Vision and Ascension: Sürat al-Najm and its Relationship with

Muhammad's mfräj1

Josef van Ess UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN

Ascension to Heaven is something Jesus and Muhammad, or the religious imagery of

Christianity and Islam, have in common. But the differences are perhaps more

profound than the similarities. In Christianity, Jesus's ascension is the logical conse­

quence of resurrection. The Qur'an, on the contrary, does not talk about resurrection;

Jesus is raised to Heaven immediately from the cross without having died upon it.

When Muhammad ascended to Heaven he did not abide there; he returned to earth.

Jesus had finished his earthly mission and he had apparently failed; when he went up

to Heaven this was to show that, in spite of his crucifixion, he belonged to the realm of

God. Muhammad's ascension, however, stood at the beginning of his career; he was,

on this occasion, initiated into his task, a task the success of which was evident to

everybody in his community. We should not forget that only in Western languages is

the term 'ascension' applied to both events; in Arabic there is a verbal difference

between Muhammad who experienced his müräj and Jesus who was raised to Heaven,

rafcfahu 'llähu ilayhi, as the Qur'an says (4:158; cf.3:55). No Muslim ever compared

Muhammad to Jesus in this respect. This fact leaps all the more to the eye since com­

parisons as such were not avoided, at least not during the earliest phase of Islam; they

are reflected in hadith. But they refer to other prophets and they are based on genu­

inely Qur'anic ideas: Abraham, it was said, was the friend of God (khalïl Allah), Mo­

ses was spoken to by God, at Mount Sinai (he is dubbed kallm Allah) and Muhammad,

finally, was the one to ascend to Heaven and to see God in person. This is more than a

comparison, it is a climax: intimacy with God (Abraham), hearing Him (Moses), see­

ing Him. A climax which presented the case in a new form, but also had its own

problems.

I do not want to discuss here the micräj stories as such. One related aspect has to be

stressed, though. Muhammad does not abide in Heaven. He is not reunited with God

after having temporarily been sent to earth by him; he only meets God, in an audience.

And this audience has a specific purpose: God tells him how many prayers his commu­

nity should perform per day. In the beginning the Almighty is quite demanding; he

mentions the number of fifty prayers. Muhammad has to bargain with Him and he

manages to get the number down to five. This reminds us of the scene described in the

Old Testament where Abraham bargains, in a similar way, with respect to the few

48 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

righteous living at Sodom and Gomorrah whom God should spare when 'He rained'

on these towns 'stones of baked clay' as described in the Qur'an (11:82). But it is

Moses who advises Muhammad to proceed in this way, Moses whom he has met

during his journey through the spheres which he performs under Gabriel's guidance.

Moses and Abraham are the last two prophets whom he passes by, those who are

closest to God in their cosmic relevance - and those who were compared with him in

the rhetorical climax mentioned above.

We can imagine how fascinating these stories were for the audience of their time. But

they had one disadvantage: none of this was at first glance to be found in the Scripture

itself. If anything, the Qur'an offered only one vague allusion to it, in süra 70 where

God is called the 'Lord of the Stairways (or Ladder)', dhü yl-macärij and where the text

then continues: 'To Him the angels and the Spirit mount up in a day whereof the

measure is fifty thousand years'. But this did not fit; Muhammad was not mentioned

there. Therefore the exegetes had to pursue their search and in the course of time they

came up with two other passages which seemed to allude to the event. The first one

was the beginning of süra 17, an isolated verse again which, devoid of any further

explanation, remained cryptic in many respects: 'Glory be to Him, who carried His

servant (Muhammad as it seems) by night from the Holy Place of Worship (probably

at Mecca) to the Further Place of Worship the precincts of which we have blessed, that

we might show him some of Our signs.' 'Some of our signs': this could refer to mi­

raculous experiences Muhammad had had on his journey in Heaven, possibly the en­

counter with God Himself. The 'precincts' which had been blessed by God evoked,

because of other Qur'anic passages, the image of the Holy Land. Therefore many

people started speculating early on whether the 'Further Place of Worship', which was

accompanied by this epithet, might possibly be Jerusalem. Already in the first century

AH, Jerusalem was graced with a mosque on the precincts of the former Salomonic

Temple, a mosque which was identified with the 'Further Place of Worship' and

named after it: al-Masjid al-Aqsä. Muhammad had - this was the result of all these

combinations - miraculously traveled by night to Jerusalem. However, this could not

yet be called ascension. He remained on the surface of the earth; he had moved

horizontally, not vertically. It is true that he had reached the place from where Jesus

had ascended to Heaven. But the Muslims did not want to compare him to Jesus in this

respect, as we have seen. Let us therefore look first at the second passage.

This second Qur'anic testimony was longer, though almost as equivocal as the first. Its importance lay in the fact that it seemed to give a description of Muhammad's encoun­ter with God. For, at the beginning of süra 53, the Qur'an reports two visions which the Prophet had had at a certain time. These are quite unusual texts, since normally according to the Qur'an Muhammad does not see God, but listens to him. The Qur'an presents itself - or is understood - as the account of auditory experiences; this is how the revelation normally takes place. In this instance the situation is different. We will

Vision and Ascension 49

begin by examining this passage from Arberry's translation, although its wording

contains certain preliminary decisions which I shall have to cancel afterwards: 'By the

Star when it plunges, your comrade (the person meant seems to be Muhammad him­

self) is not astray, neither errs, nor speaks he out of caprice. This is naught but a revela­

tion revealed, taught him by one terrible in power, very strong; he stood poised, being

on the higher horizon, then drew near and suspended hung, two bows'-length away, or

nearer, then revealed to his servant that he revealed. His heart lies not of what he saw

... ' and, immediately afterwards, the report concerning the second vision: 'Indeed, he

saw him come down another time by the Lote-Tree of the Boundary nigh which is the

Garden of the Refuge, when there covered the Lote-Tree that which covered; his eye

swerved not, nor swept astray. Indeed, he saw one of the greatest signs of his Lord.'

