Surah Al-Qadr — The Night of Power

Introduction to Surah Al-Qadr

Five verses, Meccan, ninety-seventh in the written order. It is one of the shortest surahs and among the most widely recited during Ramadan.

What it says

That the revelation was sent down on the night of power; that you do not know what the night of power is; that it is better than a thousand months; that the angels and the Spirit descend in it by the permission of their Lord on every errand; and that it is peace until the rising of the dawn.

A thousand months is roughly eighty-three years — more than most lifetimes at the time it was said. The comparison is the surah’s whole argument, and it is left without elaboration.

Which night

The surah does not date it. It is placed in Ramadan on the strength of the verse in Al-Baqarah that names Ramadan as the month of the revelation, and the hadith literature narrows it to the last ten nights and to the odd-numbered ones among them — Aisha reports the instruction to search for it there (Sahih al-Bukhari 2017) — with the twenty-seventh most commonly named.

The reports do not agree, and a number of early scholars held that the imprecision was deliberate: that the night is concealed so that the whole of the last ten nights is kept. That is a reading rather than a statement of the text.

The last word

The surah ends on peace, and then on until the rising of the dawn. It is the only description it gives of what the night is actually like.