The Quran's account of the night journey is a single verse: the opening of its seventeenth chapter, which states that God took his servant by night from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque, whose surroundings he had blessed. The verse does not itself name Mecca, Jerusalem, or any of the narrative detail popularly associated with the event; that detail comes from hadith literature, above all Sahih al-Bukhari, and from later commentary. These sources supply the winged steed Buraq that carried Muhammad on the journey, a meeting with earlier prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, in the successive heavens of the ascension that follows the night journey, and the account of the daily prayers being set at fifty before Moses is described as repeatedly urging Muhammad to ask for a reduction, until the number was set at five, with the reward of fifty retained.
The gap between the Quran's single terse verse and this rich narrative tradition is one later Islamic scholarship itself has always been aware of, treating the hadith material as authoritative elaboration rather than as part of the revealed text. Commentators also debated the meaning of the farthest mosque named in the verse: the dominant later reading identifies it with Jerusalem, where no mosque yet stood in Muhammad's lifetime, a detail some early commentators addressed by reading the site as the Temple Mount in a visionary rather than a built sense, while the mosque structure now called al-Aqsa was built there only after the Muslim conquest of the city.