Fifty Prayers Reduced to Five, and the Question of the Body

The best known episode of the ascent is the negotiation over prayer. Fifty prayers a day are enjoined; on the way down Musa asks what was imposed and says that the community will not manage it, having had experience of the children of Israel, and sends him back to ask for a reduction. This happens repeatedly, ten at a time in some versions and five at a time in others, until the number is five, at which point Musa still advises going back and Muhammad says that he has asked until he is ashamed to ask again and that he accepts. The five are then declared to count as fifty in reward. The story is cited in Islamic teaching both as the origin of the five daily prayers and as an unusually direct picture of intercession.

Whether the journey happened in the body or as a vision was disputed from the earliest period. Some early authorities, including a report attributed to Aisha, held that the body did not leave, and the wording of the verse in the chapter of the Star, which speaks of what the heart did not deny of what it saw, was cited in support; the majority position in later Sunni theology is that the journey was bodily and while awake. The identification of the farthest place of prostration with the site in Jerusalem is the standard reading and underlies the sanctity of the precinct there, though a minority of early opinions understood the phrase differently. The night is commemorated in many Muslim communities as the festival of the Isra and the Miraj, and it became the seed of a large body of narrative and visual art, including the illustrated ascension books of Persian and Turkish manuscript tradition.