The Night of Decree, Better Than a Thousand Months

Al-Qadr ('The Decree'), 5 Meccan verses, declares that the Quran was sent down on the Night of Decree (Laylat al-Qadr), a night 'better than a thousand months' in which the angels and the Spirit descend with every decree until dawn. Muslims seek this night in the last ten days of Ramadan with prayer and recitation.

Al-Qadr's classification is itself disputed among the classical authorities, most later compilers listing it as Meccan though some early transmitters recorded it as Medinan, one of the roughly dozen surahs al-Suyuti notes as never fully settled by consensus. Muslims traditionally seek Laylat al-Qadr specifically among the odd-numbered nights of Ramadan's last ten days, a practice resting on hadith rather than on this surah's own text, which specifies no date; the surah's declaration that the night is 'better than a thousand months' (97:3) is read by commentators as expressing incalculable spiritual value rather than a literal exchange rate of merit. Because Al-Qadr does not itself name a specific date within Ramadan, later Islamic scholarship developed several distinct methods for identifying the night in a given year, including counting from lettered verses in the surah itself, a practice some classical scholars endorsed and others rejected as unsupported speculation, alongside the more widely followed hadith-based recommendation to seek it among the odd nights of the month's final third. The surah's brevity, five verses building to the single closing formula 'peace, until the emergence of dawn' (97:5), is read by scholars of Quranic style as unusually serene in tone compared with the more urgent register of many neighbouring short surahs.