Sūrah 97 · Āyāt 1–3

The Night the Qurʾān Came Down (97:1–3)

The passage opens by tracing the Qurʾān to a single luminous origin — "Indeed We sent it down on the Night of Ordainment" — then halts the listener with a question whose very form magnifies the answer ("what will make you know…?") before declaring the night "better than a thousand months." The present (non-silent) sources read these three verses along two converging lines: the event of revelation and the meaning of "Ordainment" (al-Qadr).

On the revelation, al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī) builds its case on a single word: God says anzalnāhu (sent down all-at-once), not nazzalnāhu (in stages), so the verse names a whole, undivided descent of the Book distinct from its gradual delivery over twenty-three years — pairing the verse with al-Dukhān 44:2–3 ("a blessed night") and contrasting al-Isrāʾ 17:106. The Enlightening Commentary states the same two-mode solution explicitly (the Book came down once entire — to the Prophet's heart, or to the Inhabited House, or to the lowest heaven — and then in portions), and notes the inzāl/tanzīl distinction. Tafsīr al-Qummī gives the concrete image both share: the Qurʾān was sent whole to al-Bayt al-Maʿmūr on the Night of Ordainment, then to the Messenger across twenty-three years. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī add the early authorities — Ibn ʿAbbās (whole, from the Preserved Tablet to the lowest heaven) and al-Shaʿbī ("We began its sending down").

On the name, the sources array the classical options. al-Ṭabarsī lists several: the night of decreeing the year's affairs (al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid); the night of honour/rank; the night a Book of rank descended through an angel of rank to a Messenger of rank; or the night the earth narrows (qadr = constriction) with descending angels. al-Mīzān argues firmly for the first — qadr = taqdīr, the determining of the year's events (life, death, provision), keyed to al-Dukhān's "therein every wise command is parcelled out" — and infers from the continuous tense yufraq that the night recurs every year, rejecting the views that it was a one-time night later lifted. al-Ṭūsī and al-Qummī echo that qadr is exact measure and that the night fixes terms and provisions, while insisting (al-Ṭūsī) that man's striving is not thereby annulled.

On which night, the present sources are unusually candid about disagreement. al-Ṭabarsī surveys the spread (1st, 17th, 21st, 23rd, 27th, 29th), cites Abū Dharr's report that the night endures "until the Day of Resurrection," and preserves Ibn ʿAbbās's "seven"-argument for the 23rd; al-Ṭūsī narrows it to the last ten odd nights, "the 21st or the 23rd" per the Imāmiyya, left unspecified so people worship throughout. The Enlightening Commentary harmonises the Imami reports — determining on the 19th, confirming on the 21st, signing on the 23rd — against the Sunni preference for the 27th, and explains the deliberate concealment.

On "better than a thousand months," the Enlightening Commentary and al-Ṭabarsī both relate the occasion of the Israelite who bore arms (or worshipped) for a thousand months, so the figure is taken literally (~83 years); al-Mīzān and al-Ṭūsī read the superiority as the surpassing worth of worship in it. The hadith dossier of al-Baḥrānī adds the distinctly Shīʿī occasion — the Prophet's vision of the Umayyads climbing his pulpit, after which the night was given as a comfort "better than a thousand months" of Umayyad rule (al-Qāsim "reckoned it" at exactly a thousand) — corroborated, it notes, even by a Sunni line through Imam al-Ḥasan, and frames the 19th/21st/23rd as determine–parcel–execute.