ليلة القدر

Notes

1. Laylat al-Qadr is the night in the last ten nights of Ramadan on which the Qur'an was first sent down (Sura 97). Qadr means 'decree, destiny', since the affairs of the coming year are said to be decreed on it, and also 'worth, high standing', the night of great honour. 'Night of Decree' keeps the first sense; the second runs through the whole poem, which praises the night's worth above all others. ↩
2. Ghubr al-layālī, literally 'the dust-coloured nights', are the dull, ordinary nights of time, set against this one night of light; the phrase also carries a sense of the nights gone by. Maʿīn is a spring of fresh, flowing water. The Qur'an says that the Night of Decree is 'better than a thousand months' (97:3), more than eighty years of worship; hence the night is a wellspring that can water a whole lifetime. ↩
3. Nafaḥāt, literally 'breaths, fragrant wafts', recalls the Prophet's saying: 'In the days of your time your Lord has breaths of grace (nafaḥāt); so expose yourselves to them.' ↩
4. The verse echoes Sura 97:4–5: 'The angels and the Spirit descend in it by leave of their Lord with every command. Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn (maṭlaʿ al-fajr).' A tradition of the Prophet says that on that night the angels on earth outnumber the pebbles; hence the universe 'grows narrow' with them. ↩
5. The gatherings for remembrance (dhikr) of God are pictured as banquets (maʾādib), feasts at which the soul is fed. This recalls the hadith that angels travel the roads of the earth seeking circles of remembrance and, when they find one, call to each other: 'Come to what you are seeking!' ↩
6. Two echoes: the Qur'an's 'Their sides forsake their beds, as they call on their Lord in fear and hope' (32:16), describing those who rise to pray at night; and the hadith that when people gather to recite the Book of God, 'the angels encircle them (ḥaffathum)'. Al-Dhikr, 'the Reminder', is one of the Qur'an's names for itself (15:9). ↩
7. Literally 'they fall on their chins', the Qur'an's own words for those who hear the revelation: 'they fall down on their chins, prostrating… and they fall down on their chins weeping' (17:107–109). ↩
8. Ṣadā is rust, and the verse sets it beside ṣadr, 'breast', a near-jinās: ṣadā l-ṣadr, 'the rust of the breast'. It recalls the hadith: 'These hearts rust as iron rusts', and their polish is the recitation of the Qur'an and the remembrance of death. The verb yajlū means to burnish metal until it shines, so the verses 'polish' the heart as light falls on it. ↩
9. The word khayr, 'best, good', is repeated four times: the best way of life (the Qur'an), the best of nights (the Night of Decree), the best of men (the Prophet Muhammad) and the homeland of the good (Mecca, where the revelation began). The repetition gathers the book, the time, the messenger and the place into a single exclamation of praise. ↩
10. Raising the nose (iʿlāʾ al-anf) is the Arabic image of arrogance, and cutting off the nose (batr al-anf), like rubbing it in the dust (raghm al-anf), is the image of humiliation. Verse 14 describes the proud 'raising their noses'; verse 15 completes the image: no such nose escapes being cut off (batr), the pride of the mighty brought low by those they had despised. ↩
11. Mustaḍʿafūhum, 'those who were held weak, oppressed', echoes the Qur'an: 'We wished to bestow Our favour on those who were oppressed in the land, and make them leaders and heirs' (28:5). The early Muslims, poor and persecuted in Mecca, came to lead nations. ↩
12. The verb iʿtaṣama, 'to hold fast, take refuge', repeated three times, echoes the Qur'anic command: 'Hold fast, all of you, to the rope of God, and do not be divided' (3:103). The 'rope of God' is widely understood to be the Qur'an. ↩
13. Yastaqwī ('grows overbearing, seizes power') and yastashrī ('spreads unchecked', as an evil or disease spreads) fall at the ends of parallel clauses with a matching sound. West and East stand for the world powers of the poet's time: if Muslims take refuge in the Book, neither will dominate them. ↩
14. 'The rising of the dawn' repeats the words of verse 3 and of Sura 97:5. There it is the dawn that ends the Night of Decree; here it is the dawn of a new age for the Muslims. To those who say their age is over, the poet answers that it is only beginning. ↩
15. Arabic idiom named mankind by complexion, 'the red and the black' or 'the white and the red'; in early usage 'the red' (al-ḥumr) meant the fair-skinned non-Arab peoples, so 'white and red' stands for all the peoples of the earth. The claim to distinction rests on piety alone, in keeping with the Qur'an, 'The noblest of you in God's sight is the most pious' (49:13), and the Prophet's saying that no Arab is superior to a non-Arab, nor white to black, except by piety. The line may also be read more narrowly: that piety, not colour, is what sets any people apart. ↩
16. Jadīr, 'worthy, deserving', and jadīd, 'new', differ only in their last letter, a jinās that ties the religion's worthiness to its lasting freshness. ↩
17. Qiyām is 'standing', here the night prayer of Ramadan, above all on the Night of Decree, of which the Prophet said: 'Whoever stands in prayer on the Night of Decree out of faith and hope of reward, his past sins are forgiven.' The word also means 'rising up', so bi-l-qiyām, set between dashes in the Arabic, may carry a second sense: through our rising to action. The prayer vigil is the main sense, as the next verse, which asks for 'a blessed standing in the night' (qiyām), shows. ↩
18. Commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar) is a central Qur'anic duty of the Muslim community (3:104, 3:110). The Arabic names only 'forbidding the wrong' and then 'command', leaving the familiar phrase for the reader to complete. ↩
19. Mathāqīl, plural of mithqāl, a unit of weight, recalls the Qur'an: 'Whoever does an atom's weight (mithqāl dharra) of good shall see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil shall see it' (99:7–8). Here the 'weights' of sin are heavy loads the worshipper hopes to have erased. ↩
20. Bi-faḍl can mean 'by the merit, the high standing' of the Prophet, as a plea that God accept the prayer for the sake of His Messenger (tawassul), or 'by the favour, the blessing' that came through him. 'The one to whom complaint is brought', and 'in whom hope is placed', allude to his intercession: in the hadith of intercession, mankind on the Day of Judgement go from prophet to prophet until they come to Muhammad, who intercedes for them. ↩
21. The closing verse is a poetic form of the blessing Muslims say after the Prophet's name, ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, 'God bless him and grant him peace', with ṣalāt (blessing) and taslīm (peace) made to last as long as the sun rises and the breeze blows, that is, forever. ↩