Again a ' sign of the Lord', similar to the sign the Prophet was promised to be shown at

the 'Further Place of Worship'; this is what may have brought both passages together.

The location remained even vaguer than in the first case. But the two visions them­

selves are described in a thought-provoking way. Strangely enough the report is made

in the third person. People could think that God Himself was speaking; He seemed to

disclose a secret which, apart from Himself, only the Prophet could have known.

However, the wording of the Qur'an did not make it sufficiently clear who it was

whom the Prophet had seen. Whoever read or heard this passage had to make the

decision himself. Modern Muslim exegesis normally insists that it was Gabriel whom

the Prophet had seen on this occasion. But whenever these verses were incorporated

into the traditions pertaining to Muhammad's ascension we may be pretty sure that

those who were responsible for doing so included them into this context because they

believed in a vision of God. For this vision was the culminating point of the climax as

we saw; the audience which was granted to Muhammad by God was more than the

auditory event which had already been accorded to Moses on Mount Sinai. The only

problem was that the concept of God being seen by man soon came to constitute a

theological scandal, or at least a problem to be addressed with utmost delicacy. For

vision implied anthropomorphism and anthropomorphism (tashblh) turned out to be a

vexing issue for Islam as it did for Judaism once both religions started thinking in

theological terms. It never has been so for Christianity, for in Christianity anthropo­

morphism became self-evident by reason of the Incarnation. It would be somewhat

audacious to pretend that Christian theology made things easier by this dogmatic

device. Incarnation is a postulate rather than an argument. We are not surprised to hear

Tertullian say in his treatise De carne Christi 'On the flesh of Christ': Certuni est quia

impossibile, '(the Incarnation) is a certitude because it is impossible'. A Muslim would

be shocked by such a statement; something which is muhäl, 'absurd', cannot be certain

or true. But to argue in favour of the vision of God would also give rise to problems.

The contradiction emerges already in the Qur'an itself. For in a later passage, in süra

81:23, one of the visions is alluded to again: 'Your companion is not possessed. He

50 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

truly saw him on the clear horizon'. Again, simply 'him'. But here the person who was

seen is called in a preceding verse a 'noble messenger, having power' and a 'messen­

ger' is normally an angel, certainly not God himself. Does this solve our problem?

Perhaps for Muslims of our days, but not so for the interpreters of the Qur'an we are

talking about. And apart from the approach of the believer, there is the historical di­

mension. Avoiding anthropomorphism by interpreting statements about God as state­

ments about an angel was an old device of Jewish theology. The angel Metatron has to

play this role in certain places;2 the Kabbala later on followed the same line. The angel

could then take over the functions of the creator, as a kind of demiurge, 'somebody

who is obeyed', a mutäc as the Muslims used to say;3 this is, as a matter of fact, the

term which comes up here in süra 81. The frame conditions of the statement have

visibly changed. The verse is certainly later than süra 53; for now the vision is not

described in detail, it is simply mentioned again as something previously known. The

audience may have lived in Medina, some Jews possibly being among them. In any

case, the secondary quotation does not exclude that earlier on, in süra 53, it was God

whom the Prophet is thought to have seen, for there, in süra 53, the text says, in con­

nection with the first vision, when the person whom Muhammad saw in fact came

quite close to him: 'He revealed to His servant that he revealed'. 'His servant' can only

be God's servant there, namely Muhammad. But then 'he' who revealed was not the

'noble messenger' ; it would have to be God Himself and God would also be the object

of the vision. Accordingly we are forced back to our earlier assumption.

However, according to süra 53, the Prophet did not see God while he was in Heaven.

He saw him somewhere on earth, for he saw Him 'on the higher horizon' and then

'coming down another time' (nazlatan ukhra). It is thus not the Prophet who ascends

to God, God rather descends to him. It is true that, immediately afterwards, we are told

that he saw Him 'by the Lote-Tree of the Boundary nigh which is the Garden of the

Refuge'; this sounds like a code for Paradise, the 'Garden of the Refuge' being the

abode where the blessed will find refuge during or after Judgment (cf.32:19) and the

'Lote-Tree' marking the boundary of the sanctissimum where God Himself resides.

But God could descend to it nevertheless, for in those early days Paradise was fre­

quently imagined to be on earth. We need therefore not follow the suggestion of earlier

orientalists (starting with Grimme and Caetani up to Richard Bell and Régis Blachère),

namely that the 'Garden of the Refuge' was simply a plantation near Mecca and the

Lote-Tree some well-known tree marking the boundary of the Meccan Sanctuary.

