the four marks; and the saying of a man of Banū Kinānah that he prayed behind the Messenger in the year of the conquest and heard him ask that he not be disgraced on the Day, which attaches to the verse’s own first clause.

Faces that Day radiant, looking toward their Lord.

75:22–23 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

No word of n-w-r: nāḍirah, radiant, is n-ḍ-r, and nāẓirah, looking, is n-ẓ-r. It answers the veil of Muslim 179a and the reply of Muslim 178a. Aṭ-Ṭabarī reports two readings of nāẓirah: looking at their Lord, from ʻIkrimah, al-Ḥasan and ʻAṭiyyah al-ʻAwfī, and awaiting reward from Him, from Mujāhid; he takes the first as the sounder and gives a report from Ibn ʻUmar of the highest in Paradise looking at the face of Allah twice a day. Al-Qurṭubī gives the looking as the position of the body of the scholars, carries the same report from Ibn ʻUmar and the same readers for it, and sharpens the other side: the awaiting reading is related from Ibn ʻUmar and from ʻIkrimah as well, but it is known from Mujāhid alone. He glosses the first word from the beauty and ease it names, as in the supplication for the man who hears a saying and keeps it. Al-Baghawī gives seven glosses of it, from Ibn ʻAbbās beautiful, from Mujāhid glad, from Ibn Zayd in bliss, from Muqātil white with light rising over them, from as-Suddī shining, from Yamān bright and from al-Farrāʼ shining with the bliss; and as-Saʻdī gives it a glow and a light from the bliss of the hearts, and ranks the looking, some looking morning and evening and some once in the week. Muqātil’s gloss and as-Saʻdī’s are the only places in the six where a word of n-w-r is reached for at these verses at all. Ibn ʻĀshūr treats the two verses before the pair as a block of their own and takes this pair together with the two that follow; of the six entries on the pair his is the longest and Ibn Kathīr’s next. Four of the six send the reader elsewhere for the substance, and not to one place. Al-Qurṭubī sends him twice, once to the sūrah of Yūnus, where he treated the report of Ṣuhayb at the promise of the fairest reward and an increase beyond it, and once to the sūrah of al-Anʻām, where he says he has dealt in full with the verse that sights do not attain Him. Ibn ʻĀshūr sends him to the sūrah of al-Aʻrāf, to the answer given to Moses, for the root question whether the seeing is possible at all. And Ibn Kathīr says outright that he would have set out the reports of the seeing with their paths and their wordings but for the fear of length, and has scattered them through places of his own commentary. Referral is the method of these readers and not the accident of one verse, and what they say of the seeing is in several places and not one. Ibn ʻĀshūr alone names the figure between the two words. Between the first word of the pair and the second he finds a paronomasia of the altered kind, close to the complete, the two differing by the point of a single letter and by nothing the ear catches; and he makes that likeness the reason the two stand together. On the weight of the evidence the two longest entries are opposed, and both stand. Ibn Kathīr holds the believers’ seeing of their Lord in the last abode established by sound reports in paths that are mutawātir with the masters of the report, which cannot be pushed away nor withheld, and a matter agreed among the Companions and those who followed them and the forebears of this community, as it is agreed among the leaders of Islam. Ibn ʻĀshūr holds that the verse indicates a seeing with the eyes by implication only and not in the open, because it bears the interpretations the Muʻtazilah put upon it, and he ranks the promise with the ambiguous among the descriptions. He sets the schools out one after another: the forebears, believing on the whole and turning their eyes from the depths, with the verse that nothing is like Him for their leader; the groups of the undetailed interpretation, whom he calls the Salafiyyah, and among them the Ḥanbalīs, the Ẓāhirīs and the older Khawārij; the people of the Sunnah before al-Ashʻarī, the Mālikīs and the people of the report; the Karrāmiyyah and the likeners, who went to excess with the outward sense and are joined to the first sort; and the three of the speculative kind, the Muʻtazilah, the Ashāʻirah and the Māturīdiyyah. Then comes the verdict that costs him something, for one of the three is his own: the forebears affirmed the seeing without investigating, the Muʻtazilah denied it and interpreted the evidence away, and the Ashāʻirah affirmed it and sought proofs that would compel and did not reach the degree they were after. What every party brought was open to objection and denial, the taking and giving ran long, no gain came of it and it reached no limit; and it is well, he says, to commit the manner of it to the knowledge of Allah, which is what our forebears meant by a seeing without how, a gathering word of truth, though the Muʻtazilah shrink from it. The two who reject the other readings do not agree on how many there are. Al-Qurṭubī keeps three apart. The looking he gives as the position of the body of the scholars. The