Of all the nights upon which the sun has set since Allah made the heavens and the earth, there is one which the Qur'an itself was sent down to honor, and which the believers of every generation since have honored above every other: the night in the cave of Hira on which the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Everything that this chronicle has narrated in the chapters before this one, the light announced at his conception and seen at his birth, the recognition of the monks, the titles of the truthful and the trustworthy, the years of the quiet household, the retreats and the true dreams and the saluting stones, was preparation for this hour; and everything that follows in the more than seven hundred events that remain in this record flows out of it. Ibn Kathir heads his chapter with the solemnity the moment deserves: a chapter on the manner of the beginning of the revelation to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and an account of the first revelation to him from the glorious Qur'an. The mother-source of the whole account is the narration of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, the hadith numbered three in that book, which the scholars of the Ummah have received with uninterrupted acceptance from the day of its telling; and it is that narration, with its corroborating channels, which this event now relates.
The night, as the preceding event has set upon its threshold, fell towards the end of Ramadan in the fortieth year of the Prophet's ﷺ life, in the year 610 of the Christian calendar, in the small cave upon the mountain of an-Nur which looks down upon the Kaaba. Lings gives the setting in a sentence whose simplicity carries the weight: it was one night towards the end of Ramadan, in his fortieth year, and he was alone in the cave. Then, in Aisha's words as Ibn Kathir transmits them, the truth came to him while he was there in the cave of Hira. The Arabic word which her account carries, and which Ibn Kathir pauses to expound, speaks of suddenness: the truth did not grow upon him as the dawn grows upon the sky, it came upon him, breaking in upon the numbered night of his devotion. And the visitor was the angel. Aisha's account says: the angel came to him and said: Read. And he replied: I am not one who reads.
What followed belongs to the most famous sequence of words in the literature of the world. The angel, in Aisha's transmission, took him and pressed him, a verb whose readings in the two Sahihs the commentators explain as the overwhelming embrace, until he reached the limit of his endurance; and then released him, and said: Read. And he replied again: I am not one who reads. And the angel pressed him a second time until he reached the limit of his endurance, and released him, and said: Read. And a third time the reply, and a third time the embrace, until the limit was reached; and then, with the Prophet ﷺ released and trembling, there came the first five verses of the Qur'an ever to be revealed, the opening of the surah of al-Alaq: Read, in the name of your Lord who created; He created man from a clot. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught man that which he knew not. The Prophet ﷺ repeated the words after the angel, and the angel left him; and, as the fuller account of Ubayd ibn Umayr relates his own description, it was as though the words were inscribed upon his heart.
The scholars have never passed over the smallest word of this encounter, and their expositions are themselves a heritage. Of the reply, ma ana bi-qari'in, Ibn Kathir transmits the settled judgment: it is a negation, meaning that he was not a man who could read, and among those who preferred this interpretation are an-Nawawi and, before him, Abu Shamah; while those who would read it as a question are in error, for the prefixed ba is not added when the intent is to ask. The Qur'an itself settles the matter afterward, saying of the messengers that they were men whom Allah inspired, and that they were not made bodies that do not eat food, and that had He made the messenger an angel, He would yet have made him a man. Of the threefold embrace, the commentator Abu Sulayman, whom Ibn Kathir cites, said that Jibril (upon him be peace) did it only to test his patience and to discipline him, so that he might be tempered to bear the burdens of prophethood; and others said that the angel meant to awaken him to the gravity of what was being placed upon him, as Allah was later to say: We are about to place upon you a weighty word. For revelation, as the authentic descriptions of the Prophet's ﷺ state afterward, was physically heavy: when it came, his face would redden and his breathing quicken, and his blessed forehead would stream with perspiration even on a cold day. What the believer should hold is the joining of majesty and mercy in the encounter itself: the truth came with a strength that could press a human frame to its limit, and with a patience that asked three times and waited three times, and with a first message whose burden was nothing other than the generosity of the teaching Lord.
