Yesterday we left him ﷺ at the seventh heaven, Ibrahim resting against the frequented house and the seven welcomes behind him. Tonight the ascent does not stop there. There is one more tree to pass, one more boundary where even the mightiest angel must wait, and then a meeting whose details Allah kept private, except for the single gift that came down from it and into your day.
This is the heart of al-Isra wal-Mi'raj, the middle of three. Dr. Yasir Qadhi is honest at the outset: the reports of this night come as scattered fragments, true pieces with very little to fix their exact order, and where the order is unknown he says so. What is certain is the shape of the climb: up past the last created thing, to the Lord above the veil, and back down with the prayer in hand.
What the prophets spoke of
حَتَّىٰ إِذَا فُتِحَتْ يَأْجُوجُ وَمَأْجُوجُ وَهُم مِّن كُلِّ حَدَبٍ يَنسِلُونَ
“Until when [the dam of] Gog and Magog has been opened and they, from every elevation, descend”
Surah al-Anbiya 21:96 Read 21:96 with tafsir
Somewhere on this night, the narrations do not pin down exactly where, the prophets fell into conversation, and Allah preserved a piece of it for us. They were speaking of the one thing none of them could be casual about: the Last Day. Ibrahim was asked first, and he said he had no knowledge of it. Musa was asked, and he too said he had no knowledge. Then they turned to Isa, and Isa had an answer, because Isa had been told his own part in it.
He said that Allah would send him back to this earth, and that he would be the one to kill the Dajjal. After that, he said, the peoples would scatter to their lands, and Yajuj and Majuj would pour out, drinking every water they passed until it was gone, until he would pray against them and Allah would destroy them in a single night, the whole earth left reeking with them, until he prayed again and Allah sent rain to wash the world clean. And then, he said, the Hour would be like a pregnant woman at the very end of her term: everyone knows it is coming, no one knows the hour it comes. The Prophet ﷺ confirmed it the way he confirmed so much: this, he said, is in the Qur'an, and the verse above about Yajuj and Majuj is one of its references.
Sheikh Yasir pauses on what this little scene quietly explains. So much of what the Prophet ﷺ would later teach his ummah about the end of time, about Isa returning, about the Dajjal, about Yajuj and Majuj, has a source you can point to right here: Isa told him directly, on the night he was carried up. One conversation was preserved out of who knows how many. The rest is in the unseen, and we leave it there.
A father's salam, a garden's soil
There was another exchange, and it is a gift handed down to every one of us. The Prophet ﷺ said: I met Ibrahim on the night I was taken, and he said to me, O Muhammad, convey my salam to your ummah. Hold that for a moment. Our father Ibrahim, the khalil of Allah, sending his peace across the centuries to a people not yet born, through the one descendant who would carry it to them. So receive it tonight as it was sent: peace from Ibrahim, to you.
And he sent advice with the greeting. Tell your ummah, he said, that Jannah has the most beautiful and fertile soil, but it is a flat, empty plain, barren, with nothing planted in it yet. Then he told them how its trees grow. Every time a servant says subhanallah, alhamdulillah, la ilaha illallah, Allahu akbar, a tree is planted for him in that fertile ground. The soil is guaranteed to give fruit; what it is waiting for is your seed.
It is the gentlest possible reading of dhikr. The remembrance you scatter through an ordinary day, under your breath in traffic, after the prayer, half-asleep on the pillow, is not vanishing into the air. It is being planted, in the richest soil there is, in a garden you are quietly growing while you are still on your way to it. Ibrahim wanted you to know that, and he asked the Prophet ﷺ to make sure you did.
The angel who has never smiled
On this night he ﷺ was also brought to meet Malik. Not the angel of death, whose name is Malak al-Mawt, but Malik, the keeper of the Fire, the one the Qur'an names as its gatekeeper. Jibril said: this is Malik, give him your salam. The Prophet ﷺ turned to greet him, and before he could speak, Malik greeted him first. And he noticed something at once: every other angel that night had carried a brightness, a welcome, a joy. Malik did not. He met the best of creation with a face that held no smile at all.
So the Prophet ﷺ asked why, and Jibril answered: he has never once smiled or laughed since the day he was created, because of what he was made to guard. Then Jibril added a line that should land softly on you: had Malik ever been going to smile for anyone, he would have smiled for you, O Muhammad ﷺ. The keeper of the Fire, somber since the beginning, makes his one exception in his heart for the Messenger of Allah, and still cannot smile, because of what he stands over.
