The Night Journey and the Ascension, part 1

The gift after the year of sorrow

سُبْحَانَ الَّذِي أَسْرَىٰ بِعَبْدِهِ لَيْلًا مِّنَ الْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ إِلَى الْمَسْجِدِ الْأَقْصَى الَّذِي بَارَكْنَا حَوْلَهُ لِنُرِيَهُ مِنْ آيَاتِنَا ۚ إِنَّهُ هُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْبَصِيرُ

“Exalted is He who took His Servant [i.e., Prophet Muḥammad (ﷺ)] by night from al-Masjid al-Ḥarām to al-Masjid al-Aqṣā, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs. Indeed, He is the Hearing, the Seeing.”

Surah al-Isra 17:1Listen Read 17:1 with tafsir

Two words name the night. Isra means a journey made in the dark: the ride from Makkah to Jerusalem, a journey of this earth. Mi'raj is not the ascent itself but the instrument of ascent, the thing you rise by, a lift of Allah's own making from Jerusalem up through the heavens, a journey out of this world altogether. And Allah opens the surah that carries it with a word He reserves for the most exalted of things: subhan, glory to Him, the One free of every imperfection. He praises Himself for what He is about to tell you. That is how immense this night is.

Listen to what He calls the one He carried: His servant. Not by name, by title. He did not create jinn and mankind except to worship Him (Surah adh-Dhariyat 51:56), so when Allah calls a man abdihi, His slave, He is announcing the one who perfected the very purpose of creation. Among ourselves, presidents and royalty are addressed by title because a title outranks a name. So it is here: more often than Allah names him ﷺ in the Qur'an, He titles him.

And the ayah states the journey's single purpose: to show him of Our signs. Surah an-Najm answers from the far side of the night: He certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord. Promised, then delivered. Notice who the night is for. Not for Quraysh, who will only mock it. Not even for us, who were not there and can only believe. The whole journey is a personal gift to him ﷺ; we are simply allowed to hear about it.

And it came when it came for a reason this series keeps meeting: no one passes a trial with patience except that the sweetness follows. The hardest year of his life ﷺ was answered with the highest night of his life.

Twenty narrators, one night

Before the first step, an honest word about sources, because this is where Dr. Yasir Qadhi the storyteller makes room for Dr. Yasir Qadhi the academic. The night journey is among the most heavily narrated events in the entire seerah: more than twenty companions carried pieces of it, six of them in Sahih al-Bukhari alone. Set every hadith about this one night beside every hadith about the rest of the Makkan era, and the night wins.

That abundance brought problems. Professional storytellers fell in love with this story early and dressed it in vivid scenes that simply never happened; the scholars rose against them until storytellers were banned from the masjids outright, but some of those inventions had already soaked into the popular books. And even once the authentic reports are sifted from the fabricated, work the Sheikh says he has spent long hours on himself, what remains is a box of puzzle pieces: true fragments with very little to fix their exact order, like twenty friends retelling the same long day, each starting somewhere different.

The knots were real enough that great scholars, Imam an-Nawawi among them, allowed that perhaps there were two separate night journeys, because some reports seemed impossible to reconcile. The Sheikh stands with the majority and reads the answer straight out of the ayah: He took His servant by night, laylan, one servant, one night. One journey, and the small seams between narrations are to be reconciled, not multiplied.

As for when: no companion ever dated it. The earliest writers of sira, Ibn Ishaq among them, placed it about a year before the hijrah, and one authentic clue locks the window shut: Khadijah passed away before the prayer was made obligatory, and the prayer was made obligatory on this very night. So the journey came after the year of sorrow, in the final stretch of Makkah. The month? Five different claims, none with any authentic basis. The sahabah preserved every detail of the night and let the date fall away, because the calendar was never the point. What happened matters; when it happened does not.

The roof opens, the heart is washed

مَا كَذَبَ الْفُؤَادُ مَا رَأَىٰ

“The heart did not lie [about] what it saw.”