He ﷺ came down from the mountain with the words upon his heart and his heart quaking within him. Aisha's account says that he returned home with his heart palpitating, a word whose anatomy the commentators have lovingly traced, for it names the trembling of the heart itself, and some of the transmitters, as Ibn Kathir notes, gave the word as the emotions, the surges, and others as that which beats between the neck and the collarbone. He entered upon Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) and said: Wrap me up, wrap me up, in the Arabic of the narration zammiluni, zammiluni. They wrapped him in his cloak until the terror departed from him; and when he had recovered he told her what he had seen, and said: I feared for myself. The sources, as Ibn Kathir expounds, understand the fear precisely: he had witnessed what he had never experienced or imagined, and no frame of his previous life held it. Lings adds the note which the fuller channels carry, that he feared lest what had come to him might mean that he had become a man possessed; the greatest of souls has been given the full humanity of this hour, and the believer reads it with awe rather than perplexity, for the Qur'an was to say afterward of the messengers that He did not make them bodies that do not eat food, and that had He made the messenger an angel, He would yet have made him a man.
Then spoke the first comforter of Islam, and her words have been upon the lips of the Ummah for fourteen centuries. Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) said to him: Never; by Allah, Allah will never disgrace you. And she gave her reasons, which are the recorded virtues of his forty years: you keep the bonds of kinship, and you carry the burden of the weak, and you give to the destitute, and you honor the guest, and you stand by those whom calamity has struck. Al-Buti calls hers one of the noblest reactions ever to come from a woman, past or present: she soothed him when he was perturbed and made him rest when he was exhausted, and she reasoned, with a wisdom which the scholars have called the first defense of prophethood, that Allah does not build a man's goodness in order to disgrace him. Ibn Kathir expounds each phrase of her words as though polishing a jewel: the carrying of the kall, the burden, is the providing for those who cannot provide; the earning of the ma'dum is the hastening to the destitute before others; the honoring of the guest is the offering of food and lodging; the helping against calamity is the standing by the stricken until they find their footing. Let it be marked, for it will matter in the events to come, that the first theology of the Seerah after revelation was spoken by a woman, in her own house, upon the evidence of her own years of marriage; and Allah Himself would afterward greet her from above the heavens, as the authentic hadith of Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) records, Jibril (upon him be peace) coming to the Prophet ﷺ with the salutation of peace for Khadijah from her Lord and from himself, and the good tidings of a house in Paradise.
Khadijah did not stop at comfort. She took him by the hand, as Ibn Kathir's transmission has it, and went with him to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal ibn Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, who had become a Christian in the time before Islam, and had learned to write in Hebrew, copying from the scriptures what Allah willed him to write; and he was now an old man, and blind. She said to him: O cousin, listen to your nephew; and Waraqah said to him: O nephew, what did you see; and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ told him what he had seen. Then the old watcher of the scriptures, whose decades of waiting the previous event has traced, spoke the identification which his learning had been keeping him alive to hear: this is the Namus, the bearer of the divine secrets, whom Allah sent to Musa (peace be upon him). The word Namus, which Waraqah reached for and which the whole account has preserved, is the term the Christian Arabs of his circle used for the great angel of revelation; and Ibn Kathir remarks upon the depth of the old man's discernment: he named Musa and not Isa (peace be upon him), though Isa came later, because the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ was to complete and to stand in succession to that of Musa, as the spirits were later to say in the Qur'an: we have heard a recitation sent down after Musa, confirming what is with it, guiding to the truth and to a straight path.