awaiting of the reward he calls very weak, outside what the plain sense of the verse and the reports require, and he notes that al-Māwardī relates it from Ibn ʻUmar and from ʻIkrimah as well, though it is known from Mujāhid alone. And he answers a third that no other entry of these six raises: that the particle is the singular of the word for bounties, so that what the faces await is His gifts — which he takes from al-Qushayrī Abū Naṣr and calls void on three grounds, that the singular of that word is written with one letter and not the other, that those bounties are the ones that ward off and the people of the garden await no warding of punishment from themselves, and that whoever awaits a thing has his living spoiled, which is no description of them. Ibn Kathīr runs two of the three together: he opens on whoever read the particle as the singular of the bounties, gives Mujāhid’s awaiting of the reward as the instance of it, and condemns both in the one sentence. For the awaiting reading aṭ-Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr each name Abū Ṣāliḥ with Mujāhid, so the side has two and not one, and the two entries say it independently of each other. Al-Baghawī takes al-Farrāʼ’s gloss from his book on the meanings. Inside aṭ-Ṭabarī’s own entry Mujāhid stands against himself, and the entry does not remark on it. Aṭ-Ṭabarī carries, from Jarīr from Manṣūr, that Mujāhid was told people say that He is seen and answered that He sees and nothing sees Him, which is a denial in his own words. And the one chain by which the looking reading is carried up in that same entry runs through Thuwayr from Mujāhid from Ibn ʻUmar. The chain the reading leans on passes through the man whose words a few lines above deny what it carries. That report is the frailest thing on these verses, and every entry that gives it leaves a mark against it. Aṭ-Ṭabarī gives it three times and the numbers move as he goes: first halted on Ibn ʻUmar, the lowest of the people of the garden looking over a journey of a thousand years and the highest looking at the face of Allah morning and evening; then with no Companion named at all, from Abū ṣ-Ṣahbāʼ al-Mawṣilī; then raised, with two thousand years for the one and twice in every day for the other. Al-Qurṭubī passes on at-Tirmidhī’s own judgement of it, that it is strange, and that it has been related from Ibn ʻAmr without being raised. Ibn Kathīr gives it raised from the Musnad and then reports that ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Abjar has it by Thuwayr from Mujāhid from Ibn ʻUmar as Ibn ʻUmar’s own word, and that ath-Thawrī likewise did not raise it. Al-Baghawī gives it with a chain of his own through Thuwayr, and under it the printed text carries a note of the editor’s gathering the gradings of its transmitter against it. Nothing of the report is carried here and no grading is claimed for it beyond what each entry gives, the weakenings included. Ibn Kathīr answers the awaiting from the side of the veil. He sets against it the verse that the wicked are veiled from their Lord on that Day, and with it the word of ash-Shāfiʻī, that He did not veil the wicked except that it be known the righteous will see Him. The grammatical case is al-Qurṭubī’s alone and he brings two men for it. Ath-Thaʻlabī: the Arabs say the verb bare when they mean awaiting and with the particle when they mean the eye’s seeing, so that where the looking is joined to the particle and to the mention of the face it can be nothing but sight and open vision. And al-Azharī, who calls Mujāhid’s reading an error outright, setting a line al-Qurṭubī’s editor gives to Imruʼ al-Qays for the one usage against a line the editor gives to ʻUmar ibn Abī Rabīʻah and another for the other. Al-Qurṭubī reaches outside the commentators to ath-Thaʻlabī here as at 24:40, and here too what he takes from him is a report given with no grading at all — from Jābir, that the Lord shows Himself until they look upon His face and fall down in prostration, and are told to raise their heads, for this is no day of worship. Three smaller things, each in one entry only. Ibn ʻĀshūr reads the putting of the words toward the Lord before what governs them as a mark of the weight of this strange gift and not as a restriction, because they will see many splendours in the garden besides, which is against the inference such a fronting usually carries. Al-Ḥasan, whom four of the entries give and three of them in the same words, joins the two words: it looks toward its Creator, and well may it be made radiant while it is looking toward its Creator, so that the radiance is the effect of the looking; and Ibn Kathīr takes that gloss not by a chain of his own but from Ibn Jarīr’s, one of these six entries citing another’s transmission. And as-Saʻdī, whose entry is the shortest of the six, goes furthest past the words: when they see Him they forget the bliss they are in, and there comes to them of delight and gladness what cannot be told, and their faces are made radiant so that they grow in beauty upon their beauty — and there he turns from commenting to asking, and asks that Allah set us among them.