Surah an-Najm 53:11Listen Read 53:11 with tafsir

مَا زَاغَ الْبَصَرُ وَمَا طَغَىٰ لَقَدْ رَأَىٰ مِنْ آيَاتِ رَبِّهِ الْكُبْرَىٰ

“The sight [of the Prophet (ﷺ)] did not swerve, nor did it transgress [its limit]. He certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord.”

Surah an-Najm 53:17-18Listen (2) Read 53:17 with tafsir

Where did it begin? Bukhari carries both answers. In one report he ﷺ says: while I was lying in the Hijr, the low semicircle beside the Ka'bah. When Quraysh rebuilt the House and their funds ran short, they left that portion out, which is why praying in the Hijr is praying inside the original Ka'bah. In another report: while I was in my house, the roof opened, and Jibril descended. The scholars read the two together rather than against each other: taken from his house, brought first to the Hijr. Not every difference is a contradiction.

There Jibril opened his chest and brought a basin of gold. One narration says it was filled with Zamzam, another says with iman, with faith itself, and again both are true at once: Zamzam carrying iman into him. His heart was washed and set back in its place. It had been washed once before, when he was a small boy in the desert and a black speck was drawn out of it. There is no speck this time. This washing is not a cleansing. It is a fortifying.

Because of what comes next. He ﷺ is about to step out of the world as we know it, and it is related that if another man had seen even a fraction of what he was shown that night, the man would have lost his mind. So Allah strengthened the heart first, and the Qur'an testifies to the result: the heart did not lie, and the eye did not flinch, did not wander, did not look away. He gazed steadily, with a fortified heart, at things no human being has ever been shown.

A creature named lightning

Then Jibril brought the mount: a riding beast, pure white, smaller than a mule and larger than a donkey, with a harness and a saddle by a report in Tirmidhi. Its name, al-Buraq, grows from barq, lightning, and its stride is the detail you never forget: each hoof lands at the farthest point its eye can see. Run any numbers you like. A creature whose every step swallows the horizon is moving faster than anything we have ever built.

Notice what is missing: wings. The winged horse of the paintings was never narrated. The hadith describes a creature of flesh and blood, and it behaves like one: when the Prophet ﷺ moved to mount it, the Buraq shied, the way any animal startles under an unfamiliar rider. Jibril seized the harness and rebuked it: are you not ashamed? No one more honored in the sight of Allah has ever ridden you.

Sit with that sentence. It means others have ridden this creature before, riders we are never told of, on errands of Allah we know nothing about. Whole orders of creation exist that our catalogues have never touched, and tonight one of them stands saddled in Makkah, waiting for its noblest rider ﷺ.

The masjid only he could see

The Buraq carried him ﷺ to Jerusalem, and you have to picture the city honestly. In that year there is no dome, no minaret, no sanctuary at all. Rome rules Jerusalem, and its Christian emperors, out of contempt for the Jews, had deliberately left the ancient Temple site to be used as a dumping ground. To every other eye in the city that night, the holiest hill in Jerusalem is rubble and refuse.

He ﷺ did not see what the city saw. He says: I tied the Buraq to the post the prophets tie to. A hitching post, worn by the prophets before him, at a masjid the world had buried; Allah unveiled the original house of worship to him as it truly is. Then he walked in and prayed two rak'ahs. Greeting the masjid with prayer would only be legislated years later in Madinah, and the five daily prayers did not yet exist, but he ﷺ was already living what would one day be taught.

And he was not alone. He turned and found them, or he knew all along (the narrations carry it both ways): the prophets, gathered, standing in prayer. He describes them like a man pointing across a room. Musa: tall, dark, powerfully built, like the men of the tribe of Shanu'ah. Isa: white with a touch of red, shorter, his hair glistening as if he had just stepped from a bath. And of Ibrahim he said simply: no one resembles him more than I do.

Then the prayer was called, and he ﷺ was put forward. Every prophet Allah ever sent, well over a hundred thousand souls, stood in a single row behind one imam. Weigh what that means: every prophet is the leader of his own ummah, so the imam of the prophets is the leader of every ummah at once. The master of the children of Adam, as he ﷺ himself later put it, adding: and it is no boast. It is simply what happened in Jerusalem that night.