There is a courtesy in this scene the Sheikh does not want you to miss. The Prophet ﷺ would be shown the Fire that night, which means he could, had he wished, have passed by Malik at his post. Instead Malik was brought up to him, and Malik was made to greet first. The whole arrangement is a statement: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ is as far from that Fire as the seventh heaven is from the lowest of creation. Even its noble keeper comes to him, and pays him the respect of a superior, and the distance between this man and that place could not be drawn more clearly.
The Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary
عِندَ سِدْرَةِ الْمُنتَهَىٰ عِندَهَا جَنَّةُ الْمَأْوَىٰ
“At the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary - Near it is the Garden of Refuge [i.e., Paradise] -”
Surah an-Najm 53:14-15 Read 53:14 with tafsir
إِذْ يَغْشَى السِّدْرَةَ مَا يَغْشَىٰ
“When there covered the Lote Tree that which covered [it].”
Surah an-Najm 53:16 Read 53:16 with tafsir
Then, past the seventh heaven, he came to it: Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary. Muntaha means the very end, and that is precisely what this tree marks. It is the edge of creation as we know it. Everything that rises up from the earth, Sheikh Yasir explains, ascends to here and goes no further: the souls, the prayers, the good deeds, the wholesome word, all of it carried up and received at the Sidra. And everything Allah sends down to the earth, the mercy and the rain and every decreed thing, begins its descent from here. The Lote Tree is the great threshold between our world and what lies above it.
He described it the only way it could be described to people who had never seen it, in the language of things they knew. Its fruit were like the great clay water jars of the town of Hajar. Its leaves were like the ears of elephants, vast and broad. And then the description stops being like anything at all. The tree was being covered, enveloped, by something, and the Qur'an itself will not name what: when there covered the Lote Tree that which covered it. Colors ran up and down it that he ﷺ said he could not describe, colors beyond any our eyes are built to see. Butterflies of gold drifted around it. It did not hold still; it kept changing, until, in one report, he said no one could describe it at all. He was no longer looking at anything of this world.
And the Qur'an's verdict on what he saw there is the seal: the sight did not swerve, nor did it transgress; he certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord. Allah Himself calls the Lote Tree one of His major signs. So pause on the arithmetic the Sheikh leaves with you: if a single tree, at the edge of the universe, is named among the greatest signs of the Lord, then what is greater than it, waiting just beyond it, was about to call him ﷺ on alone.
Two rivers you can see, two you cannot
إِنَّا أَعْطَيْنَاكَ الْكَوْثَرَ
“Indeed, We have granted you, [O Muḥammad], al-Kawthar.”
Surah al-Kawthar 108:1 Read 108:1 with tafsir
عَيْنًا فِيهَا تُسَمَّىٰ سَلْسَبِيلًا
“[From] a fountain within it [i.e., Paradise] named Salsabeel.”
Surah al-Insan 76:18 Read 76:18 with tafsir
At the Lote Tree he ﷺ saw four rivers flowing, two hidden and two open, and he asked Jibril what they were. Jibril said: the two hidden ones are in Jannah, rivers you will not see in this world; and the two you can see are the Nile and the Euphrates. Two of the rivers of Paradise touch this earth, and they are the very rivers along which the oldest civilizations of mankind have always lived, watered and blessed from a source higher than any map can trace. As for the two rivers of Jannah, they are al-Kawthar, the abundance Allah granted him in the surah above, and Salsabil, the fountain the Qur'an names in Surah al-Insan.
And here, somewhere in this stretch above the heavens, three more of Allah's major signs were unveiled to him, one after another. He saw al-Bayt al-Mamur, the frequented house, the Kaaba of the heavens that Ibrahim had been resting against, set so exactly above the earthly Kaaba that were it to fall it would land upon it; seventy thousand angels enter it every day to worship and never return, a fresh seventy thousand the next day, since the beginning of creation, until your mind gives out trying to count them. And he saw Jibril in his true and original form, the form he was created in, six hundred wings spread across the whole horizon, pearls and corals dripping from his feathers.
Sheikh Yasir gathers the three into one thought. The Lote Tree is the highest reach of this universe. The frequented house is the heavens at worship, the angels' own Kaaba. And Jibril in his form is the noblest of all the angels of Allah. The greatest of the angels and the greatest of the children of Adam, ﷺ, seeing each other as they truly are, at the boundary of everything created. Of all the things he was shown that night, the Sheikh notes, he only ever saw Jibril in that original form twice in his entire life, and this was one of them.
Carried up alone, to hear the Pen
عَلَّمَهُ شَدِيدُ الْقُوَىٰ ذُو مِرَّةٍ فَاسْتَوَىٰ وَهُوَ بِالْأُفُقِ الْأَعْلَىٰ
“Taught to him by one intense in strength - One of soundness. And he rose to [his] true form While he was in the higher [part of the] horizon.”