Muslim exegesis never saw any reason to deny that the encounter took place in Para­

dise, even if it were somewhere on earth. The 'Lote-Tree of the Boundary' became

something like the emblem of Muhammad's ascension; even when reports of the mfraj

make no other reference to sürat al-Najm, the sidrat al-muntahä remains as the thresh­

old leading to God's own realm, the seventh Heaven; it is there that the four rivers of

Paradise originate. The tree existed in the reality of the Arabian peninsula; it could

Vision and Ascension 51

grow up to height of twelve metres.4 Whoever thus wanted to interpret these Qur'anic

passages was confronted with two sets of alternatives: God or an angel, Heaven or

earth. This meant altogether four possibilities. Moreover one had to keep in mind that

the Qur'an spoke about two visions, not about one only. For an ascension one of them

would have been sufficient - although, if the Prophet had to haggle about the number

of prayers, even two of them were perhaps not enough.

The game of exegesis always implies theological decisions. But these theological

decisions do not grow out of unbridled imagination; they usually follow patterns which

are available in the religious environment. As is well known, the idea of the heavenly

journey was widespread in the Ancient World; I need not refer to the considerable

corpus of secondary literature produced on this topic. A large number of categories,

concepts, symbols, metaphors etc. had been developed in the Old and New Testaments

and could be taken up; Uri Rubin's book on the 'Eye of the Beholder' gives numerous

examples.5 The issue of 'influences' is not our central concern here; what mattered

was the existential decision, the Vorentscheidung, the pre-judgment of the interpreter.

Those who were afraid of anthropomorphism soon came to imagine that Muhammad

had merely seen an angel, namely Gabriel, and only on earth at that. The Prophet was

then initiated by Gabriel into his task and received from him his first revelation. This is

also, our exegete would continue to say, the reason why the event got into the Qur'an;

for Gabriel, at this moment, appeared to Muhammad for the first time, and in his real

angelic nature at that. We may wonder whether those who interpreted the vision this

way had the biblical book of Revelation, chapter 10 in mind: Ί saw another mighty

angel come down from Heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was upon his

head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire'; after all, this

angel carries a little book, a writing, in his hand which John then eats - a metaphorical

way of expressing initiation and revelation. But this is a mere historical problem that

needs further investigation. What is important for our discussion is the observation

that whoever thought of an angel here had to solve the problem of why the Prophet had

to see Gabriel twice; he could also not entirely ignore the grammatical problem

previously mentioned, namely what to do with the recalcitrant pronoun in 'His

servant'. Nevertheless this scenario was broadly accepted; we find it already in Ibn

Ishäq's biography of the Prophet, a text composed in Medina, during the first half of

the second hijrl century.

Such an approach gained little for the ascension argument; its protagonists would have

been better off ignoring the passage altogether. This however was again an option

which most people were not willing to accept. Therefore, the vision of God continued

to be considered a viable possibility. But then one could no longer avoid speculating

about the exact nature of the vision, thus making the Qur'anic description more

explicit. How this was done comes out from the first testimonies of theological reflec-

52 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

tion we normally have, from prophetic tradition. Hadlth is frequently nothing else but

exegesis in disguise. A chain of transmitters precedes each tradition in order to guaran­

tee trustworthiness. The first example we will examine is interesting in so far as these

persons are incorporated into a kind of frame-story.

Yahyä reports: I asked Abu Salama: Which part of the Qur'an

was revealed first? He answered: Süra 74 (yä ayyuhä Ί-

muddaththir). I said: But I have been told it is süra 96 (iqra bismi

rabbika). Abu Salama answered: Long ago I put the same ques­

tion to Jâbir b. cAbdallah, and he also said: Süra 74.1 reacted

then the same way you did now: But I have been told it is süra

96,1 said, and he replied: I can only tell (you) what I heard from

the Messenger of God himself, namely: I (this is now Muhammad

speaking) had retreated to Mount Hirâ for contemplation. When

I had finished my spiritual exercises I descended to the bottom of

the wâdï. I heard a voice calling me, and I looked around, in front

of me, behind me, to my right, to my left. (But then) Lo, there He

was, sitting upon His throne, between Heaven and earth. I went

to Khadija and said to her: 'Cover me with a mantle and pour

cold water on me! ' Then the revelation came upon me: Yä ayyuhä

Ί-muddaththir, Ό thou shrouded in thy mantle, arise and warn!

Thy Lord magnify... ' .6

What is revealed to Muhammad is the beginning of süra 74, God's appeal by which he

becomes a prophet and the call to magnify Him. This is also the gist of the story. The

scholars did not agree on which Qur'anic revelation had been the oldest and this

quarrel was resolved here in favour of süra 74. On such questions reference was made

to authoritative opinions of the early community; therefore the controversy is

presented in the form of a prophetic tradition. The chain of informants shows that the

dispute took place at Medina; it was there, in the town where the Prophet had died, that

it was thought that the most accurate information about Muhammad's life and experi­

ences was available.

The Prophet thus sees God in all His greatness and sovereignty, sitting on His throne.

