Isra and Mi'raj

Isra and Mi'raj commemorates two joined events kept on a single night: the Isra, the miraculous night journey of the Prophet Muhammad from the sacred mosque at Mecca to "the farthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aqsa), traditionally identified with Jerusalem; and the Mi'raj, the ascent from there through the heavens, where he is said to have met the earlier prophets and where the five daily prayers were fixed. The Qur'an alludes to the journey in a single verse of Surah 17 without naming the destination; the fuller narrative, including the meetings with Adam, Jesus, Moses and Abraham and the negotiation that reduced the prayers from fifty to five, comes from the hadith and the biographical tradition. It is usually dated to 27 Rajab.

Observance is markedly uneven across the Muslim world. It is a public holiday and a night of prayer, lamps and public retellings in Indonesia, Malaysia and much of the Arab world, while Salafi and Wahhabi scholars decline to single the night out for worship, accepting the event itself but rejecting the commemoration as an innovation without early warrant, the same pattern of dispute that surrounds the Mawlid. The identification of the "farthest mosque" with Jerusalem is a foundation of the city's standing in Islam.

Islamic tradition associates the Mi'raj specifically with a rock now enshrined beneath the Dome of the Rock on the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, identified as the point from which the Prophet ascended through the heavens, making the Dome, completed in 691 and one of the oldest surviving Islamic monumental buildings, a direct architectural expression of the Isra and Mi'raj narrative rather than only a general commemoration of the Prophet's connection to the city.

The same Haram al-Sharif compound is also the Temple Mount of Jewish and Christian tradition, and its status is one of the most sensitive and long-running points of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with access, administration and sovereignty over the site subject to ongoing dispute between Israeli authorities, the Jordanian-administered Islamic waqf that manages the Muslim holy places there, and Palestinian claims to the city; this entry describes the religious tradition behind the site's significance in Islam without taking a position on the political dispute, which is a distinct question from the theological one and is treated at length in the specialist literature on the conflict rather than in an account of the holiday itself.