Light and Darkness as Qur'anic Metaphors: A Thematic Survey

The word nūr (light) appears forty-nine times in the Qur'an; the word zulumāt (darknesses, always in the plural) appears twenty-three times. This asymmetry is itself meaningful: light is singular, unified, while darkness is multiple, fragmented. The Qur'an's linguistic choices are never accidental.

The most concentrated treatment of light as a theological concept appears in Surah Al-Nur (24:35), the famous Ayat al-Nur: 'God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly white star lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Light upon light. God guides to His light whom He wills.'

The commentators have spilled rivers of ink on this verse. Al-Ghazali devoted an entire treatise to it — Mishkat al-Anwar (The Niche of Lights) — arguing that the verse describes the hierarchy of lights from the divine to the prophetic to the angelic to the human intellect. Ibn Arabi read it as a description of the self-disclosure of the Divine through creation.

The plural zulumāt — darknesses — is significant. The Qur'an consistently uses the singular for light and the plural for darkness. This reflects a theological reality: there is one truth, one guidance, one straight path (al-sirat al-mustaqim), but the ways of error are many. Surah Al-An'am (6:153) makes this explicit: 'This is My path, straight, so follow it; and do not follow other paths, for they will scatter you from His path.'