This does not surprise us; we are familiar with such visions from the Bible and the

Ancient Near East. But taken as an interpretation of süra 53 it is unusual. For though it

is true that the Qur'anic passage refers to Muhammad having seen God 'on the higher

horizon', 'between Heaven and earth' as the hadlth says in its exegetical reformula­

tion, we don't hear anything about God being seated. According to the Qur'an he

rather 'stood poised, being on the higher horizon' as Arberry puts it. At this point we

have to resort to the tools of philology; translations are always interpretations and in

the case of the Qur'an they often still depend on medieval Muslim exegesis. For the

Vision and Ascension 53

Arabic verb behind 'He stood poised' (istawa) is equivocal; it only means 'he held

himself upright'. But this can also be done when sitting and whenever the word istawä

is used elsewhere in the Qur'an with regard to God it appears in the combination 'He

held Himself upright on His throne'. It could therefore also be understood this way in

our passage. On the other hand, whenever the vision was transferred to Gabriel the

throne had to disappear; an angel does not sit on a throne, he stands. He is standing

then, as says Ibn Ishäq, with his feet juxtaposed,7 'on the higher horizon' and gradu­

ally 'draws near'. In our hadlth, on the contrary, it is clear that the throne 'drew near';

it then 'hung suspended' or came down like a bucket (dalw) in a well (tadallä) until it

was only 'two bows'-length away, or nearer'. It was in this situation of intimacy, his

ear close to the mouth of God, that the Prophet received his first revelation.

To be precise, we should admit that, according to the story, he received his revelation

only when he was back home, after having been shrouded in his mantle. But what he

was told then is nothing else but what he would have heard from the mouth of God

Himself: 'Arise and warn! Thy Lord magnify!'. At this very moment he was not yet

asked to transmit a specific message; he simply went through an initiation. From now

onward he was to magnify the Lord, and he seems to repeat this mandate to himself

having come home and covered himself with a mantle in order to concentrate - this at

least seems to be the significance of this striking practice. In the moment of his vision

he was not yet able to receive the message; the voice which he heard seemed only to

call him, and then he was completely overwhelmed by what he saw.

At this point we should perhaps pause for a moment and look back. Our discussion so

far has consisted mainly of hypotheses. The material we possess - and which I cannot,

of course, present in detail here - is contradictory because of its axiomatic bias and the

secondary literature also starts from divergent presuppositions. The first hypothesis is

the easiest to corroborate: Muhammad saw, according to the report in süra 53, God

and not Gabriel. This is, as I said, not in agreement with the canonical biography of the

Prophet. Nor is it, properly speaking, my hypothesis; what I want to say is simply that

this interpretation was favoured by a certain number of early mufassirün. We need

only consult Tabari's Tafslr in order to access all the relevant material. Tabarï himself

was not particularly fond of anthropomorphism; he got into trouble with the Hanbalites

of his time for this same reason. Consequently, he interpreted the visions of sürat al-

Najm as visions of an angel, of Gabriel at that. But in spite of this he cites 'Abdallah b. c Abbäs and Anas b. Malik as those among the Companions of the Prophet who

believed them to be visions of God and then, with the same opinion, cIkrima, the slave

and disciple of Ibn c Abbäs.8 He even mentions a statement by Ka°b al-Ahbär who

carefully noted that Muhammad had seen God twice and then added, with all the

authority of an expert in Judaism but not entirely in correspondence with the Old

54 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

Testament, that similarly Moses had talked to God twice.9 This reminds us again of

the old climax and in point of fact, it was Ibn cAbbas to whom it was attributed: Abraham

- Moses - Muhammad, the vision being the deepest experience of the divine,10 a

vision of God 'in his most beautiful shape' (fì ahsani süratin) as Ibn cAbbas was

supposed to have said,11 i.e., in his form as a merciful and gracious God, not in the

terrifying, tremendous appearance He will assume as the Lord of the Last Judgement.

But there existed also counter-traditions which stressed God's transcendence. They

were connected with cÄ'isha, Muhammad's favourite wife, to whom statements about

intimate experiences of her husband are frequently attributed; she emphatically denies

his having ever seen God, under any circumstances.12 Apart from such traditions we

are confronted with compromises of different sorts. People could say that the ascen­

sion together with the vision as well as the night journey to Jerusalem had only been a

dream; this sounded especially convincing in Arabic, where there is no special word

for 'dreaming' but where one simply says 'he saw in his sleep'. People could also

pretend that the Prophet had not seen God in reality, 'with his eyes', but only spiritu­

ally, 'in his heart'. This could also ultimately amount to a dream, a veracious dream of

course, for, as is said in the prophetic tradition, 'the eyes of the Prophet may sleep, but

his heart does not.'13 One knew from 39:42 that the sleeper's soul ascends to God

whereas his body remains in situ. And above all: the report about the first vision in

süra 53 ended with the sentence 'His heart lies not of what he (Muhammad, or it: the

heart) saw.'14 Finally, anthropomorphism could be avoided by dematerializing the

object of the vision. Let me document this again by a hadlth. The last informant says

there after the chain of transmitters has been reproduced:

Ί said to Abu Dharr al-Ghifârî, the well-known companion of

the Prophet: If I had met the Prophet I would have asked him a

question.

—What question?

—I would have asked him whether he had seen God. Abu Dharr

replied: But this is exactly what I myself once asked him.

—And what did he say?

—Light! How could I have seen Him?!'15

The last sentence is not easy. Moreover there are variant readings. But the intention of

the hadlth is obvious: light does not have a form; when God therefore reveals Himself

as light he does not appear in any specific shape and the vision results in the Prophet

being literally dazzled. This seemed to be the philosophers' stone: vision granted only

together with transcendence.

