Mi'raj (Part 8 of 7): summary.

Continued from Part 7 ... The Night Journey, Al-Isra wal-Miraj, is a key event in the revelation of the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh). The journey involved the Prophet being carried by Buraq, "an animal white and long, larger than a donkey but smaller than a mule, who would place its hoof at a distance equal to the range of vision", from Mecca to Jerusalem, where he led the previous prophets and messengers of Islam in prayer. He then ascended through the heavens and spoke with particular prophets. At the pinnacle of his ascent, Allah (swt) gave him the instructions regarding the number of compulsory salat we must make as Muslims. Importantly, there are narrations in which the Prophet declared that this journey was a physical event, not a metaphysical vision. The majority of scholars in the past have agreed with this. However, it is also clear that, even amongst the Sahaba of the time, the miraculous, physical nature of this journey was cause for much debate. In this modern age, science and digital logic ground so much of our daily lives, we all unconsciously fall into a particular way of thinking about our psychological relation to reality. A kind of scientism is unavoidable, and Muslims are not immune to it: after all, both historically and recently, we have often played a central role in the development of the scientific world view. A surprising conclusion of the evening will hopefully be that a deeper understanding of the way in which we do science -- in fact, the way in ...