Laylat ul-Qadr Explained: The Night of Power Every Muslim Is Being Called to Experience
By Daisy Khan
There is a night buried within the final ten days of Ramadan, which Muslims worldwide spend an entire month preparing for. It has no fixed date. It cannot be marked on a calendar. And that ambiguity, according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is entirely by design. In this episode of WISE Women with Daisy Khan, host Dr. Daisy Khan, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf unpacks the theological and spiritual meaning of Laylat ul-Qadr, the Night of Power, and argued that this night is not a historical footnote. It is a standing invitation. One that every Muslim, in every era, is being actively called to accept.
The Cave, the Angel, and the Trembling Prophet
It was during the month of Ramadan, in a cave above Mecca called Ghar Hira, that everything changed. The Prophet Muhammad, then around 40 years old, had developed a practice of retreating there for days or weeks at a time to meditate on the deeper questions of existence. He was not yet a prophet. He could not read or write. And on one of these visits, the Archangel Gabriel appeared, embraced him, and issued a command in Arabic: Iqra. Read.
The Prophet’s response was immediate and human. He said he could not recite. Gabriel repeated the command twice more and then recited the first five verses of the Quran directly to him. Read in the name of your Lord who created humankind from a clot. Read, and your Lord is the most noble. These were the first words of what would become the final divine revelation to humanity, and they arrived not to a scholar or a king but to an illiterate man alone in a cave.
What follows is a scene that spans 1,400 years. The Prophet rushed back to his wife Khadija, trembling and shaking. She wrapped him in her arms and reassured him that God would not let harm come to a man of his character. She then reached out to a learned Christian relative, who recognized the experience immediately. He said that Gabriel had come, just as he had come to the great prophets before, and that Muhammad was the one who had long been awaited.
Imam Feisal offers a striking theological frame for this moment. He describes the Prophet’s trembling as the physical result of a divine energy transfer. When a person has a spiritual opening of this magnitude, the energy can make you tremble. Gabriel's embrace was not just a greeting. It was, Imam Feisal says, a transmission of divine energy into the physical body of the Prophet, and the trembling it produced was its evidence.
Never Meant for Prophets Alone
Here, Imam Feisal shifts the conversation in an unexpected direction. The Night of Power is not meant to be observed as a historical anniversary. It is meant to be personally experienced.
The Prophet, he explains, did not simply recount Laylat ul-Qadr to his companions. He urged them to seek it for themselves. Some companions reported experiencing it in the first ten days of Ramadan. Others found it in the last ten. The Prophet confirmed both accounts. And what this tells us, according to Imam Feisal, is that the night is not fixed in time because it is not primarily an event in time. It is an event in consciousness.
“We have to experience the self-disclosure of God in our own individual consciousness,” Imam Feisal said in the episode. “So what the Prophet is urging us to do is to experience the reality of God in our own consciousness, in our minds and hearts.”
This reframing changes everything. Laylat ul Qadr stops being a date to observe and becomes a destination to reach. The reason Muslims intensify their worship during the final ten nights of Ramadan, staying up for Tahajjud prayers, attending lectures and circles of remembrance, is not just tradition. It is the active pursuit of a direct encounter with the divine. The ambiguity of the date is a deliberate expansion of opportunity. It means this night is available to every person, in every decade of life, willing to do the interior work of seeking it.
What the Night of Power Promises
Many Muslims grow up hearing that the Night of Power brings forgiveness, that prayers offered during it are accepted, and that blessings multiply many times over. Imam Feisal contextualizes all of this not as a cosmic transaction but as an interior transformation made possible through sincere effort.
When the Quran says the gates of hell are chained, and the gates of heaven are wide open during Ramadan, he explains, it is describing a shift in spiritual access. God’s mercy becomes more readily available. The discipline of daily fasting begins to dissolve accumulated sin. The cumulative weight of a month lived with intention starts to register in the soul.
During the episode, Imam Feisal outlined what Laylat ul Qadr genuinely offers:
Forgiveness and divine amnesty for those who seek it with sincerity
Acceptance of prayers offered during the final ten nights
A heightened experience of God’s mercy and nearness
The possibility of the self-disclosure of God in your own consciousness
Spiritual insight that accumulates daily and deepens across the thirty days of fasting
But none of this arrives automatically. The Night of Power asks something in return. Daisy Khan reminded listeners that fasting in Islam is not limited to abstaining from food and drink. It extends to the eyes, the ears, the tongue, and the hands—no lying, no cruelty, no obscenity, no allowing anger to govern behavior. The Prophet warned that a person who avoids food and drink but behaves badly gains nothing from the fast except hunger and thirst. The doors open only for those who are actually trying to walk through them.
What We Are Called to Be
One of the most striking moments in this episode arrives near its close. Imam Feisal shares the story of someone in the generation after the Prophet asking Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, what he was like. Her answer has echoed through Islamic scholarship for fourteen centuries. She said: he was the walking Quran.
Not a man who memorized scripture. A man who became it. Every interaction with family, neighbors, strangers, and animals was a living expression of the ethics and morality taught in the revelation he had first received in that cave above Mecca.
This is the deepest purpose of Ramadan, according to Imam Feisal. Not to endure thirty days of hunger and thirst. Not to accumulate spiritual merit on a ledger. But to close the distance between who we are and who we are being asked to become. Each day of fasting, each night of prayer, each moment of choosing patience over irritability or generosity over selfishness, moves us closer.
“We try to come as close as we can to reach the model of the Prophet,” Imam Feisal said, “in our behavior, in our morality, in how we interact with our families, our spouses, our children, our parents, our employees, and with human beings and with the animal kingdom.”
Ramadan is not a month of deprivation. It is a month of practice. And the night buried inside it, the night with no fixed date, is the night when that practice might finally become something else entirely.
Fasting covers the eyes, the ears, the tongue, and the hands. A fast that leaves you rude and angry is no fast at all. Intention is everything. Ramadan is not about food. Ramadan is the month that gives every Muslim the tools to close that distance.
To hear the full conversation between Daisy Khan and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on the Night of Power and the deeper spiritual architecture of Ramadan, listen to this episode of WISE Women with Daisy Khan, part two of The Ramadan Series. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and share this episode with someone who is fasting this Ramadan. You can help them find the night they have been looking for.
#WISEWomenwithDaisyKhan #WISEWomen #Ramadan #LaylatulQadr #NightOfPower #WhyMuslimsFast #IslamicSpirituality #ImamFeisalAbdulRauf #DaisyKhan #RamadanExplained #QuranRevelation #SpiritualGrowth #FaithAsAForceForGood #ProphetMuhammad #WalkingQuran #InterfaithDialogue #MuslimCommunity #Tarawih #FastingInIslam
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Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is an American Muslim leader, author, and interfaith advocate whose work has shaped Muslim-West relations for more than two decades. He is the founder and chief executive of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, organizations dedicated to fostering dialogue, pluralism, and ethical leadership across faith communities. Imam Feisal serves as imam of Masjid Al Farah in New York City and has long been a prominent public voice calling for principled engagement, religious literacy, and peaceful coexistence. He is the author of several books, including What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West. A graduate of Columbia University with advanced study in physics, he bridges spiritual scholarship with intellectual rigor, advancing a vision of Islam rooted in mercy, justice, and responsible civic participation.
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