Qunut

The word qunut carries senses of obedience, devotion and standing long in prayer, and in liturgical use it names the supplication a worshipper offers while standing upright in the ritual prayer, usually after rising from the final bowing. Where the rest of salat is fixed recitation, the qunut is petition, and its most famous wording is a small masterpiece of compressed asking.

In the narration preserved by al-Tirmidhi and others, the Prophet's young grandson al-Hasan ibn Ali reports being taught words to say in the witr prayer, O God, guide me among those You have guided, grant me health among those You have granted health, take me into Your care among those You have taken into care, bless me in what You have given, and protect me from the evil of what You have decreed, for You decree and none decrees against You. The prayer closes by declaring that whoever God befriends is not humbled, and ends in praise. Jurists count this among the most authentic of the transmitted supplications, and it remains the standard qunut of the witr, the odd numbered night prayer, across much of the Muslim world, recited nightly in Ramadan congregations where the whole mosque holds the long standing together, hands raised, answering each petition with amin.

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.