One more thing about that row. He had already passed Musa on the road that night, standing in prayer in his grave; here Musa prays in the row; in the sixth heaven they will meet again. Death has not stopped a single one of them from praying. The same prayer, toward the same Lord, with the same message: one family at one task, some preferred above others, and the one leading them preferred above all.

Two cups, one ummah

وَإِنَّ لَكُمْ فِي الْأَنْعَامِ لَعِبْرَةً ۖ نُّسْقِيكُم مِّمَّا فِي بُطُونِهِ مِن بَيْنِ فَرْثٍ وَدَمٍ لَّبَنًا خَالِصًا سَائِغًا لِّلشَّارِبِينَ

“And indeed, for you in grazing livestock is a lesson. We give you drink from what is in their bellies - between excretion and blood - pure milk, palatable to drinkers.”

Surah an-Nahl 16:66Listen Read 16:66 with tafsir

After the prayer, Jibril held out two vessels. One narration places this moment here, another during the ascent; a small seam, and it changes nothing. In one vessel, wine. In the other, milk. And remember where we are in the story: wine has not yet been forbidden. The believers of Makkah still drink it. This is not a test of law. It is a test of instinct.

Jibril says: choose, and choose for your ummah. Fourteen centuries hang on the reach of one hand. He ﷺ takes the milk, and Jibril tells him: you have chosen the fitrah. Milk is the Qur'an's own image of purity, drawn clean from between filth and blood, the drink he ﷺ loved, the one thing that serves as both food and drink. Wine is the opposite story: something pure left to spoil until it steals the mind that milk would have nourished. One of the companions later said that even if wine had never been prohibited, a man of sound intelligence would have walked past it on his own.

You have chosen the fitrah, and your ummah will be upon it. He ﷺ taught that every child is born upon the fitrah, the clean original setting, good at its core. That night, long before the laws came down one by one, the direction of this ummah was chosen for it: purity as the default, the fitrah as home.

Doors that ask who is there

الَّذِي خَلَقَ سَبْعَ سَمَاوَاتٍ طِبَاقًا ۖ مَّا تَرَىٰ فِي خَلْقِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ مِن تَفَاوُتٍ ۖ فَارْجِعِ الْبَصَرَ هَلْ تَرَىٰ مِن فُطُورٍ

“[And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks?”

Surah al-Mulk 67:3Listen Read 67:3 with tafsir

وَلَقَدْ زَيَّنَّا السَّمَاءَ الدُّنْيَا بِمَصَابِيحَ وَجَعَلْنَاهَا رُجُومًا لِّلشَّيَاطِينِ ۖ وَأَعْتَدْنَا لَهُمْ عَذَابَ السَّعِيرِ

“And We have certainly beautified the nearest heaven with lamps [i.e., stars] and have made [from] them what is thrown at the devils and have prepared for them the punishment of the Blaze.”

Surah al-Mulk 67:5Listen Read 67:5 with tafsir

The Buraq stays tied at the post. From Jerusalem the second journey begins: the mi'raj, the rising. At the lowest heaven there is a door, and the door is locked. Jibril asks for it to be opened, and a gatekeeper answers from the other side: who is this? Jibril. Who is with you? Muhammad ﷺ. Has he been sent for? Yes. Only then does the door open, and the same exchange repeats at the second heaven, and the third, all the way to the seventh.

Hold that picture: locked doors in the heavens, each with an appointed keeper, and no one passes without permission, not even Jibril. And the verification is nothing but words, because angels cannot lie. In a world without deceit, your word is your visa.

What are these seven heavens? Sheikh Yasir slows down here, because two words get tangled: samawat and jannat. The samawat are seven created skies, layered one above the other. In his considered view, everything astronomy has ever seen, every star in every telescope, every galaxy billions of light years out, all of it together is only the first of the seven, the nearest heaven Allah says He beautified with lamps. Six more stretch beyond it, each enclosing the last, and the jannat, the gardens of Paradise, lie above them all.

