Narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey Tracing the Development of the Ibn Abbas Ascension Discourse by Frederick S. Colby (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. 314 pages.)

Abstract

The story of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven
enjoys huge popularity across the Muslim world. It has functioned as a vehicle
for many forms of artistic expression throughout the ages as well as having
been subject to much literary development. In addition, it has impacted
and interacted with legal and theological dogma that may be seen in elements
ranging fromthe establishment of the five daily prayers (on which see
the fascinating essay by Ron Buckley, “The Isra’/Mi`raj and the prescription
of the five daily prayers,” in Andreas Christmann, Robert Gleave [eds.],
Studies in Islamic Law: A Festschrift for Colin Imber [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007], 23-49) to the conceptualization of paradise and hell (see the treatment in Nerina Rustomji, The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and
Hell in Islamic Culture [NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2008], especially
pp. 26-39).
Historically, the narrative makes its basic appearance in some of the earliest
Muslim texts, for example, in Ibn Ishaq’s eighth-century work entitled
Life ofMuhammad. The emergence of the story has been seen (in, for example,
Brooke Olson Vuckovic, Heavenly Journeys, Earthly Concerns: The
Legacy of the Mi`raj in the Formation of Islam [New York and London:
Routledge, 2005]) as an important element in the historical formation of
Islamic identity; it has also been seen by some as having had a powerful
impact on European imaginings of the hereafter, as found in medieval writers
such as Dante ...