You are the Light of the heavens and the earth.

Muslim 769a · ṣaḥīḥ (muttafaq ʻalayh)

From Ibn ʻAbbās: said when the Prophet ﷺ rose to pray in the depth of the night. In Muslim 769a this clause stands first, before qayyām and rabb, and bare: wa-man fīhinna falls on the rabb clause. Al-Bukhārī 1120, carried at Name 51, puts it third, after qayyim and mulk; al-Bukhārī 6317 and 7442, an-Nasāʼī 1619 and Ibn Mājah 1355 give anta nūru s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍi wa-man fīhinna. Name 63 carries the qayyām clause of 769a. Abū Dāwūd 771 and at-Tirmidhī 3418 have the report through Mālik, as 769a does: at Abū Dāwūd ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Muḥammad Muḥyī ad-Dīn ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; Darussalam, referring to Muslim 769); at at-Tirmidhī ṣaḥīḥ (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī; Darussalam, referring to Muslim) and ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ (at-Tirmidhī; Bashshār ʻAwwād Maʻrūf).

O Allah, place light in my heart, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light on my right, light on my left, light before me, light behind me, light above me, light below me, and make for me light — or he said: and make me light.

Muslim 763g · ṣaḥīḥ

From Ibn ʻAbbās, the night he stayed with his aunt Maymūnah: the Prophet ﷺ said it in his prayer or in his prostration. The narrator was unsure of the close, wa-jʻal lī nūran, make for me light, or wa-jʻalnī nūran, make me light. Muslim 763h gives wa-jʻalnī nūran and says he did not doubt; Muslim 763i, from Abū Rishdīn, has aʻẓim lī nūran and not wa-jʻalnī nūran. Muslim 763a puts sight before hearing, has ʻan yasārī for ʻan shimālī and above and below before in front and behind, and ends wa-ʻaẓẓim lī nūran; al-Bukhārī 6316 has that order and ends wa-jʻal lī nūran. Light in the tongue is in Muslim 763j, where Salamah kept twelve of nineteen words, and in Muslim 763l, said as he went out to the prayer and ending allāhumma aʻṭinī nūrā. An-Nawawī reports from the scholars that the light asked for in every limb and on every side is the showing of the truth, its radiance and the guidance to it.

His veil is light … Were He to remove it, the glories of His Face would burn away everything of His creation His sight reaches.

Muslim 179a · ṣaḥīḥ

From Abū Mūsā: the Prophet ﷺ stood among us with five sayings, the first that Allah does not sleep, the opening carried at Names 22, 49 and 63. At ḥijābuhu n-nūr the text of Muslim 179a adds wa-fī riwāyati Abī Bakr an-nār, and the quotation is joined by an ellipsis there: the wording of Abū Bakr ibn Abī Shaybah has an-nār, the fire, where that of Abū Kurayb has an-nūr. Muslim 179b, through Jarīr from al-Aʻmash, has ḥijābuhu n-nūr; so do Ibn Mājah 195, by the route of 179a, and Ibn Mājah 196, through al-Masʻūdī, after which Abū ʻUbaydah recited 27:8 (both ṣaḥīḥ: al-Albānī; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; Darussalam). An-Nawawī reports from al-ʻAyn, al-Harawī and the commentators that subuḥātu wajhih is His light, majesty and splendor, and says the veil is what prevents seeing Him, named light or fire because both prevent perception.

He said: I asked the Messenger of Allah ﷺ: Did you see your Lord? He said: Light; how could I see Him?

Muslim 178a · ṣaḥīḥ

Abū Dharr asked, and ʻAbd Allāh ibn Shaqīq transmits it from him. Muslim 178b gives the answer as raʼaytu nūrā, I saw light; an-Nawawī reports al-Māzirī, His veil is light, so how could I see Him, and of the second wording, I saw the light only and nothing besides. At-Tirmidhī 3282 has nūrun annā arāh by the same route through Qatādah: ṣaḥīḥ (Aḥmad Shākir; al-Albānī; Darussalam, referring to Muslim); at-Tirmidhī: ḥasan.