Beside the nightly qunut of witr stands the qunut al-nazilah, the supplication of calamity. The precedent is prophetic. Sahih al-Bukhari records that after the treacherous killing of a party of Muslim reciters at Bir Ma'una, the Prophet spent a month offering qunut in the dawn prayer, naming the tribes responsible and praying against them, an extraordinary and remembered breach of the prayer's usual serenity. From that precedent the schools derived the rule that in public disaster, war, persecution, plague or famine, the imam may add a spoken supplication to the congregational prayer, and Muslim communities have used it in every age, praying for the besieged and the suffering by name.
The schools otherwise map the qunut differently. The Shafi'i school retains a daily qunut in the dawn prayer, the Hanafi school places it in witr throughout the year, the Hanbali school likewise favours witr, and the Maliki school treats a quiet qunut at dawn as merely permitted. These differences, argued from competing hadith about what the Prophet did and for how long, remain visible wherever Muslims of different schools pray together. In all schools the gesture is the same, the standing congregation with hands raised, the imam's petitions answered by a murmured amin, the fixed liturgy opening for a moment onto the needs of the hour.