Then Waraqah uttered the prophecy, and the Seerah has kept it as one keeps a solemn threshold. He said: would that I were a young man again, would that I might live until the day when your people expel you. And the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: will they expel me. And Waraqah answered: yes; there never came a man with the like of what you have brought but that he was treated with enmity; and if I should remain alive to your day, I will help you with a strong help. Ibn Kathir expounds the pathos of the old man's wish, that he longed for the youth of faith and useful knowledge and good work, and the pain of the parting which the prophecy names, for, as as-Suhayli noted, to be driven from one's homeland is among the hardest of the hard. Not many days afterward, as Aisha's account concludes, Waraqah died; and the revelation paused, for a season whose story belongs to the events that follow. Of the standing of the old man with Allah, the sources have not left the Ummah in doubt: the reports which Ibn Kathir gathers record that the Prophet ﷺ, asked about him, said: I saw him, and upon him I saw white garments, and if he were of the companions of the Fire he would not have been wearing them; and in another narration: I saw him in the midst of Paradise wearing silken robes; and in a third: do not speak ill of Waraqah, for I have seen for him one garden, or two. The hadith which grades them carries the honesty of the science: Ibn Kathir pronounces the first of these chains good, the second good, the third excellent; and of his death he writes his own verdict: may Allah have mercy on him and bless him, for what is told of him here is credence in what occurred, and faith in the revelation that had come, and good intent for the future.
The canonical account which this event has followed is Aisha's, but the sirah preserves the same night through other eyes as well, and their convergence is part of its certainty. Imam Muslim, Ibn Kathir notes, transmits the same narration from the same source through other chains, and his version runs to the words of Waraqah's promised help; and Ibn Kathir, who had discussed the whole in his commentary upon al-Bukhari, both its chains and its text, registers the small variants of wording with which the transmitters marked their several hearings. The account of Ubayd ibn Umayr, transmitted through Wahb ibn Kaysan before Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr, carries the same night in the form of a dream: the angel came to me while I was asleep, carrying a brocade cloth upon which was writing, and pressed me with it until I thought it was death, and then released me, and recited the five verses; and Ibn Kathir judges that it served as a prelude to the awakening that followed. The same channel relates the further scene on the mountainside: that he went out into the heights and heard a voice from the sky saying: O Muhammad, you are the Messenger of Allah, and I am Jibril; and he looked up, and there was the angel in the form of a man, his feet set upon the horizons of the sky, and whichever way he turned, he ﷺ still saw him, until Khadijah's messengers, whom she had sent all the way to Makkah searching for him, found him standing in his place; and her greeting when he returned: rejoice and be of good courage, by Him in whose hand is the soul of Khadijah, I hope that you are the prophet of this people. Al-Bayhaqi preserves the stratagem with which she sealed her own certainty: when Jibril (upon him be peace) came again while the Prophet ﷺ was with her, she bade him sit at her right, then at her left, then in her lap, asking each time whether he still saw him; and when she cast aside her veil while he sat in her lap, he said that he saw him no longer; and she said: this is no demon, cousin, this is an angel; take heart and rejoice. Ibn Kathir transmits her verdict in the words of al-Bayhaqi: this she did to settle the matter, and to preserve her faith, and to affirm her credence. In the convergence of all these channels the event stands: the cave, the command, the embrace, the verses, the trembling descent, the wife, and the old man who knew.
