Tahajjud

Tahajjud is the voluntary night prayer of Islam, offered after a period of sleep in the last part of the night before dawn. It is not among the five obligatory prayers, but it holds a place of exceptional honour in the tradition, praised in the Qur'an where the Prophet Muhammad is directed to keep vigil in a portion of the night as an additional devotion, and where those who forsake their beds to call upon their Lord are commended. The name derives from a root meaning to remain awake, and the practice is defined by its cost: rising in the stillness when sleep would be natural, precisely because that hardship is understood to make the worship sincere.

There is no fixed number of units. The reported practice of the Prophet was a small number of long, unhurried rak'ah with extended recitation, standing and prostration. Worshippers add supplication and, often, the reading of the Qur'an, and the hour is held in the sources to be the time when prayer is most surely heard, the divine mercy described as descending upon the world in the last third of the night.

Tahajjud has been especially cultivated in the Sufi orders and among the devout of every school as the private engine of the spiritual life, distinct from the public and obligatory character of the five daily prayers. Manuals of the inner life treat the capacity to keep the night watch as a fruit of long training, since it depends on both waking and inward attentiveness. Because it follows sleep, it is distinguished in the books from a continuous vigil kept without rest.

The practice connects to the wider Islamic esteem for the night as the time of nearness to God. In Ramadan its communal counterpart is the tarawih; outside it, tahajjud remains the individual's own, unregulated by congregation and unseen, which is exactly the quality the tradition prizes in it.

Al-Ghazali, in the Ihya Ulum al-Din, treated the night vigil as one of the surest engines of spiritual advancement precisely because it is unseen and unrewarded by any worldly recognition, arguing that a deed performed when everyone else is asleep carries a sincerity public worship cannot fully replicate; later Sufi orders built formal litanies and recommended numbers of rak'ah around the practice, while insisting, in keeping with the wider tradition, that the exact number matters far less than the wakeful intention behind it.