The First Revelation to Muhammad

Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad, then about forty years old and in the habit of retreating to meditate in the Cave of Hira on a mountain near Mecca, was visited there by the angel Jibril, who commanded him to recite and, when Muhammad protested that he could not, embraced him until he spoke the words later recognized as the opening verses of the Quran's ninety sixth chapter. The earliest surviving full biography of Muhammad, compiled by Ibn Ishaq in the mid-eighth century and preserved only through a later recension by Ibn Hisham, together with hadith collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari, supplies the narrative detail beyond the bare fact of revelation: Muhammad's fear on returning home, his wife Khadija's reassurance and her covering him to calm him, and the confirmation of her Christian kinsman Waraqa ibn Nawfal that what had come to Muhammad matched the pattern by which earlier prophets, including Moses, had received revelation. These sources were compiled more than a century after the events they describe and rely on chains of named transmitters, the isnad, that the Islamic tradition itself developed as a method of authentication.

Ibn Ishaq's work does not survive in its original form; what is read today is a recension by Ibn Hisham, who states in his own introduction that he omitted some material his source had included, so the Sira available now is already a filtered version of an already-late source, a point specialists in early Islamic history weigh when assessing how much of the narrative detail can be traced to the earliest layer of transmission.

Islamic tradition identifies the first revelation with Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power or Night of Decree, described in its own short chapter of the Quran as better than a thousand months, and situates that night within the last ten nights of Ramadan, though its exact date is not fixed and is traditionally sought rather than known. This identification is the reason the fasting month of Ramadan centers as much on the Quran's revelation as on the fast itself, with increased recitation and nightly prayer, particularly in the final third of the month, treated as ways of seeking the night's blessing.

The single event in the cave was, by Islamic tradition, the first of revelations that continued intermittently over the following twenty three years until shortly before Muhammad's death, so this entry describes the inaugural moment specifically and does not extend to the fuller history of the Quran's revelation as a whole, which belongs on the Quran's own entry. A three-year gap between this first revelation and the next is reported in some accounts, a period Islamic tradition calls the fatra, during which Muhammad is described as anxious that the contact had ceased, before further revelations resumed and continued at intervals for the rest of his life.