The Space Between Here and There: The Prophet's Night Journey as an Allegory of Islamic Ritual Prayer

Abstract

This paper commences with an analysis of Qur'an 17:1, the Prophet's alleged night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, which it interprets as an allegory of Islamic ritual prayer. By way of this interpretation, the paper subsequently reviews Islam as a particularly spatially oriented religion and proposes a spatial reading of the word ‘Islam’ itself.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Raymond Farrin and especially Nur Soliman for their comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹Frédéric Bauden, Aboubakr Chraïbi, Antonella Ghersetti, and Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Call for Papers’, H-Mideast-Medieval listserve, March 16, 2009, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Mideast-Medieval&month=0903&week=c&msg=gdGfGSc4D1pbxBSKpRtkvw&user=&pw= (accessed August 31, 2010).

²Ibid.

³Ibid.

⁴Qur'an 17:1. All translations from the Qur'an are mine, unless indicated otherwise.

⁵See, for example, Abū Ja^cfar Mu⋅ammad b. Jarīr al-[Tdot]abarī, Tafsīr al-[Tdot]abarī: Jami^c al-bayān ^can ta’wīl āy al-Qu’rān, ed Ma⋅mūd Mu⋅ammad Shākir, 27 vols (Cairo: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 2008), 17: 490–515.

⁶See, for example, Uri Rubin, ‘Mu⋅ammad's Night Journey (isrā’) to Al-Masjid al-Aq⋅ā: Aspects of the Earliest Origins of the Islamic Sanctity of Jerusalem,’ Al-Qantara 29, no. 1 (2008): 147–64.

⁷For a succinct discussion of the verse and its relation to the mi‘rāj, see Michael Sells, ‘Ascension,’ in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, 6 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006), 1: 176–81.

⁸Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Erste Qibla—Fernstes Masgid? Jerusalem im Horizont des historischen Muhammad,’ in Zion—Ort der Begegnung. Festschrift für Laurentius Klein zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres, ed. Ferdinand Hahn, Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, Hans Jorissen, and Angelika Neuwirth (Bodenheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1993), 227–70; Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Face of God—Face of Man: The Significance of the Direction of Prayer in Islam,’ in Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten, with Jan Assmann and Guy G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 298–312; Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Jerusalem and the Genesis of Islamic Scripture,’ in Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Lee Levine (New York: Continuum, 1999), 315–25; Angelika Neuwirth, ‘From the Sacred Mosque to the Remote Temple: Sūrat al-Isrā’ Between Text and Commentary,’ in With Reverence For the Word, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry Walfish, and Joseph Ward Goering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 376–407; and Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Spatial Relations,’ in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, 5: 104–8. It is neither interesting nor economic for my purposes to detail the many interpretations, arguments and counter-arguments concerning the Prophet's night journey, of which Neuwirth's is only one, albeit one of the more recent. I follow her account because it is persuasive and opens up new lines of inquiry, including mine, and because she is a meticulous, holistic reader of the Qur'an, as well as an authority in the field of qur'anic studies.

⁹Neuwirth, ‘Spatial Relations,’ 107.

¹⁰Neuwirth, ‘Face of God,’ 309.

¹¹Ibid., 308.

¹²Neuwirth, ‘Jerusalem,’ 319. For Aisha's (‘Ā’isha) interpretation, see Mu⋅ammad Ibn Is⋅āq (recension of Ibn Bukayr), Kitāb al-sīra wa al-maghāzī, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1978), 295, as cited in Frederick Colby, Narrating Muhammad's Night Journey: Tracing the Development of the Ibn ‘Abbās Ascension Discourse (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 52.

¹³Al-[Tdot]abarī, Tafsīr, 17: 492. Neuwirth cites it on a number of occasions; for example, in ‘From the Sacred Mosque,’ 385–6. Tellingly, perhaps, al-[Tdot]abarī does not cite this hadith in the section of his exegesis concerning proofs in favour of the incorporeal nature of the Prophet's journey, but in the section concerning the starting point of the journey. With thanks to Nur Soliman for prompting this clarification.

¹⁴Cf. Neuwirth, ‘Jerusalem,’ 320: ‘[T]he aim of this journey, the revelation of the ‘signs,’ is nothing other than an expression of the unique closeness to God granted to the Prophet through prayer.’

¹⁵‘[The night journey] remains a unique event whose frame can perhaps best be explained psychologically as a unique dream experience of the Prophet […].’ Neuwirth, ‘From the Sacred Mosque,’ 395.

¹⁶For an anthropological analysis of these stages, see Joseph Chelhod, ‘Les attitudes et les gestes de la prière rituelle dans l'Islam,’ Revue de l'histoire des religions 156, no. 2 (1959), 171–84.

¹⁷Qur'an 17:80.

¹⁸Fakhr al-Dīn b. ‘Umar al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr aw Mafātī⋅ al-ghayb, ed. ‘Imād Zakī al-Barūdī, 32 vols in 16 bds (Cairo: Al-Maktaba al-Tawfīqiyya, 2003), 21: 30.

