unlike other lights. Yet you are unjust in what you ask, denying what He has said about Himself in His Book. If you acknowledge the Book, you and we agree that Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth, but we disagree over saying that He is light: we say, “He is light,” whereas you say, “We do not say that He is light.”

If you claim that “light” means “guide,” we ask you: “Can someone other than Him then be a guiding light?” If you say no, analogy and language prove you wrong. If you say yes, we say to you: “You have thereby equated the guiding light that is other than Allah, glorified be He, with Him, since He is the guiding Light. In the one case the meaning is ‘light,’ and in the other the meaning is ‘light’; thus the two are alike in meaning and name.” You have therefore fallen into the very thing for which you faulted your opponent, since you maintain that He is light unlike any other light, and say that He is a guiding light unlike any other guiding light. What distinction, then, is there between you and the one who says that? What difference is there between him and you?

If you object, “If He is light, then light can only be an actual body and a shining radiance,” we reply, “Nor can He know and see except as flesh and blood, divisible and made up of parts.” If your analogy is valid against your opponent, then his analogy is valid against you: that He can hear and see only if He is flesh