Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: Light and luminous being in Islamic theology

Abstract

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human(oid) body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti (Ash’ari, Egypt, d. 1505) and al-Majlisi (Persia, d. 1699), suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi (Syria, d. 1191) and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought.