[Page 111]Abstract: In this article, Daniel C. Peterson describes the famous “night” journey that Muhammad allegedly made from Arabia to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem through the heavens and into the presence of God. His ascension through various gates of heaven, passing by the gatekeepers, is compared with biblical and Latter-day Saint teachings. Elements of the dream strongly resemble the biblical description of the Garden of Eden with its two special trees.

[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

See Daniel C. Peterson, “Temples All the Way Down: Some Notes on the Mi‘raj of Muhammad,” in Ancient Temple Worship: Proceedings of The Expound Symposium 14 May 2011, ed. Matthew B. Brown, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Stephen D. Ricks, and John S. Thompson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2014), 195–216. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-temple-worship/.]

The mi‘raj of Muhammad is the famous “night journey” that the Prophet of Islam allegedly made from Arabia to Jerusalem (a part of the journey that is sometimes distinguished under its own title, as the isra’), and from Jerusalem through the heavens and into the presence of God.

[Page 112]The narrative of the mi‘raj has long attracted the attention of Islamic miniaturists and illustrators (in, for example, the famous Turkish Miraj Nameh [“Book of the Mi‘raj”] preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France). Moreover, it has served, in more or less allegorical form, as a model for many Sufi accounts of the mystical ascent to union with the divine and perhaps even for certain Neoplatonic cosmologies (e.g., those of al-Farabi, al-Kirmani, and Ibn Sina or Avicenna) in the Islamic tradition.

Allusions to the mi‘raj in the Qur’an are, at best, sparse and rather obscure. There are, for example, two verses in the 17th chapter — known in Arabic as Surat al-Isra’ (“the chapter of the isra’”) because of them — that seem to refer to the story. Here is one such passage:

Exalted be He who took His servant [asra bi-‘abdihi] by night from the Masjid al-Haram to the Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs. Truly, He is the Hearer, the Knower.1

This verse is typically taken to refer to a journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. The term masjid is the common Arabic equivalent of the English mosque, which ultimately derives from its pronunciation in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic (masgid). The Arabic sajada corresponds to the English verb to bow or to prostrate oneself, and a masjid (from the same three-consonant root, s-j-d) is a place where such prostration occurs. Thus, more broadly, it indicates a place of prayer and worship, or a shrine.

It is striking for my present purposes that Muhammad’s journey is, thus, portrayed as having occurred between at least two shrines, sanctuaries, or places of worship.

Al-Masjid al-Haram (roughly, “the sacred mosque”) is the term still used to refer to the Grand Mosque at Mecca, centered on the famous Ka‘ba. Although this shrine was, of course, much less spectacular then than is today’s enormous architectural complex, it pre-dates Muhammad. By contrast, the phrase Masjid al-Aqsa cannot refer to the building on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount called the Al-Aqsa Mosque (and sometimes known — presumably by reason of its location, since it is, otherwise,