Frank Griffel's study of al-Ghazali's thought describes the eleventh century theologian devoting an entire treatise, the Mishkat al-Anwar, the Niche of Lights, to working through what this single verse means, rather than treating it as one image among many. Ghazali reads the verse's own architecture, a niche, a lamp, a glass, an olive tree, as a structured allegory rather than as ornamental description, and uses it to organize a whole account of how divine light relates to created light, working through several possible readings rather than settling on one and discarding the rest.
Griffel traces how the treatise moves from an everyday, literal sense of the verse, God as a metaphorical source of guidance the way light illuminates a path, through a philosophical sense drawing on the idea of a single source of intelligible being from which everything else derives its reality by degrees, toward a mystical sense in which the verse describes the soul's own capacity to receive divine illumination directly. Ghazali does not present these as competing readings to choose between but as levels a reader can pass through, which is part of why the verse became, and remained, a favored text for Sufi commentary long after Ghazali's own treatise.