But it also shows, of course, that people did not want to deny the event as such; an angel was not enough. This was not just a transitory or isolated phenomenon. We find evidence for it everywhere. Let me adduce only one example, a testimony which may

Vision and Ascension 55

look exotic but shows, as in a mirror, the broad consensus which supported the idea. About AH 160 a strange person, a 'heretic' according to the perspective of our Muslim sources, started a rebellion against the cAbbasid government in Eastern Iran and Central Asia. This was the Muqanna, a man who veiled himself and was said to have performed miracles; Jorge Luis Borges has written a short essay about him.16 He believed that God incarnated Himself in the prophets, first in Adam when he created him according to His image, also in Jesus and finally in Muhammad. The moment He slipped into Muhammad coincided with the latter's vision, for never was God so close to him, 'two bows'-length or nearer' as is said in süra 53, or 'like an arrow to its bow' as the heresiographer formulates with regard to the Muqanna's own pretension to be another - and probably the last - incarnation of God. The only new idea in his doctrine was the concept of incarnation (hulül); in order to make it palatable to his audience he proceeded from an exegesis of süra 53 which he cannot have invented himself. It seems rather to have been common knowledge among those whom he wanted to win over. This brings me to my second hypothesis:

II - Muhammad saw God sitting on His throne. This is now an assumption which contradicts not only the communis opinio of the Muslims but also of Western Islamicists, for although Western scholars for philological reasons normally take the visions of süra 53 to have been visions of God,17 they nevertheless believe Muhammad to have seen God standing 'on the higher horizon', like a figure projected against the sky. The Muqanna, however, thought differently, for we are told in the same heresiographical passage that God, after each manifestation or incarnation, returned to his throne.18 The Muqanna thus understood Muhammad's vision in the sense that when God 'drew near' to the Prophet in order to unite Himself with him He left his throne.

Again it would be easy to produce more texts in support of this. But we do not need them, for we can refer to a testimony which mentions this concept in immediate connection with Muhammad's miQräj. It is a hadith, an apocryphal one which, in its entire length (about twenty pages in print), is only quoted in Suyûtï' s La 'all al-masniïa fi'l-ahädlth al-mawdüca. However, Tabari quotes part of it,19for the isnäd starts again with Ibn cAbbas; he is followed by Dahhâk b. Muzähim who represented the exegeti-cal tradition connected with Ibn cAbbäs' name in Eastern Iran. Ibn Muzähim lived in the town of Balkh, i.e., in the area of the ancient Bactrian Empire, a melting-pot of religions and civilizations, where a small Arabic aristocracy controlled the trade route towards Central Asia. The hadlth says when the heavenly journey reaches its culmi­nating point:

Ί looked at Him (i.e., God) with my heart until I was sure that He was present and that I really saw Him. For suddenly He removed the curtain and there He was, sitting on His throne in all His dignity and glory ... He bent over a little bit in His dignity

56 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

towards me and bade me draw nearer. For this is the word of the

Scripture where He reports how He treated me and glorified me

(53:5-10): ' . . . He who is terrible in power, very strong. He held

himself upright which, in this context, can only mean: on the

throne, being on the higher horizon. Then he drew near and hung

suspended, two bows'-length away, or nearer... And he revealed

to His servant that He revealed', namely the task He had decided

to impose on me.20

The 'task' referred to here is obviously Muhammad's prophetic mission. Anas b. Malik

- or those who referred to him - had put it in more concrete terms: God reveals to

Muhammad the fifty prayers which He wants to impose on his community.21 Dahhäk

b. Muzähim was less precise; he wanted to describe Muhammad's vision. And he does

so with some caution: Muhammad has to close his eyes; even Gabriel (who knew, of

course, the effect of this sight) covers them with his hands. But for the moment the

prophet has been struck by the insupportable power of the light and this is what he sees

now in his heart: God sitting on His throne, coming near to him in order to touch him

and to transfer his revelation in a truly corporeal way: 'He put one of his hands be­

tween my shoulder-blades, and for some time I felt the coolness of his fingers coming

through to my heart... ' This brings me to my third hypothesis:

III - The throne vision was the point where the literary motif of the ascension, which

was originally foreign to the Qur'an, could sneak in. If the Scripture seemed to

confirm the Prophet's having seen God sitting on His throne there was no obstacle to

imagining that he had ascended to Heaven in order to see Him where the throne was

located. However, the new context implied different emphasis. All of a sudden there

was the possibility of, even the urge to, combining the two visions mentioned in süra

53 into a single event where Muhammad would have seen God 'on the higher horizon'

and then again - or at the same time - in the 'Garden of the Refuge', 'by the Lote-Tree

of the Boundary'. Moreover, the direction had changed; it was now the Prophet who

moved and not God and the Prophet moved upward, not downward as did God - or the

angel - in the Qur'an. Muslim theology was on the point of discovering that God does

not move at all; He is immutable. This was a transcendentalist axiom and for the

transcendentalists it could be the first step in overcoming their repugnance against the

motif of the ascension as such. Finally, Muhammad's miraculous movement from one

place to another facilitated the introduction of the other Qur'anic motif where he seemed

to travel or to be carried off in a miraculous way: namely his Night Journey to

Jerusalem.

