What Is Light
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What is light? al-Ghazali says the word has layers of meaning. For ordinary people, light means appearing. Something is lit when it becomes visible.
Look at the things around you. He says they fall into three kinds. Some things cannot be seen by themselves, like a dark object in the night. Some things can be seen, but do not show anything else, like the stars, or a glowing coal. And some things are seen themselves and make other things seen, like the sun, or a lamp. This third kind, he says, is what we call light.
So light is that which is visible in itself, and makes other things visible.
But wait, he says. Light alone is not enough for seeing. A blind person stands in the brightest sun and sees nothing. For anything to appear, there must also be an eye. And the eye does something light cannot do. Light only shows. The eye perceives.
So the seeing eye, he says, deserves the name light even more than the light of the sun. That is why people have always spoken of the light of the eyes.
Notice what he is doing. He is taking us up a ladder, one step at a time. From the light we see, to the light by which we see. And he is about to take us one step higher. Because there is something within us that sees far more clearly than the eye ever can.
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