Despite the deliberate scriptural and prophetic ambiguity about the night's exact date, many majority-Muslim countries and communities have settled into treating the twenty-seventh of Ramadan as the effective public occasion regardless, and it is that night, rather than any of the other odd nights the hadith commend, that draws by far the largest crowds to major mosques, including exceptionally large broadcast gatherings at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, where recitation and prayer on the night are televised across much of the Muslim world.
Local custom has layered its own specific observances onto the twenty-seventh in various places, including in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, where communities light rows of oil lamps or torches along streets and outside homes on the night, known in some Javanese communities as Malam Selikur, a regional custom of illumination that exists alongside, rather than as part of, the core scriptural instruction to seek the night through prayer and recitation, illustrating how a deliberately unfixed and interior spiritual instruction can still generate specific, locally distinctive and highly visible public customs over time.
Classical jurists differed on which single night was likeliest even within the favoured last ten days: many Shafi'i scholars leaned toward the twenty-seventh, the night now kept almost everywhere, while other authorities argued for the twenty-first, twenty-third or twenty-ninth, or held that the night rotates unpredictably from year to year specifically so that believers cannot simply keep one night and neglect the rest of the final ten, a scholarly disagreement that the popular convention around the twenty-seventh has largely, though not universally, settled in practice.