This second miraculous event does not have to occupy us here. It originally belonged

to a different setting, in spite of the indissoluble bond with the motif of the ascension

which was created afterwards. In Ibn Ishäq's biography of the Prophet both reports are

Vision and Ascension 57

still isolated from each other; Ibn Sacd even assigns them to different dates. There

were, however, two things which paved the way for the attempt to combine them: a)

According to religious imagery, God's throne could also be located in Jerusalem, his

terrestrial throne to be precise, the throne from which He created the world and to

which He will return at the end of times in order to sit in judgement on all mankind,

and b) In the beginning the night journey was sometimes understood as a nocturnal

translation to a heavenly place of worship, namely to the bayt ma'mür, the 'House

inhabited'of 52:4 which, in scholarly speculation, was interpreted as the equivalent of

the terrestrial kacba at Mecca, a celestial Jerusalem as it were. This brings us to an

entirely new dimension of our topic; we cannot deal with it here.22 But let us note at

least that, under these circumstances, the isrä' could also end with a vision of God and

that this vision was then described in the same way as was done with respect to the

mfräj: the Prophet meets God in a garden on the Haram al-Sharlf, the ancient Temple

Mount, in a hortus conclusus as it is said (fi hazlra), i.e., amidst the enclosure formed

by the walls of the Herodian - or, as people believed at that time, Salomonic - temple.

He sees Him there sitting on a throne, in the shape of a youth bearing a crown of

light,23 and then God touches him as a proof of intimacy.

Let me conclude now and, in summarizing, bring in a last factor: chronology. There is

one thing we have to be clear about right away: I have been talking about exegesis and

not about reality. We shall never know what Muhammad really saw, and even he

himself before talking about the event had to interpret it. The formulation in süra 81 is

clear: he had seen a 'venerable messenger', i.e., an angel (which does not necessarily

mean Gabriel). The statements in sur at al-Najm are certainly earlier, and they are also

more explicit; but with regard to the question we asked they remain ambiguous. Moreo­

ver, in spite of being early they do not seem to be the immediate expression of the

event as such, for in this case we would not expect two apparitions to be mentioned at

once. On the other hand, the text is obviously homogeneous; the rhyme remains the

same throughout the entire süra, with exception of the last six verses (57-62). We can

therefore not explain the combination of the two visions as the outcome of later redaction,

under TJthmän or before. The hypothesis which suggests itself in this situation is: The

beginning of sürat al-Najm does not describe one event which happened immediately

before, but rather refers to two of them in order to underline, by their singularity, the

veracity of something else. Where is then the 'Sitz im Leben' of the sural

This is not a question to which we can give a definite answer. But going back to Tabari

again, to his Tafslr24 as well as his Tärlkh,25 we are left with the impression that, for

him, sürat al-Najm was connected, in its first half, with the affair of the 'satanic verses'.

As is well known, the three pagan goddesses are mentioned in verses 19-20, immedi­

ately after the report about the second vision and they are mentioned there and no-

58 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

where else in the Qur'an. We need not assume that the 'satanic verses' ever formed part of the süra - on the contrary, they are refuted there. But their rhyme is the same. When the Qur'an says that Lät, TJzzä, and Manät cannot be of any relevance for the new religion, the audience is supposed to connect this with the false revelation which had been spread. This is at least how we may be allowed to interpret Tabarî - and the sources he used. The consequences for our topic are enormous. Thematically, the em­phasis would shift from the visions to the refutation of the ill-advised theologoumenon; the instrument by which the three goddesses were supposed to exert their influence, i.e. intercession (shafäca), is still the topic of verse 26. The beginning of sürat al-Najm, however, would then be nothing else but a solemn start, the introduction of a speech, a sermon perhaps, held by the Prophet when, as is also suggested by the reports we find in Tabarî,26 those who had emigrated to Ethiopia came back, people who had heard what had happened in Mecca only through rumours and who were eager to know what the Prophet really thought about the subject. The greatest possible authority and persuasion would have been needed in order to invalidate the inculpations; in order to reach this goal the Prophet could have referred to his encounters with the heavenly power, the 'numinous' as we say today. 'Your comrade is not astray, neither errs, nor speaks he out of caprice. This is nought but a revelation revealed, taught him by one terrible in power, very strong', if we follow Arberry's translation. What was important was the encounter as such; the question who it was whom he had encountered could remain, for the moment, unanswered. I leave this hypothesis as it is; my concern is exegesis and not reality.

On the exegetical level we are confronted with a totally different situation. When the mufassirün began their work the Qur'an had become a Scripture, the canonized collec­tion of all the texts revealed to Muhammad. It is true that, during the first generations, one did not forget that sürat al-Najm had some connection with the 'satanic verses'. But this was not relevant, for even if the event had ever occurred it had remained an episode; the 'satanic verses' never had a chance to form part of the final redaction of the Qur'an. The two visions of sürat al-Najm, instead of being an allusion made by the prophet to something previously known, as a proof of his veracity in a delicate moment, were now taken to be an immediate testimony of his first contact with God or his messenger. In the same time, the second reference to the event, in süra 81, came to the fore. Being part of the 'Book' this sentence was now on the same level as süra 53; a 'Book' had to be consistent. In a way the scholars continued to be aware of the fact that revelations had been reactions to specific situations; this is why they talked about asbäb al-nuzül. But as far as the contents were concerned the passages had to be balanced against each other. The jurists soon elaborated the category of abrogation (naskh) in order to solve the ensuing difficulties. But in our case this device did not work; theological statements could not be assumed to have been made in a different way at different times.

