DAZZLING LIGHT IS A MANIFESTATION of the divine shared across many religions. We only need think of Diwali, the Hindu five-day autumn festival of lights or the Jewish holiday festival of Hanukkah held over the course of eight days and nights. Light also occupies a prime place in Christianity and Islam.
The primacy of light in creation is manifest at the beginning of the Bible in which God brings light where previously there had only been darkness. In the Quran light is not just created by God but is identified with God’s presence: “God is the Light of the heavens and earth … God guides whoever He will to his Light.”
Optical science in mediaeval Europe drew heavily on Islamic optics in Latin translation, above all the De Aspectibus (On Appearances) by Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in the eleventh century, which is one of the great works of science. Al-Haytham embraced the mathematical, physical and anatomical aspects of earlier Greek and Roman traditions, with the addition of his own experimental bent. Under the rubrics of direct illumination, reflection and refraction, the behaviour of light and the functioning of sight are analysed exhaustively.
Not least he deals with the “errors of direct vision and their causes”. Errors arise from the limitation of sight in the face of extreme effects that lie “outside the range of moderateness”, as when something is too far away, too bright or too dark, visible for too short a time, or too fast (like a spinning top). That phenomenon “outside the.
