Light upon Light — God is the Light of the heavens and the earth
Suhrawardi built an entire philosophical system out of this single Qur'anic verse, replacing the standard categories of substance and accident with one continuous scale of light running from God down to the dimmest, most material things.
Qur'an 24:35, the so-called Light Verse, pictures God's light through a chain of images — a niche, a lamp, glass "as if it were a glittering star" — building toward light upon light. The twelfth-century philosopher Suhrawardi took this verse as scriptural warrant for Hikmat al-Ishraq, the Philosophy of Illumination, in which he replaced the Aristotelian vocabulary of substance and accident with a single hierarchy running from pure light, the Light of Lights, down through gradations of dimmer light to darkness, with every being's rank fixed by how much light-as-knowledge-as-consciousness it possesses. For Suhrawardi, to know something just is a kind of illumination, an immediate presence of the light to itself, rather than the abstract mental representation favored by the Peripatetic philosophers he was arguing against. Later Persian Sufi writing inherited its light-soaked vocabulary directly from his reading of this one verse.
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
Qur'an; Hikmat al-Ishraq (Suhrawardi)