Which untangles a confusion before it starts: meeting Adam in the first heaven does not mean Adam lives on the lowest level of Paradise. No one is in Paradise yet; it stands empty until the Day of Judgment. The prophets he ﷺ is about to meet were brought out to the heavens for one purpose tonight: to welcome him.

Seven welcomes, seven messages

قَالَ لَا تَثْرِيبَ عَلَيْكُمُ الْيَوْمَ ۖ يَغْفِرُ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ ۖ وَهُوَ أَرْحَمُ الرَّاحِمِينَ

“He said, "No blame will there be upon you today. May Allāh forgive you; and He is the most merciful of the merciful.”

Surah Yusuf 12:92Listen Read 12:92 with tafsir

وَرَفَعْنَاهُ مَكَانًا عَلِيًّا

“And We raised him to a high station.”

Surah Maryam 19:57Listen Read 19:57 with tafsir

Behind the first door stood a tall, towering man, and Jibril said: this is your father Adam, greet him. Adam answered his salam: welcome, O righteous son and righteous prophet. Now understand what this lineup is, because the Sheikh clears up a common mistake: the order of the heavens is not a ranking of the prophets. These are welcoming parties. When a dignitary arrives, someone of honor receives him at every stage; Allah sent out some of the noblest of all His prophets to receive this one guest ﷺ. And each greeter, read rightly, is a message addressed to him.

Adam: the father who was made to leave the holiest of homes, with a promised return. Within a year, the son standing before him must leave the holiest city on earth, driven out the way Shaytan once drove out his father, with the Abu Lahabs of Makkah playing the old part; and like his father, he will return. The second heaven: Isa and Yahya, sons of two sisters, the prophets nearest him in time, and both savaged by their own people. Yahya was killed outright (their own scriptures record it), and Isa escaped only because Allah raised him. The message: you are not the first whose own people turned on him.

The third: Yusuf, given half of all beauty, wronged by his own blood brothers, who lived to hear them confess and forgave them anyway. The Prophet ﷺ never forgot that one. Years from this night, standing over a conquered Makkah while Quraysh wait to learn their fate, he will reach for Yusuf's exact sentence: no blame upon you today. The fourth: Idris, of whom the Qur'an tells us essentially one thing, that Allah raised him to a high station, spoken now to a man being raised through the heavens themselves. The fifth: Harun, despised by his people and then beloved by them, another rejection that ended in love.

The sixth: Musa. No prophet's road resembles his ﷺ more: the trials, the stubborn people, the long years, and the second largest ummah ever gathered. All his life our Prophet ﷺ would steady himself with him; when an injury cut deep he would say: Musa was harmed more than this, and he was patient. And as the Prophet ﷺ passed beyond him, Musa wept. Asked why, he said: this young man was sent after me, and more of his ummah will enter Jannah than mine. A young man! He ﷺ was past fifty, but Musa had lived more than double that, and the tears were not a grudge. They were ghibtah, the believer's envy, which grieves only that someone carried more good home. It is the one jealousy this religion smiles upon.

And the seventh: Ibrahim, resting his back against al-Bayt al-Ma'mur. He alone greeted the Prophet ﷺ as Adam had: welcome, O righteous son and righteous prophet. Every other prophet said brother; the two fathers said son, and you can hear the pride in it. Ibrahim is the khalil, the intimate friend, and the Prophet ﷺ said Allah took only the two of them for that station. As for the house at his back: the frequented house, the Ka'bah of the heavens, set so exactly above the Ka'bah of earth that were it to fall, it would land upon it. Seventy thousand angels enter it every day to worship and never return, a new seventy thousand every day since creation began; do that arithmetic until your mind gives out. And why is Ibrahim resting there, at ease where angels are granted one visit in all eternity? Because he built the house below. The reward takes the shape of the deed: raise Allah's house on earth, and rest against Allah's house in the seventh heaven. One quiet note rings ahead: of all the prophets he met, only Isa is still alive, and so only Isa had to come down to meet him that night, as he will come down once more at the end of time.