Vision and Ascension 59

Under these circumstances we cannot but be struck by the high degree of acceptance

which the anthropomorphic interpretation of sürat al-Najm found in the early commu­

nity. We can, of course, not be sure whether the discussion really goes back to the

generation of the sahäba; much of what was related about the urgemeinde is projec­

tion rather than reality. Ibn cAbbäs has been treated as a kind of mythological figure in

recent scholarship.27 cÄ'isha may have witnessed how the statements concerning her

husband's visions in what was to become a Holy Scripture afterwards became less

equivocal, or how the Prophet himself became increasingly more cautious in interpret­

ing them, but her statements are sometimes phrased in a way as to contain polemical

remarks against later theological currents, especially of a Shiite type. At the time when

the visions occurred she was not yet born. We may be pretty sure that the question

became a matter of serious dispute only later on, perhaps not before the end of the first

century. During Hishäm b. cAbdalmalik's caliphate, some time between AH 105 and

120, Jâd b. Dirham was executed in Iraq, allegedly for having denied that Abraham

was God's friend and that Moses had been addressed by God Himself on Mount Sinai;

Jäd had obviously rejected the climax attributed to Ibn cAbbäs and consequently also

Muhammad's vision of God.28 His 'heresy' was, however not so 'new' a biaKa as the

heresiographers pretend. He stood in a tradition, and there seems to have been a certain

continuity between süra 81, cÄ'isha's statement and his rejection of anthropomor­

phism, although he himself may have already been influenced by Neoplatonism in

Harrän where he had lived.

As to the stories about Muhammad's ascension, they also seem to have flourished

mainly in Iraq; there the idea of the heavenly journey was deeply rooted in Hellenistic

gnosticism and apocalyptic or mystical Judaism. In Mecca and Medina the scholars

remained cautious; Ibn Ishäq who did not believe the Prophet to have seen God Him­

self did not grant Muhammad's ascension a prominent place in his narrative either and

accepted it only in an attenuated version. In Syria people apparently preferred to think

rather in terms of the night journey; Jerusalem was what they were interested in. They

did not object to Muhammad's having seen God and even having been touched by

Him, but they did not have any need for the motif of the ascension. Yet this latter motif

turned out to be the stronger one, probably simply due to the fact that, with the event of

the Abbasids, Iraq became the political and intellectual center of the Islamic world.

From there it spread to Eastern Iran; already in the Umayyad period Iraqi troups had

settled there. Our most extensive report came, as we saw, from Balkh; Dahhäk b.

Muzähim, to whom it was attributed, claimed to have got it from Ibn cAbbäs. Even

here we are, as far as authenticity is concerned, not yet on safe ground. However, the

oldest testimony which can be reliably dated is found again in Iraq. The only problem

is that in this case the motif is not connected with Muhammad; it is used by - or with

respect to - a heretic who pretended to be a prophet himself: a Shiite by the name of

Abü Mansür al-Ijl.

6ο Journal of Qur'anic Studies

I cannot deal with him here; suffice it to say that he belonged to the ghulät, the lunatic

fringe of early Shiism. He was executed in the twenties of the second hijrl century; he

had started a rebellion. His adherents justified his claim by pretending that he had

ascended to Heaven. God had talked to him in Persian, they said, and addressed him by

the title 'my son' (yä pasar)', afterward He had sent him back to earth in order to

proclaim His word. Abu Mansür apparently considered himself to be a son of God; his

adherents called him the Logos (al-kalima) and took the oath by that term. They looked

upon him as the Messiah since God had touched his head with His hand. The verb for

touching a person's head, patting it as one does with a child, is masaha in Arabic, and

mash, the Arabic equivalent to Hebrew meshah, the Messiah, is simply the passive

participle to this verb. The word itself does not primarily mean 'to anoint' like Hebrew

mashah or Aramaic meshah; Abü Mansür's adherents - and possibly he himself- thus

understood the Messiah in their own, Arabic way. This was a very imaginative manner

of taking up the motif. We may be pretty sure that Abu Mansür wanted to vie with

Muhammad in this respect, but the model he followed was Jesus.

What is important for us is that he failed; the outcome of his preaching was simply a

riot, the occupation of a mosque perhaps. Whoever arrogated the motif of the ascen­

sion to himself no longer remained unpunished. Only a prophet could pay a visit to

God and meanwhile the vast majority had decided Muhammad to have been the last

prophet, the 'seal of the Prophets'. The Shiites did, in a certain way, not belong to this

majority; this is why they still retained early views for some time. This also applies to

anthropomorphism; they adhered to it even after they had calmed down, so to speak,

and stopped producing new prophets. But in the long run they, too, changed their

mind; not only did they dissociate themselves from people like Abu Mansür, but they

also became transcendentalists as most of the Sunnis had already become. All of them,

Sunnis and Shiis alike, have remained so until today; they owe this common outlook

mainly to the impact of Mu'tazilite theology. When in the period of the Mamluks,

during the ninth hijrl century, somebody in Cairo pretended to have ascended to heaven

in order to see God and to talk to Him, he was simply put into a lunatic asylum.