When did the night fall? The sources permit the certainty they give and the uncertainty they keep. The day of the week is beyond dispute: Ibn Kathir transmits from the Sahih of Muslim the hadith of Abu Qatadah (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Prophet ﷺ, asked of fasting upon Monday, said: that is the day on which I was born, and the day on which revelation was sent down upon me; and Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) said: your prophet was born upon a Monday, and prophethood came to him upon a Monday; and of Ubayd ibn Umayr, Abu Jafar al-Baqir and several other scholars, Ibn Kathir says that they held the revelation to have come upon Monday, a matter undisputed among them. The month is Ramadan, as the Qur'an itself witnesses when it names the month of Ramadan the month in which the Qur'an was sent down. But the day of the month the early authorities left in a spread which the honest chronicle must carry whole: Ibn Kathir records the report that it was the tenth of Ramadan; al-Waqidi transmitted from Jafar al-Baqir that the beginning of the revelation was Monday the seventeenth of Ramadan, while others said the twenty-fourth; the hadith of Wathilah ibn al-Asqa (may Allah be pleased with him) places the sending down of the Qur'an upon the fourteenth of Ramadan, after the tablets of Ibrahim upon the first, the Torah upon the sixth and the Injil upon the thirteenth; and from the mass of these reckonings Ibn Kathir concludes that the majority of the companions and their followers held the Night of Decree to be the twenty-fourth, joining the beginning of the Qur'an to that most blessed of nights, which the surah of the same name was sent down to exalt. The modern computation of the Sealed Nectar, weighing all these together with the calendars, fixes upon Monday the twenty-first of Ramadan at night, the tenth of August of the year 610, when the Prophet ﷺ was forty years, six months and twelve days of age; and its author appends his own caveat, that there is some difference among the scholars upon the fixed day, and that he has written what seems to him the correct one. The master record of this chronicle accordingly keeps the range entire, the seventeenth, the twenty-first, or the twenty-fourth of Ramadan, upon the tenth of August of the year 610; and the believer loses nothing by the spread, for the night is certain even where the day of the month is weighed; the Prophet ﷺ himself taught the believers to seek the Night of Decree in the odd nights of the last ten of Ramadan, and the surah sent down concerning it declares: We sent it down upon the Night of Decree, and what will make you know what the Night of Decree is; the Night of Decree is better than a thousand months.
Consider, then, what the first word of the Qur'an was. Not a command to fight, nor a warning of fire, nor a law of worship: the command was Read, in the name of your Lord who created. The first name of Allah which the Qur'an gave to the world is your Lord who created, and the first doctrine is the creating of man from a clot, and the second command is again Read, joined now to the Most Generous who taught by the pen, taught man that which he knew not. Five verses, and in them the whole architecture of the message: the Lord, the creature, the teacher, the pen, and the dignity of knowledge; the first five verses of a book which would descend for twenty-three years, one hundred and fourteen surahs, and would carry a scattered people, as the reader of the coming chapters will witness, out of the darkness of everything they had been. Al-Buti has drawn the parallel which the event itself suggests: before this man in the cave there had been another seeker, Musa (peace be upon him), who turned aside to a burning bush and heard the holy call, I, even I, am Allah, so worship Me; and one flame of that fire reached across the centuries to flare again in the depths of a cave wherein was a man devoted to worship and self-purification; but this flame was not a fire to attract the onlooker, it was a light which shone with inspiration and guidance upon the startled heart. And the Qur'an would afterward say to its bearer, remembering this hour: and thus We have revealed to you a spirit of Our command; you did not know what the Book was, nor what faith was, but We made it a light by which We guide whom We will of Our servants; and indeed you guide to a straight path.
On that night, in the person of the Prophet ﷺ, the prophethood of Adam's line gathered up its whole inheritance and turned its final corner. The light which his mother had seen go forth from her toward the castles of Syria; the recognition of Bahira at Busra and of Nestora beneath the tree; the expectation of the rabbis and the monks; the salutations of the rocks; the dreams of six months; the forty years of the most truthful of lives: all of it was, in the sight of Allah, one stairway, and the stairway now reached its landing, and the Qur'an began. Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) believed, and az-Zuhri says of her that she was the first of all people to believe in Allah and to give credence to His Messenger; and within the pause of the revelation which followed Waraqah's death, and the resumption which the following events will narrate, the first community of Islam gathered in the house of the man who had come down from the mountain saying: wrap me up. From that house the recitation has never since ceased. Every prayer ever prayed in the way of Islam, from that year to this hour, has opened with the praise which the Qur'an taught; every line of it that has ever been recited, in the caves of persecution and on the minbars of empire, in the deserts of Arabia and on the lips of children in every land of the earth, is a continuation of the night of the cave; and when the believer recites the five verses of al-Alaq, and reaches the words: Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, the believer is standing, by the mercy of Allah, inside the first minute of the revelation of the Qur'an to the worlds. The mercy of Allah came upon His chosen servant ﷺ in the form of a command to read, and the world has been reading ever since.