Laylat al-Qadr: The Night of Decree

A look at laylat al-qadr in Islamic teaching, drawn from the Quran and authentic hadith.

Somewhere within the last ten nights of Ramadan lies a single night the Quran describes as better than a thousand months – longer, in spiritual weight, than more than eighty years of ordinary worship compressed into a single night. Its exact date is deliberately left unknown, and an entire surah of the Quran is devoted to describing it.

Laylat al-Qadr: The Night the Quran Began to Descend

Surah al-Qadr states plainly: “Indeed, We sent the Quran down during the Night of Decree” (97:1), referring to the beginning of its revelation to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the cave of Hira. The same short surah describes angels and the Spirit – understood as Jibreel – descending during that night by their Lord’s permission for every matter, and declares the night to be peace until the emergence of dawn (97:4-5).

Better Than a Thousand Months

The central claim of Surah al-Qadr – “the Night of Decree is better than a thousand months” (97:3) – is read by classical scholars as an act of divine mercy toward this final community, whose overall lifespans, unlike those of earlier peoples, are comparatively short. A single night’s worship on Laylat al-Qadr, performed sincerely, is described as outweighing what would otherwise take a lifetime longer than eighty-three years to accumulate through ordinary devotion.

Why Its Date Is Deliberately Hidden

A hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari describes the Prophet ﷺ coming out to inform his companions of the exact night, only for two men to be quarreling, at which point he said the knowledge of it had been raised up from him, and instructed them instead to search for it among the odd nights of the last ten of Ramadan – the twenty-first, twenty-third, twenty-fifth, twenty-seventh, and twenty-ninth. Scholars read this deliberate concealment as encouraging sustained devotion across the entire final third of the month, rather than concentrated effort on a single predictable date.

The Twenty-Seventh Night’s Special Standing

While the exact night is not fixed with certainty, a substantial body of hadith and the practice of many companions and scholars point to the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan as the most likely candidate, a view held by figures including Ubay ibn Ka’b (RA), who is reported to have sworn to it based on a sign the Prophet ﷺ described – that the sun would rise the following morning without strong rays, like a plate without radiance, an observation later generations have continued to note and discuss.

The Supplication Aisha Was Taught to Say

A hadith recorded by al-Tirmidhi describes Aisha (RA) asking the Prophet ﷺ what she should say if she happened to know which night was Laylat al-Qadr. He taught her a specific supplication: “Allahumma innaka afuwwun tuhibbul-afwa fa’fu anni” – O Allah, You are Forgiving and love forgiveness, so forgive me. Scholars note the significance of what he chose to teach her in that moment: not a request for wealth, status, or worldly ease, but specifically for forgiveness, treated by classical commentary as the request most fitting for the single most valuable night of the entire year.

I’tikaf: Withdrawing for the Final Ten Nights

Hadith describe the Prophet ﷺ observing i’tikaf, a period of dedicated retreat inside the mosque, specifically during the last ten nights of Ramadan every year of his life in Medina, according to an account recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and doing so with even greater intensity in the final Ramadan before his death, when he is reported to have observed it for twenty nights instead of ten. During i’tikaf, a person withdraws from ordinary worldly engagement, remaining in the mosque continuously except for genuine necessities, devoting the time to prayer, recitation, and remembrance of Allah, precisely across the stretch of nights most likely to contain Laylat al-Qadr. Scholars point to this practice as the clearest expression of how the Prophet ﷺ himself responded to the uncertainty surrounding the night’s exact date – not by narrowing his effort to a single guessed night, but by structuring an entire ten-night withdrawal from ordinary life around the possibility that any one of those nights might be the one described in Surah al-Qadr as outweighing eighty-three years of worship.

This discussion pairs naturally with our article on Zakat: The Islamic System of Almsgiving. For further primary-source reading, Quran.com offers searchable access to the full text of the Quran and its major hadith collections.