The Night Journey and Ascension of Muhammad

The Qur'anic basis is a single verse: glory be to the one who took his servant by night from the sacred place of prostration to the farthest place of prostration, whose surroundings we have blessed, in order to show him some of our signs. It names no mount, no companion and no ascent, and a second passage, in the chapter of the Star, describes a vision near the Lote Tree of the Boundary without connecting the two explicitly. Everything else comes from hadith and from the early biographical tradition, where the narrative is told in detail and with variations between transmitters.

In the developed account the roof of the house is opened, the chest is opened and washed, and a white mount called Buraq, smaller than a mule and larger than a donkey, whose stride reaches as far as its sight, is brought and mounted with Jibril alongside. They travel to Jerusalem, where the mount is tethered, and the prophets who came before are assembled and Muhammad leads them in prayer, which is the moment the tradition reads as the succession of one prophetic line by another. Then comes the ascent through the heavens, at each of which a gate is opened after Jibril is challenged and identifies his companion, and at each of which a prophet is met: Adam at the first, Isa and Yahya at the second, Yusuf at the third, Idris at the fourth, Harun at the fifth, Musa at the sixth and Ibrahim at the seventh, seated with his back to the much-frequented house.

The best known episode of the ascent is the negotiation over prayer. Fifty prayers a day are enjoined; on the way down Musa asks what was imposed and says that the community will not manage it, having had experience of the children of Israel, and sends him back to ask for a reduction. This happens repeatedly, ten at a time in some versions and five at a time in others, until the number is five, at which point Musa still advises going back and Muhammad says that he has asked until he is ashamed to ask again and that he accepts. The five are then declared to count as fifty in reward. The story is cited in Islamic teaching both as the origin of the five daily prayers and as an unusually direct picture of intercession.

Whether the journey happened in the body or as a vision was disputed from the earliest period. Some early authorities, including a report attributed to Aisha, held that the body did not leave, and the wording of the verse in the chapter of the Star, which speaks of what the heart did not deny of what it saw, was cited in support; the majority position in later Sunni theology is that the journey was bodily and while awake. The identification of the farthest place of prostration with the site in Jerusalem is the standard reading and underlies the sanctity of the precinct there, though a minority of early opinions understood the phrase differently. The night is commemorated in many Muslim communities as the festival of the Isra and the Miraj, and it became the seed of a large body of narrative and visual art, including the illustrated ascension books of Persian and Turkish manuscript tradition.