No single work shaped the verse's later reception as much as Mishkat al-Anwar, "The Niche for Lights," a short treatise the eleventh century theologian and mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali built directly on this verse's imagery. Al-Ghazali, already the author of a major systematic defense of orthodox theology, used the verse's progression of niche, lamp, glass and oil as a framework for describing degrees of spiritual illumination, from ordinary sense perception through reason to the direct mystical vision he associated with the most advanced spiritual attainment, treating God as the only true light and every other kind of illumination, physical or intellectual, as light only in a borrowed, secondary sense.
That reading gave the verse a durable place in Islamic mystical, or Sufi, literature well beyond al-Ghazali's own treatise, as later writers continued to treat the Light Verse as a primary proof text for light-centered accounts of divine reality and of the soul's ascent toward it. Its visual richness also made it, alongside Ayat al-Kursi, one of the more common single verses reproduced in Islamic calligraphy and architectural inscription, its imagery of a radiant niche making it especially suited to that kind of visual display. This atlas records it as a portion in its own right, contained within the surah An-Nur already recorded here, following the same treatment already given to Ayat al-Kursi as a named verse smaller than any surah or juz division.