The lamp of paradox

Abstract

The transferable image of a hanging lamp suspended from an arch appears across several media in the Islamic world from the medieval period. Lamps and lamp-shaped objects also survive in significant numbers. While the relationship of the lamp image to the Qur’anic Light Verse (24:35) and its medieval exegeses has long been recognized, this article questions both the a priori assumption of textual primacy over images and objects, and the ascription of univocal symbolism to a highly complex polyvalent phenomenon. The image of the radiant lamp, in both the Qur’anic text and its subsequent mental and material envisionings, represents a symbiotic engagement between the visual and verbal realms, at the core of which lies a seemingly paradoxical stress on the materiality of the lamp itself as metonym for light. This study addresses the use of the lamp image in medieval Islam by considering the implications and outcomes of a representational model that hypostatizes light as matter and mental image as external form. Textual sources, and their relationships to both internal and external forms of vision, are first discussed. Following this, an examination of individual objects scrutinizes an increasingly dense materiality of the lamp image as the Word is embodied in glass, ceramic, metal, and wool. The visual–verbal–material nexus of radiance, as formulated within the Qur’anic text, reaches its most complete incarnation, paradoxically, in fully opaque votive “lamps” that replace optical illumination with a web of connotative signification.