Many Darknesses, One Light

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with a sentence that has outlived the plot it introduces: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

We read it as a remark about domestic life, but it is really a claim about the shape of good and bad. Flourishing converges on a single form; failure scatters into many. A happy household rests on the same handful of things—trust, patience, some working measure of forgiveness. Remove any one of them and the house can come apart in a thousand unrelated ways: this one through resentment, that one through neglect, another through pride. There is a narrow road into happiness and a wide field of exits from it.

The Quran carries the same intuition, but it encodes it in grammar. Light— nūr—is kept singular. Darkness— ẓulumāt—is cast in the plural. The distinction is easy to miss in English, where “darkness” and “light” both sit there as bare nouns. It lives in the Arabic:

يُخْرِجُهُم مِّنَ الظُّلُمَاتِ إِلَى النُّورِ

yukhrijuhum mina aẓ-ẓulumāti ilā an-nūr—He brings them out of the darknesses (plural) into the light (singular).

The central verse says it in full: