Laylat al-Qadr, pearl of the month of Ramadan
Contents
The month of the Ramadan fast has just ended, that of the descent of the Qur’an revealed as guidance for men: “The Qur’an was revealed during the month of Ramadan. It is a Direction for men, a clear manifestation of the Direction and of the Law” (Qur’an II, 185). In this aspect, the divine name Ramadan expresses the principial unity in the temporal succession of day and night, of fasting and vigil (see “Le Ramadan”). The verse’s meaning, according to Ibn ’Arabi, is that the Qur’an descended by means of the fast proper to this month. According to tradition, this revelation took place during the Night of Destiny. During that night, the Qur’an descended from the Guarded Tablet to the lowest heaven.
The Night of Destiny lies within the month of fasting and is commemorated on the twenty-seventh night. Interpretations are many, bearing notably on the translation of the word “qadr”: destiny, decree, ordinance. It takes its meaning and its magnitude from its place within the month of Ramadan, where it can be meditated, made the object of prayers or of fasting by the whole community.
This essential night, worth more than a thousand months (Qur’an XCVII, 3), in a sense sums up and condenses the significance of fasting. For the Qur’an was revealed on several occasions, according to circumstances and events, but the Night of Destiny is that of the primordial, original revelation: that of the descent of the Mother of the Book, uncreated, into the Prophet’s heart.
That night, precious above all others, is the one where the sacred invests the earth, where the Divine takes possession of the community of human souls, of the soil, of the territory. It is the meeting between what lies beyond and what is present to us.
Beyond asceticism
From a spiritual point of view, it is not asceticism in itself that matters: Imam Malik says that without intention and without putting the soul in a state of purity, fasting has no other effect than giving hunger and thirst. Giving up drinking and eating is only a means of allowing concentration on the essential, which is the true significance of the fast.
This concentration on the One essential is the true meaning of renouncing this world’s food. But something else again is given up. One must dispense with frivolous thoughts and futile actions, and detach oneself from the to-and-fro of daily life which, for the rest of the year, appears important, and which, at the moment when the soul concentrates on being, appears insubstantial. Little by little, then, one abandons the gesticulations of life in this lower world, bad thoughts and rancours, and finally all the passions.
The attitude sought is one of the greatest possible limpidity towards other beings: it is not a matter of passion for beings, but of a state stronger even than compassion, than love of beings: an undifferentiated state, of equilibrium and concentration on the essential.
That is why the Night of Destiny, night of concentration par excellence, night of the meeting between the Divine and the everyday, night of revelation, crowns and gives its full significance to the month of fasting. Thus, at the end of twenty-seven nights, the eye of the heart opens symbolically, its vision surpassing that of the eye of flesh, majestically crowning the month of Ramadan.
The heart of creation
One might, and some indeed have, compare the Night of Destiny to that moment in prayer which is prostration. We begin standing, in the most beautiful of postures, a bridge between heaven and earth, and we finish prostrate, forehead to the ground, extinguished to this world; then the cycle begins again. The moment of prostration represents at once the instant of absolute stillness and humility, and the instant of supreme concentration and expectancy. It is thus that the Night of Destiny, woven inside the month of Ramadan, symbolising and recalling the revelation made to man, has a significance that moves the believer.
The Night of Destiny is a night where everything is supposed to stop: not petrified, inert or dead, but stopped by an excess of vitality, an excess of life. This life is vitality, but above all spirituality. All of nature stops in the state it was in on the first day of Creation. Thus are we animated for a few moments, in this sacred night, by the vital energy, by the newness, by the blessing of the first day of Creation which the Night of Destiny repeats.
The fast is a return to the Adamic state. Forgotten, for a while, are struggles, rivalries, the political, hopes and disappointments. Everyone gathers around the single fact of being a consciousness, of being created.
The writer André Malraux liked to draw inspiration from the last verse of the surah “al-Qadr” (97), which every believer can recite and, at the moment he says it, partake of an inner reality more interior to him than himself: “And if this night is a Night of Destiny: blessing upon it, until the appearance of dawn!”
Alain Galindo, after a lecture by Nadjm oud-Dine Bammate.
Further reading
- Surah al-Qadr commented by Ibn ’Ajiba
- The foundations and meaning of the Ramadan fast (1/2)
- What is dhikr?