¹⁹‘Al-⋅alāt mi‘rāj al-mu’min.’ Cited in ibid., 1: 260. In a recently published article on ritual prayer and the night journey that I came across only as mine was about to go to press, the author quotes a number of other Muslim authorities who have drawn the analogy between ritual prayer and the night journey, amongst them Ibn [Hdot]anbal (d. 855) and al-Qushayrī (d. 1072). Ronald Buckley, ‘The Isra’ / Mi‘raj and the Prescription of the Five Daily Prayers,’ in Studies in Islamic Law: A Festschrift for Colin Imber, ed. Andreas Christmann and Robert Gleave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30–1. In this article, the author confirms from another perspective the claim of the present paper regarding the correspondence between ritual prayer and the night journey: ‘[I]t is highly appropriate that the profoundly religious act of prayer should be associated with the unparalleled religious event of the isrā’ / mi‘rāj. They partake of each other's sacrality, and are, as it were, composed of the same religious essence, and are both answerable to the same yearning for contact with the Divine.’ Ibid., 28. Regarding the synonymity of the terms ‘isrā’’ (night journey) and ‘mir‘āj’ (ascension) in Islamic tradition, see B. Schrieke and J. Horovitz, ‘Mir‘āj,’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954–2005), 7: 97. On the gradual fusion of these terms in early Islamic tradition, see Heribert Busse, ‘Jerusalem in the Story of Mu⋅ammad's Night Journey and Ascension,’ Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991): 15–21; and Colby, Narrating Muhammad's Night Journey, 51–62 and 79–92.

²⁰Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), 156.

²¹Ibid., 156–7 (original italics).

²²Ibid., 157.

²³‘The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling […].’ Ibid., 157.

²⁴Ibid., 157.

²⁵Ibid., 149.

²⁶Cf. Helmer Ringgren, Islam, ’aslama and muslim (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1949), 13, where he summarizes the root meaning of the verb. On the meaning of the fourth form of the triliteral Arabic verb, see William Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Translated from the German of Caspari with Additional Notes, with Numerous Additions and Corrections, rev. W. Robertson Smith and M. J. de Goeje, preface and addenda et corrigenda Pierre Cachia, 2 vols (Beirut: Librairie de Lebanon, 1974), 1: 34. On the English meanings of the verb salima, yaslamu, see Edward William Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon, 8 vols (Beirut: Librairie de Lebanon, 1968), 4: 1412.

²⁷Abū ^cAbd Allāh b. Ismā^cīl al-Bukhārī, [Sdot]a⋅ī⋅ al-Bukhārī, ed. ^cAbd al-^cAzīz b. ^cAbd Allāh b. Bāz, 8 vols in 5 bds (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1994), 1: 7 (k. bad’ al-wa⋅ī, ch. 6, no. 7); also cited in Ringgren, Islam, 3. Hence, too, al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī's (d. 502/1108) dictionary definition; namely, islām is entering into al-salm, wholeness (cf. Qur'an 2:208). Abū al-Qāsim al-Rāghib al-I⋅fahānī, al-Mufradāt fī gharīb al-Qur’ān ([Cairo]: Mu⋅tafā al-Bābī al-[Hdot]alabī, [1961]), 240–1, as cited in Jane I. Smith, An Historical and Semantic Study of the Term ‘Islām’ as Seen in Sequences of Qur’ān Commentaries (Missoula: Scholars Press for Harvard Theological Review, 1975), 19 and 22. See also al-Rāzī's near-identical definition, as also cited in ibid., 108.

²⁸Cf. the original meaning of ‘Islam’ as ‘exclusive property of one,’ and its subsequent meaning as the opposite of polytheism (shirk). D. Z. H. Baneth, ‘What did Muhammad Mean when he Called his Religion ‘Islām’? The Original Meaning of Aslama and its Derivatives,’ Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 185–6. See also Ringgren, Islam, 14–22.

²⁹Abū [Hdot]ayyān al-Taw⋅īdī, al-Muqābasāt li-Abī [Hdot]ayyān al-Taw⋅īdī, ed. [Hdot]ayy al-Sandūbī, 2nd ed. (Kuwait: Dār Sa‘ād al-[Sdot]abā⋅, 1992), 172–3 (‘muqābasa’ no. 23). Cf. Gerhard Böwering, ‘Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,’ Iran 30 (1992): 77–89, esp. 81, where I first learnt of al-Taw⋅īdī's text.

³⁰Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora: Davies Group, 1999), 7.

³¹Cf. Neuwirth, ‘Jerusalem,’ 324: ‘If one were to spell out the main characteristics of Islam, then a visual and an auditive dimension certainly would have to figure prominently: the worshipper facing Mecca on the one hand, and the announcement of prayer through liturgical words and followed by Qur’ānic recitation at certain times of the day on the other. Prayer's demand for an orientation in space—to the center of the world, which is paramount to the place of divine self-manifestation—is valid for Judaism as well; yet regarding its realization, there is no apparent comparable practice in Jewish worship.’

³²Walid A. Saleh, ‘The Etymological Fallacy and Qur’anic Studies: Muhammad, Paradise, and Late Antiquity,’ in The Qur’ān in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’ānic Milieu, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Marx, and Nicolai Sinai (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 666.

³³Andrew Rippin, ‘‘Desiring the Face of God’: The Qur’ānic Symbolism of Personal Responsibility,’ in Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’ān, ed. Issa J. Boullata (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 123.

³⁴A reference to the Prophetic hadith in which the Prophet acts as recounted. Al-Bukhārī, [Sdot]a⋅ī⋅, 2: 16 (k. al-kusūf, ch. 9, no. 1052).