Abstract







The entry “Miʿrāj” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, written by B. Schrieke, is among the first systematic Western attempts to analyze the event of Isrāʾ and Miʿrāj. Isrāʾ refers to the Prophet’s night journey from Masjid al-Ḥarām to Masjid al-Aqṣā, and Miʿrāj refers to his ascension from Jerusalem to the heavens; in Islamic tradition, these are two connected stages of a single revelatory experience. By critically analyzing its content and consulting the Qur’an, early exegeses, the hadith collections of the two major Islamic branches, and contemporary scholarship, this article reconstructs and evaluates his view. The findings show that this entry has merits in historical narrative analysis and in classifying the three early interpretations of the verse of Isrāʾ, but in its Qur’anic analysis, hadith assessment, and explanation of the role of Jerusalem, it relies on the historicist presuppositions of classical Orientalism and is incompatible with Islamic sources. Its most prominent conclusion is that the claim of “the independence of Isrāʾ and Miʿrāj” and “the Umayyad fabrication of Bayt al-Maqdis” does not correspond with early narrative evidence (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, al-Kāfī, and pre-Umayyad exegeses), and that separating the verses of Isrāʾ and Najm is also contrary to the continuous exegetical tradition of the two major Islamic branches.