The Night Journey and the Negotiated Prayers
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The number of the five daily prayers — the second pillar of Islam — derives not from the Quran but from the ascension narrative (mi‘raj) in the sahihsahih“Authentic.” The highest grade of hadith reliability; also the name of the two most authoritative collections (al-Bukhari and Muslim).Full glossary → hadithhadithA report of Muhammad's words, actions, or tacit approvals. The hadith corpus is the second source of Islamic law after the Quran.Full glossary → (Sahih al-Bukhari 349; 3887). In it, Allah first decrees fifty prayers a day. Descending, Muhammad meets Moses, who says the community cannot bear fifty and tells him to return and ask for a reduction. Muhammad goes back; Allah lowers the number. This repeats — Moses sending him back again and again — until the obligation is reduced from fifty to five, at which point Moses still urges another return, but Muhammad is ashamed to ask more. Allah then says: “They are five and they are fifty; the word with Me does not change” (Bukhari 7517). The theological problem is internal: an omniscient God set a figure He then revised nine times at human prompting, with Moses — not God — foreseeing the practical impossibility the Almighty had apparently overlooked, and the closing formula “My word does not change” appears precisely after the word has changed.
Common Muslim Responses
Muslim scholars answer that the episode is divine pedagogy, not divine error: Allah knew the outcome from eternity and staged the exchange to teach the Prophet and the umma the breadth of His mercy and the high honor of prayer (fifty in reward for five), and to display Moses’s compassionate experience with his own stiff-necked nation. God’s “changing” the number is His sovereign prerogative within a process He fully foreknew; the final formula means the reward-value (fifty) is fixed even as the obligation (five) is eased. The narrative magnifies mercy, not ignorance.
Counter-Rebuttal
Critics reply that the pedagogy reading explains why a storyteller would tell it, not why an omniscient God would enact it: a being who knows the end from the beginning does not need to issue fifty, be talked down in stages, and rely on Moses to flag the impossibility — the scene is intelligible as folklore about a bargaining deity and unintelligible as the act of the omniscient. That Moses, on his tenth-century-BC experience, repeatedly knows better than the freshly issued divine decree inverts the order of knowledge the doctrine requires. And anchoring a pillar of the religion — the prayer count every Muslim performs daily — in a hadith vision rather than the Quran returns the critique to Part VIII: the most basic practice rests on the same contested transmission whose reliability the tradition cannot consistently defend.