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A Popular Custom Resting on a Weak Report

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A Popular Custom Resting on a Weak Report

A hadith attached to Ad-Dukhan, promising that whoever recites it on a Thursday night receives the forgiveness of seventy thousand angels, circulates widely in popular devotional collections and calendars recommending specific surahs for specific nights. Hadith critics, examining its chain of transmission, generally class the report as weak or unreliable, a judgement classical scholarship reaches independently of the surah's own genuine content, which nowhere makes such a claim about its own recitation, so the custom rests on a devotional tradition transmitted outside, and considerably less securely than, the Quranic text itself.

The pattern is not unique to Ad-Dukhan: several short and medium-length surahs carry similarly popular but weakly attested recitation virtues, and Islamic scholarship on hadith authentication treats the honest identification of such reports as weak, rather than their suppression, as the appropriate response, since a widely practised custom is not thereby rendered doctrinally sound. Ad-Dukhan's own strongest textual claim to devotional significance remains its verse on the blessed night of revelation (44:3), read by the great majority of classical commentators as referring to the same Night of Decree named explicitly in a separate, later surah.

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