In ʿIrāqī's Lamaʿāt, or Divine Flashes, the sun shines in a mirror and the image is meant to do something to you. Ilma Qureshi argues in a new paper that the 13th-century Persian text is not decorated philosophy but philosophy that works through its decoration. The claim is deliberately provocative: that the form of the text matters as much as, if not more than, its content.
This matters because it treats a poem as an instrument for producing a specific kind of experience rather than a vessel carrying a detachable message. If Qureshi is right, some philosophical insight lives in what a work does to a reader, not only in what it says, and cannot be lifted out and restated in plain prose without loss. That reframes both how we read a tradition and how we think about the varieties of Islamic philosophy, broadly construed.
The evidence is a humanistic close reading. Qureshi examines ʿIrāqī's literary devices and rhetorical strategies and argues they are carefully deployed to induce an affective experience in the reader, drawing on the reader's full range of senses, imagination, and intellect. That experience, she contends, facilitates a distinct form of knowing. The method is hermeneutical: textual analysis and philosophical argument built on the case study, not experiment.
The limits are worth stating plainly. There is no empirical or quantitative data here, no measured readers reporting measured effects. The argument rests on the author's interpretive framework, and its strength is the strength of that reading. It would be undercut if the poem's devices turned out to be incidental rather than intentional, if actual readers did not experience the effects attributed to the form, or if the insight proved fully recoverable from prose paraphrase.
What the paper leaves open is a question about consciousness itself. If a poem's rhythm and imagery can generate a mode of awareness that its propositional content alone cannot, then aesthetic experience may be a genuine channel of knowing rather than a pleasant wrapper. How language and sensory imagination assemble into a conscious state, and whether that state carries knowledge, is exactly what the Lamaʿāt puts to us. This study names the question sharply without claiming to settle it.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-026-01152-7