Surah an-Najm 53:5-7 Read 53:5 with tafsir
ثُمَّ دَنَا فَتَدَلَّىٰ فَكَانَ قَابَ قَوْسَيْنِ أَوْ أَدْنَىٰ فَأَوْحَىٰ إِلَىٰ عَبْدِهِ مَا أَوْحَىٰ مَا كَذَبَ الْفُؤَادُ مَا رَأَىٰ
“Then he approached and descended And was at a distance of two bow lengths or nearer. And he revealed to His Servant what he revealed [i.e., conveyed]. The heart did not lie [about] what it saw.”
Surah an-Najm 53:8-11 Read 53:8 with tafsir
Now comes the boundary that even Jibril does not cross. Up to the Lote Tree, the narrations keep Jibril at his side, leading, naming, explaining. At the Sidra, that changes. The Qur'an describes the encounter with the angel in the language above, the one intense in strength who rose to his true form at the highest horizon. And then the verbs shift. He ﷺ stops speaking of Jibril altogether and says, in the singular: then I was caused to ascend. Reading the reports carefully, Sheikh Yasir concludes the legitimate thing to say is that the Prophet ﷺ went on beyond the Lote Tree, beyond Jibril, beyond the last living creature, to a level no created being has ever reached.
What was up there? In one hadith he said: I rose until I could hear the scratching of the Pen. The same Pen Allah created first of all things and commanded to write everything that would be until the Day of Judgment, writing in the Book that is with Allah above the Throne. No angel is at that height. No creature is. He ﷺ rose to where the only ones present are the Owner of the Throne and the Pen recording His decree, and he heard it being written. It was, the Sheikh says, an audience the like of which we know of no other being ever receiving.
And of what passed there, Allah told us almost nothing, and there is a wisdom in the silence. The conversation between the Lord and His Messenger ﷺ was something too private and too precious to be handed out. The Qur'an gathers it into one merciful, undisclosed line, and he revealed to His servant what he revealed, and leaves it veiled. Only one thing was reported back to us from that meeting. Only one. And it was the most important thing He could have sent down.
Fifty, lowered to five
وَمَا جَعَلَ عَلَيْكُمْ فِي الدِّينِ مِنْ حَرَجٍ
“And [He] has not placed upon you in the religion any difficulty.”
Surah al-Hajj 22:78 Read 22:78 with tafsir
The one gift that came down was the prayer. Think about what that means before you hear the rest. Every other command of this religion, the zakah, the fasting, the hajj, all of it, was sent down to him ﷺ through Jibril, in the ordinary way of revelation. For one commandment alone, the Messenger was summoned up, past the heavens, past the Lote Tree, into the presence of the Divine, to receive it directly. That commandment is the salah. If nothing else told you where the prayer stands, this would be enough.
Allah prescribed fifty prayers a day. On the way back down, the Prophet ﷺ passed Musa, who asked him what his Lord had enjoined. Fifty prayers, he said. Musa told him to go back: your ummah cannot bear fifty, I have more experience with people than you, go and ask Him to lighten it. And here is a detail the Sheikh loves, because it is so human. The Prophet ﷺ looked to Jibril, as if asking his opinion, and Jibril nodded: yes, do it. The best of mankind, seeking a second opinion from the best of angels, in the middle of the heavens. So he went back, and Allah lowered it. And he came down, and Musa sent him back again, and again, and again. Five times, at least, up and down, with Musa meeting him each time and the same advice each time, until at last the Prophet ﷺ said: I have gone back to my Lord until I am ashamed to ask again. I am content.
And when he said it, a voice called out: I have decreed My obligation and I have made it light upon My servants, it is five, but it shall be rewarded as fifty. Five prayers on the scale, fifty in the reward. Allah had known from the start it would settle at five; the going up and coming down was mercy made visible, His easing of the burden shown to us step by step. There is a difficulty He did not place upon you, the verse above says, and you are watching Him lift it in real time. Sheikh Yasir leaves you with the ache of it: it costs us less than twenty minutes of a day, this gift carried down from beyond the Throne, and still so many of us cannot find the five. He also notes the other half of the picture: the Prophet ﷺ himself, knowing the original fifty, would pray about fifty units a day of his own accord. The five were lightened for us. He kept reaching for the fifty.
We stop here, with the prayer in his hands and the descent not yet finished. Tomorrow the journey comes the rest of the way down, and then the hardest part of the whole night: the morning after, when he ﷺ must tell Makkah what he saw.