Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

“ AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS MESSENGER” t 63
tial supernatural experience had been given the Prophet. The verse
had him carried “by night”—the Muslim biographical tradition
specified he had been sleeping near the Kaaba—to “the distant
shrine.” The event was eventually identified as a reference to a
miraculous journey from Mecca to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Later this same journey was connected with the belief that
after his stay in Jerusalem, Muhammad had been briefly taken up
into heaven—although this is explicitly denied in the Quran
(17:95). According to the fully developed tradition, Muhammad
was carried up, past his various prophetic predecessors, to the seventh
heaven, which was guarded by no less than Abraham himself.
Finally, he returned to Mecca that same evening. Muhammad’s
association with the city through the Night Journey explains in
part the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem, whereas his Ascension
may very well mark the occasion when the totality of the Quran’s
contents were revealed to Muhammad, though in “real time” they
were sent down to him piecemeal and as the occasion dictated
(25:32).
Muhammad Cleansed, and Rapt
The Christian mystics who passed from a careful cultivation of
self-denial to a desire to stand before the divine throne, or even to
look on the face of God, had ample precedents in their still meditated-on
Jewish and Hellenic pasts. The early Sufis knew of no
such transports to other realms. They had instead the example
of their own master. After an initiatory ritual, the prophet Muhammad
himself had once ascended to the highest heaven and
communed with God. These two events, called respectively the
Opening of Muhammad’s Breast and the Ascension, are rich in
subsequent Islamic associations but are touched on, in a typically
oblique fashion, in the Quran. “Did We not open your breast, and
take from you your burden which was breaking your back?” asks
Quran 94:1–3. The biographical and exegetical tradition wove a
story of an angel physically opening Muhammad’s breast, either
early in life or immediately before his vocation as a prophet, re-