Sidrat al-Muntahā

Four rivers come out of the ground at its root. Two of them run off into country no map records, and two of them arrive, eventually, as the Nile and the Euphrates. The fruit hangs in clusters, each one the size of the big earthenware storage jars they used to make at Hajar. The leaves are as broad as an elephant’s ear. Above it and beyond it there is nothing further, because there is no further.

The Qur’an says almost none of this. The phrase sidrat al-muntahā occurs exactly once in the whole book, in the fourteenth verse of the Surah of the Star, inside a passage of eight lines: he saw the angel a second time, near the lote tree of the utmost boundary, near which is the Garden of Refuge, when there covered the lote tree that which covered it, and his sight did not waver or stray, and he saw some of the greatest signs of his Lord. That is the whole of it. Everything else arrived later, through the hadith and through thirteen centuries of commentary, and the commentators have been arguing about those eight lines ever since. No source says who planted the tree or when, and none of them seems to think the question worth raising.

The fullest account belongs to Malik ibn Sa’sa’a and is preserved by al-Bukhari. Muhammad is at the House in Mecca, somewhere between sleeping and waking, when his chest is opened, washed with Zamzam water and filled with wisdom and belief. A white animal is brought to him, smaller than a mule and larger than a donkey, and he rides with Gabriel through seven gates, at each of which the same clipped exchange is held with a gatekeeper who wants to know who is asking and whether he was sent for. Adam greets him in the first heaven. Jesus and John in the second, Joseph in the third, Idris in the fourth, Aaron in the fifth. In the sixth he meets Moses, who starts weeping once he has passed, for reasons that turn out to have nothing to do with grievance and everything to do with arithmetic. Abraham is waiting in the seventh. Then he is shown the Much-Frequented House, where seventy thousand angels pray each day and no angel ever returns to it twice. And then the tree is raised for him.

Nothing happens at the tree in the way things happen elsewhere in that story. It does not speak, transform, threaten or bless. Its work is quieter and more total: everything ascending from the earth comes up to it and stops and is taken there, and everything sent down from above comes down to it and stops and is taken there. Prayers, deeds, souls, revelation, the entire freight of traffic between God and the world changes hands at a tree. Gabriel, who has carried messages down through the heavens for the length of scripture, goes no further than the trunk.

Then there is the covering. When there covered the lote tree that which covered it. The verse withholds its own object, and the tradition has spent a very long time filling the hole. Ibn Mas’ud said moths of gold. The commentary of the two Jalals says birds. Others said the ranks of the angels pressing in to worship until they hid the branches, or the light of God itself. George Sale, translating in 1734, set several of these side by side and declined to pick one. The reading that holds up best is the one Abdel Haleem reached for in 2004: the tree was covered in something there is no word for.

The sources cannot even agree where it stands. Bukhari’s account puts it in the seventh heaven. Ibn Mas’ud, in the collection of Muslim, puts it in the sixth. Later commentators moved it past the seventh altogether, or set it at the right hand of the Throne. Nobody is sure. That disagreement is less a defect in the record than a consequence of what is being described, which is a boundary, and boundaries are awkward things to give an address to.

What was settled there is not in dispute. Three things were handed over at the tree: the five daily prayers, the closing verses of the chapter of the Cow, and pardon for those of the community who died without setting anything beside God. The prayers took some negotiating. Fifty were imposed at first, and Moses, who had spent an entire career finding out what people will and will not do, sent him back up again and again until the number came down to five, with the assurance that a single good deed would be counted as ten. It is one of the few passages in any scripture where a prophet talks his God down like a man haggling over a camel, and it works.

The sidr itself is not a fantasy tree. It is Ziziphus spina-christi, the Christ’s thorn jujube, a stubborn evergreen of wadis and dry margins across the Levant, Arabia and the Horn of Africa, armed with long pale spines and carrying a small reddish fruit called nabq that tastes faintly of dates and of dust. Its leaves lather in water. They have been used to wash the dead for as long as there are records of anyone washing the dead, and Richard Burton, travelling in disguise to Medina in 1853, found an old sidr growing inside the Prophet’s mosque in a garden named for Fatima, its fruit being sold off to pilgrims. The tree at the end of the created universe is, botanically speaking, a scrubby thorn bush that grows in ditches.

That is less strange than it sounds. Moses met God at a thorn bush that burned and was not consumed. Muhammad met the limit of creation at a thorn tree wrapped in something that did not destroy it. The parallel is hard to miss, and both stories make the same choice: the encounter happens at the least impressive plant available.

Later tradition grew the tree the way later tradition always does. A story set down by European translators in the nineteenth century gives it one leaf for every living human being, each leaf carrying a name, the whole tree shaken a little after sunset on the fifteenth night of Ramadan so that the leaves of those who will die in the coming year come loose, some withered through and some still part green. That belongs to popular legend rather than to the Qur’an or the sound hadith, and it is worth keeping the two apart. In the same century the tree left Islam altogether. The Bab, writing from the 1840s, and then Baha’u’llah after him used sidrat al-muntahā as a title for themselves, and the boundary became a claim.

Its powers are all of one kind. It fixes an edge. It turns an infinite prospect into something a creature can stand in front of and look at, and it makes the handover of everything passing between heaven and earth into a physical event with a location and a smell of dust and green leaf. Its limits are the same fact wearing different clothes. It cannot be passed. Not by Gabriel, who stops at it; not by the angels, whose knowledge runs out at the bark; not by the prophets, whose sight reaches it and goes no further. The one thing on the other side is the only thing anyone ever wanted to see, and standing in the way of that is the whole of the tree’s job.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sidrat al-Muntaha?

Sidrat al-Muntaha is an immense lote tree in Islamic tradition that marks the utmost boundary of creation. Its name means roughly “the lote tree of the limit”, and it is the point past which no created being, angel or human, is permitted to go. It is named once in the Qur’an, in Surat al-Najm, and described at length in the hadith of the Night Journey.

Where is Sidrat al-Muntaha located?

The sources disagree. The account in Sahih al-Bukhari places Sidrat al-Muntaha in the seventh heaven, while Ibn Mas’ud’s report in Sahih Muslim places it in the sixth. Later commentators put it beyond the seventh heaven entirely, or at the right hand of the Throne. What every version agrees on is that the Garden of Refuge lies near it.

What happened at Sidrat al-Muntaha during the Night Journey?

Muhammad reached the tree at the end of his ascension through the seven heavens and was given three things there: the five daily prayers, the closing verses of the chapter of the Cow, and forgiveness for members of his community who died without associating anything with God. Fifty prayers were imposed at first, and on Moses’s repeated advice he went back to ask for a reduction until the number settled at five. Gabriel, who had accompanied him the whole way, went no further than the tree.

What does Sidrat al-Muntaha look like?

The description in Sahih al-Bukhari gives the tree fruit the size of the large clay storage jars of Hajar and leaves as broad as an elephant’s ears, with four rivers rising at its root. Two of those rivers are hidden and flow in paradise; the two visible ones were identified as the Nile and the Euphrates. The Qur’an adds only that something covered the tree, without saying what, which later commentators variously took to be moths of gold, birds, or massed angels.

Is Sidrat al-Muntaha a real tree?

The heavenly tree is not a botanical specimen, but the sidr it is named for is entirely real: Ziziphus spina-christi, the Christ’s thorn jujube, a thorny evergreen that grows across Arabia, the Levant and the Horn of Africa. Its small reddish fruit is called nabq, and its leaves have long been used to wash the dead. Richard Burton reported an old sidr growing in the Prophet’s mosque at Medina in 1853, with its fruit sold to pilgrims.

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