Muhammad's ascension, however, had a long and triumphant history, in art and in

literature, even in a Latin text like the Liber Scalae Machometi which may have influ­

enced Dante in his Divine Comedy. Normally the Prophet was no longer believed to

have seen God during his encounter; he only heard His voice, preferably from behind

a veil. But the event was not understood as being mere dream either; it was a reality, a

miracle. And even the vision of God was not completely ruled out, though in a differ­

ent context. Sunni Islam went through a protracted discussion about whether the ru 'yä

bVl-absär, the beatific vision after the Last Judgment, should be part of the creed; it

was finally decided that in Paradise all Muslims will see God, albeit only intermit­

tently, as in a theatre when the curtain, the veil, rises as a token of divine grace. But

Vision and Ascension 61

then the world will have come to an end and vision is part of eternal bliss. The Prophet,

on the contrary, had a task to accomplish; therefore he had to return to earth. His

glorification marked the beginning, not the end of his career. He became a symbol of

Muslim identity and in this respect his uniqueness is more strongly felt today than ever

before. But his uniqueness is nowadays mainly defined in this-worldly categories,

especially in connection with his achievements as a leader of his community. His

supernatural encounter with the divine remained an isolated event; the Scripture itself,

though evoked in its support, prevented its full deployment. In this respect Islamic

theological thinking, if compared to Christian speculations and perhaps to its advan­

tage, stopped half-way.

NOTES

1 I have treated the topic at length in an article which appeared in: M. A. Amir-Moezzi (ed.), Le voyage initiatique en terre d'Islam: ascensions célestes et itinéraires spirituels, Bibliothèque de L'École des hautes études: section des sciences religieuses, 103 (Louvain, Peeters, 1996), pp. 27-56.1 refer the reader to it for further documentation. Endnotes are added here only where new material has been used or where it seemed absolutely necessary.

2 For this figure cf. now Steven M. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 181 ff.

3 Cf. the role the mutäc plays in Ghazâlï's Mishkät al-anwär.

4 Cf. now EI 2, IX, pp. 549 f., s. v. sidr (R. Kruk).

5 Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims: a textual analysis, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 5 (Princeton, Darwin Press, 1995).

6 Al-Bukhârï, Sahlh, Kitäb al-Tafsir 65 (sürat al-Muddaththir).

I Ibn Hishäm, cAbd al-Malik, al-Slra al-nabawiyya; trans. F. Wüstenfeld as Das Leben Muhammed's nach Muhammed Ibn Ishak (2 vols., Göttingen, Dieterichsche Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1858-60), pp. 153-6.

8 Al-Tabarï, Jämf al-bayän can ta'wll äy al-Qur'än Cairo, 1373/1954), 27:48,5 ff. (Tkrima); 45,4 ff. (Anas b. Mälik); 48, pu. f. (Ibn cAbbäs); cf. also al-Balädhuri, Ahmad b. Yahyä, Ansah al-ashräf, ed. M. Hamidullah, Dhakhä'ir al-carab, 27 (Cairo, Ma°had al-Makhtütät bi-Jämicat al-Duwal al-cArabiyya and Dar al-Macärif, 1959), 1:256, no. 591.

9 Al-Tabarï, Jämf al-bayän, 27:51,17 ff.

10 Ibid., 48,7 f.

II Ibid., 48,12 f., in the context of a well-known hadlth which again alludes to the climax.

12 Ibid., 50,14 ff.

13 A. J. Wensinck and J. P. Mensing, Concordance et indices de la tradition musulmane (8 vols., Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1936-88), 7:48a.

14 Ibn cAbbäs allegedly already pointed to this fact (al-Tabarï, Jämf al-bayän, 27:48,3 f.).

15 Ibn Khuzayma, Kitäb al-Tawhld (Cairo, 1354/1935), p. 134,4 ff.

16 Jorge Luis Borges, Έ1 tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv' in Carlos V. Frias (ed.), Obras completas (1923-1972) (Buenos Aires, Emece Editores, 1974), pp. 324 ff.

17 Cf. W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 42 f.

18 It is now to be found in W. Madelung and P. E. Walker, An Ismaili Heresiography: The 'Bäb al-shaytän' from Abu Tammäm's Kitäb al-shajara, Islamic History and Civilization, 23 (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1998), p. 76,4 ff. of the Arabic text; cf. P. E. Walker, 'An Isma'ili version of

62 Journal of Qur'anic Studies

the heresiography of the seventy-two erring sects' in F. Daftary (ed.), Mediaeval Isma *Ui history and thought (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 171.

19 Al-Tabarï, Jämic al-bayän, 27:48,18 ff. and before.

20 Al-Suyûtï, Lac,äll al-masnücafi'l-ahädlth al-mawdüca, 1:74,14 ff.

21 Al-Tabarï, Jämic al-bayän, 27:45,7 f.

22 For a more detailed treatment cf. my article <cAbd al-Malik and the Dome of the Rock. An Analysis of some Texts' in J. Raby and J. Johns (eds.), Bayt al-Maqdis: cAbd al-Malik1 s Jerusa­lem, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, 9 (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 89-103.

23 For the motif as such cf. now D. Gimaret, Dieu à Vimage de Vhomme. Les anthropo-morphismes de la sunna et leur interprétation par les théologiens (Paris, les Éditions du Cerf, 1997), p. 158 f.

24 Al-Tabarï, Jämic al-bayän, 27:186 ff., i.e., not in connection with sürat al-Najm but with sürat al-Hajj, v. 52.

25 1:1192,3 ff.; cf. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, pp. 101 ff.

26 Al-Tabarï, Jämic al-bayän, 17:187, -5 etc.; cf. the story as told by °Urwa b. al-Zubayr in Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder, pp. 160 f.

27 Cf. Claude Gilliot, 'Portrait «mythique» d'IbncAbbäs', Arabica, 32:2 (1985) p. 62.

28 Cf. my Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam (6 vols., Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1991-5), 2:452 ff. Ibn cAbbäs' opinions may here been propagated by his pupil Ikrima who traveled widely and lived until 105/723-4.

^ s

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