Conclusion
The Qur'anic account of the Night
Journey is remarkably concise. In Qur'an 17:1, the emphasis is on God's power
and purpose in carrying His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the
Farthest Mosque. Beyond that, the Qur'an offers very few details. It does not
describe how the journey took place, nor does it identify any mount or
supernatural creature.
The name al-Burāq enters the narrative
through the hadith literature, particularly the collections of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī
and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. Even there, the description is relatively modest. Al-Burāq is
introduced simply as a white animal, larger than a donkey but smaller than a
mule, whose defining characteristic is its extraordinary speed. The elaborate
features that many people associate with al-Burāq today are absent from these
earliest accounts.
Those familiar images emerged
centuries later as Muslim artists, poets, and storytellers retold the story in
different cultural settings. By the medieval period, al-Burāq was increasingly
portrayed with wings, human features, ornate harnesses, and other symbolic
elements that reflected the artistic traditions of the time. As Christiane
Gruber, Oleg Grabar, and other historians of Islamic art have shown, these
images tell us as much about the development of Islamic visual culture as they
do about the story itself.
Scholars have also drawn attention to
similarities between these later depictions and themes found in earlier Jewish,
Christian, Persian, and Near Eastern traditions. While such parallels are
interesting and deserve careful study, they should not be taken as proof of
direct borrowing. They are better understood as evidence that Islamic art and
storytelling developed within the wider cultural world of Late Antiquity and
the medieval Near East, where religious ideas and artistic motifs often crossed
cultural boundaries.
Ultimately, the evidence points to two
related but distinct traditions. The Qur'an presents the Night Journey in
simple and restrained language, leaving many details unexplained. The hadith,
tafsir, sīra literature, and later Islamic art gradually expanded that brief
account into the richer narrative that became familiar to later generations.
Distinguishing between these layers of tradition allows us to appreciate both
the brevity of the Qur'anic text and the historical process through which the
story of al-Burāq developed over the centuries.
References
Al-Bukhārī, Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl
(810–870 CE). Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.
Al-Nawawī, Yaḥyā ibn Sharaf (1233–1277
CE). Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim.
Al-Qurṭubī, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad
al-Anṣārī (c. 1214–1273 CE). Al-Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān.
Al-Ṭabarī, Muḥammad ibn Jarīr (839–923
CE). Jāmiʿ al-Bayān ʿan Taʾwīl Āy al-Qurʾān.
Asad, Muhammad. 1980. The Message
of the Qur'an. Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus.
Blair, Sheila S., and Jonathan M.
Bloom. The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800. Yale University Press, 1995
(revised ed. 2009).
Frye, Richard N. The Golden Age of
Persia. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975.
Grabar, Oleg. 1987. The Formation
of Islamic Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gruber, Christiane J. 2008. The
Timurid Book of Ascension: A Study of Text and Image in a Pan-Asian Context.
Valencia: Patrimonio Ediciones.
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of
Islam, Vol. 2. University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī
(1372–1449 CE). Fatḥ al-Bārī bi-Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.
Ibn Kathīr, Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUmar (c.
1300–1373 CE). Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm.
Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj al-Naysābūrī (c.
815–875 CE). Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim.
Neuwirth, Angelika. 2010. The
Qur'an and Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rahman, Fazlur. 1980. Major Themes
of the Qur'an. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reynolds, Gabriel Said. 2010. The
Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext. London: Routledge.
Shoemaker, Stephen J. 2018. The
Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.