Why Ramadan’s Qadr Night is the holiest event in Islam

It might be unimaginable for many to think that one thousand and four hundred years ago, there were no Muslims following Islam, which is today the world’s second-biggest religion and will probably be the largest faith by 2075.  

This enormous change started on Laylat al-Qadr – which means the Night of Destiny – in 610 CE when Prophet Muhammed, a native of Mecca in today’s Saudi Arabia, received the first divine word from Allah through the mediation of Archangel Gabriel, according to the Islamic faith. 

With the Night of Destiny, Prophet Muhammed’s life and world history irreversibly and fundamentally changed. Within a short period, the new faith won many converts – first in Mecca and then Medina, another city where Muslims migrated in 622 under the paganist pressure of the Meccan aristocracy. 

Then, the Islamic faith spread from the Peninsula of Arabia to many other regions – from the Middle East to Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the subcontinent – drawing millions of new believers into the congregation. 

“Qadr Night marks the night on which the Prophet Muhammad first received revelation, transforming him from a regular Meccan in Arabia into a Prophet to all mankind. This was a momentous event in the history of humanity,” Usaama al Azami, a British-Muslim academic and a lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford, tells TRT World. 

But the transformation was not easy for the Prophet, who was terrified by the experience of receiving the first Quranic revelations from God in the Hira Cave, located in Mount Nour (Jabal al-Nour in Arabic) near Mecca. 

Before the divine revelation, Mohammed went to the Hira Cave occasionally to seek refuge from Mecca’s noisy urban life and contemplate the meaning of life and his own mission in the world. 

For the 40-year-old Meccan, it was a staggering experience, “an overwhelming and terrifying event”, as Azami puts it. 

Enbiya Yildirim, a member of the High Council of Türkiye’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, cites the documented life and times of Prophet Muhammad to throw light on the event.

“That was an extraordinary experience. In their lives, people don’t see extraordinary entities (in the Prophet’s case Gabriel) emerge and tell them extraordinary things,” Yildirim tells TRT World. “He asked himself whether he was dreaming or losing his mind (when he faced the Archangel.” 

Anyone who experienced what the Prophet went through on the Qadr Night would question himself, and doubts would emerge about their mental health, says Yildirim. The Prophet also had a similar experience, he adds. “He almost came apart at the seams.”

Calming presence

At this crucial moment of the Prophet’s life, his wife Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, a woman with uncharacteristic sensibility, played a critical role in calming and assuring him that he had not lost his mental faculty. 

After he reached home, he asked Khadijah to wrap him in a garment and asked her what she thought about his experience. Her response to the Prophet, who always wanted to remind his companions that he was a servant of God like them and the messenger, reinstated his confidence in his enormous task. 

“You have not wronged anyone in your entire life. You do good and avoid any wrongdoing. You always respect people’s rights. If you experienced this extraordinary event, it has to do with the Almighty Creator. As a result, don’t worry about yourself, she told the Prophet,” says Yildirim. 

“She reassured him and gave him the support necessary at that moment to embrace the role God was summoning him to. This began the Prophet’s journey for the next two decades, and Islam’s story as the final revelation from God to mankind,” says Azami. 

The Qadr Night also ended the Prophet’s seclusion period in the Cave of Hira, where he stopped going after the first revelations. 

“This could be understood as concluding a pre-Islamic phase of the Prophet’s life in which he was searching for the truth. The Cave played no role in his subsequent Prophetic ministry,” says Azami. 

Khadijah also took her husband to her cousin Waraqah bin Nawfal, a hanif who practised monotheism in the Peninsula of Arabia. Like Khadijah, Warakah also confirmed that Mohammed’s experience shows that he should be a prophet and will be victorious on this challenging mission, according to Yildirim. 

“There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people,” Warakah told the Prophet, according to Islamic tradition. 

Night of Destiny

Beyond the Prophet’s first experience of Quranic verses, the Qadr Night has other significant features. “It is a night in which, according to the Quran, people’s destinies are determined for the year. It is a night of great importance in which the reward to devotion to God is multiplied, and great devotion is therefore strongly encouraged,” says Azami. 

“The night is also referred to at the beginning of Surah (Chapter) 44 in the Quran as the night on which God determines all of the events of each year,” adds the Oxford scholar. 

It came to be called the Night of Destiny as it was the beginning of the Prophet’s ministry, which changed human history, and a specific period when all humans’ destinies were determined. Due to all these reasons, the Qadr Night has an incomparable value to any other period in any given year, according to the Quran.  

“Surely, We sent it down on the Night of Destiny. And what should make thee know what the Night of Destiny is? The Night of Destiny is better than a thousand months. Therein descend angels and the Spirit by the command of their Lord — with every matter. It is all peace till the rising of the dawn,” says the Surah al-Qadr (Chapter 97), which is dedicated to the night’s importance. 

This chapter also indicates that not just several verses but the whole Quran were revealed on the Qadr Night, according to Azami. “It is also the night in which the Quran was revealed as a whole by God to the lowest heavens, after which it was revealed gradually over roughly twenty years to the Prophet according to the needs of the community,” he says. 

As a result, Muslims should not only worship and show their devotion to God on this night but also need to think about their lives and make a yearly evaluation because this is the Night of Destiny, says Yildirim. 

While it’s unclear which day the Qadr Night occurred, the Prophet advised his companions to seek it on the last ten days of each Ramadan. Most believe it should be a night with an odd number, and many Muslim scholars believe that the 27th of Ramadan could probably mark this night. 

After the first revelations in 610, each year, Prophet Muhammed spent the last ten days of Ramadan with both prayers and contemplation, which is called itikaf in Islamic understanding, says Yildirim. “We call it a process of purification.” 

Therefore, for Muslims, the Qadr Night is an opportunity to prepare themselves for the next year by contemplating and accounting for the past year, according to Yildirim. “It’s almost like we start life again on the Night of Destiny.”