Laylat al-Bara'ah

Laylat al-Bara'ah, the "Night of Forgiveness" or "Night of Records", is kept on the night of the fifteenth of Sha'ban, the month before Ramadan, by many Muslims, especially in South Asia (where it is known as Shab-e-Barat), Southeast Asia, Turkey, Iran and much of the Arab world. It rests on reports that on this night God descends in mercy, forgives those who seek pardon, and, in one widespread interpretation, records or affirms the destinies, the provisions and the deaths, of the coming year.

Where it is observed, the night is spent in voluntary prayer, recitation of the Qur'an and supplication for forgiveness; in many regions the following day is fasted, and it is a customary time to visit graves and pray for the dead and to give charity. As with the Mawlid and Isra and Mi'raj, the observance is contested: Salafi scholars regard the specific rites of the night as an innovation lacking sound early warrant, while the traditions that keep it point to the reports of its merit and to long practice. It functions in many communities as a spiritual preparation for the approaching month of Ramadan, a night of stock-taking and seeking pardon before the great fast begins.

In Pakistan and parts of North India, Shab-e-Barat has developed a distinctive and, to visitors unfamiliar with the local custom, somewhat unexpected secondary character as a night of extensive private fireworks, with families and neighbourhoods setting off substantial displays that continue for much of the night alongside, and sometimes rather louder than, the prayer and Quran recitation the night is formally meant to centre on, a specifically South Asian folk elaboration of the observance not generally found in the Arab world or Turkey, where the night is kept in a more uniformly quiet, devotional register.

The fireworks custom has drawn periodic criticism from religious authorities and public safety officials alike, the former on the grounds that it distracts from or trivialises a night meant for serious devotion and self-examination, the latter over the fire and injury risks of largely unregulated private firework use, so that Laylat al-Bara'ah in much of South Asia today combines, somewhat uneasily, a genuinely devotional core with a boisterous and specifically regional folk custom that developed alongside it rather than from within its original religious content.

In Turkey the night is one of the Five Kandils of the Ottoman-derived religious calendar, so called because minarets across the country are traditionally lit with rings of small lamps, kandiller, on these particular nights; Berat Kandili, as the night is known there, is marked with special congregational prayers and, in many mosques, the distribution of sweets to children, a specifically Turkish festive layer distinct from the fireworks custom of South Asia described above.