Lailat ar-raghā'ib
The Lailat ar-raghā'ib ( Arabic ليلة الرغائب, DMG lailat ar-raġāʾib 'Night of Wishes') is a night that is given great importance in Sufi -influenced Islam . It is the night that precedes the first Friday of the Islamic month of Rajab . Today it is mainly celebrated in the Turkish-speaking countries of the Islamic world. In Turkish it is called Regaib gecesi or Regaib kandili .
The basis of the raghā'ib customs is a hadith , which al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 ) cites in his work Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn ("revival of religious studies"). Accordingly, it is particularly meritorious to spend the day before this night with fasting and to perform the so-called wish prayer (ṣalāt ar-raġāʾib) during the night itself , which consists of twelve prayer cycles and includes numerous additional formulas. Those who perform this prayer should be forgiven of all sins, no matter how numerous they are. Al-Ghazālī reports that this prayer was very popular among the Muslim population of Jerusalem in his day . However, the Hanbali scholar Ibn al-Jahdam (d. 1201) rejected this tradition as "invented" and suggested that it was brought into the world by the Meccan Sufi Ibn Jahdam (d. 1024).
In the early 13th century, a public debate about raghā'ib prayer took place in Damascus between the two scholars ʿIzz ad-Dīn Ibn )Abd as-Salām (d. 1262) and Ibn as-Salāh (d. 1245) the former branded this custom as bidʿa , while the latter declared it permissible. Since most of the contemporary scholars agreed with ʿIzz ad-Dīn, the Aiyubid sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil forbade the raghā'ib prayer to be held in mosques. The texts that the two scholars wrote in connection with the debate were edited in 1960 by Muhammad Nāsir al-Dīn al-Albānī and Muhammad ash-Shāwish.
The raghā'ib night in the Ottoman Empire was later celebrated in a particularly solemn manner . The Ottoman scholar Mollā Fenārī (d. 1430) wrote a treatise in the 15th century in which he defended the raghā'ib customs. In addition, the idea spread throughout the Ottoman Empire that that night Āmina bint Wahb , the Prophet's mother, understood that she was going to give birth to a Prophet. From the 18th century, special poems of praise to the Prophet were written for the raghā'ib night, which were performed with music. These praises were called regaibiyye . The best-known Regaibiyye was Masnawī Matlau'l-fecr , written by Selahaddin Uşşakī (d. 1783) .
literature
- Arabic sources
- Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī : Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn . Ed. Badawī Ṭabbāna. Semarang o. D. Vol. I, p. 203. Digitized
- Ibn al-Ǧauzī : Kitāb al-Mauḍūʿāt . Ed. ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Muḥammad ʿUṯmān. 3 Vols. Medina 1966. Vol. II, pp. 124-126. Digitized
- Muḥammad Nāṣir ad-Dīn al-Albānī and Muḥammad Zuhair aš-Šāwīš: Al-Musāǧala al-ʿilmīya bain al-imāmain al-ǧalīlain al-ʿIzz ibn ʿAbd as-Salām wa-Ibnāt ʿalā ḥaʿ arula-ṣal . Al-Maktab al-islāmī, Damascus / Beirut 1405h (= 1984/5). PDF
- Secondary literature
- MJ Kister: "Ra dj ab" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Vol. VIII, pp. 373b-375b.
- Hamdi Tekeli: "Regaib Gecesi" in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi Vol. XXXIV, pp. 535b-536a. Digitized
- Mustafa Uzun: "Regāibiyye" in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi Vol. XXXIV, pp. 536b-537a.
- Mehmet Akkuş: "Edebiyatımızda Regaibiyye ve Salahi'nin Matlau'l-Fecr'i" in Ankara Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakanschesi Dergisi 32 (1992) 129-153. Digitized