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Night of Power

IN ISLAM, during the holy month of Ramadan, it is said that one night is holiest of all: al Qadr, the Night of Power. According to Islamic belief, it was on this night that the Qu’ran was delivered to the Prophet Mohammed, and it is thus the holiest of all nights. On this night, prayers are granted “for everything that matters.”

The Night of Power is so deeply ingrained in the Muslim heart that a short chapter in the Qu’ran is devoted to it. It begins, as do all chapters therein, with the exclamation, “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” and goes on thus:

Verily we have sent this

In the Night of Power.

And what will convey to you

What the Night of Power is?

The Night of Power is better

Than a thousand months:

The Angels and the Spirit descend in it,

By permission of their Lord,

For everything that matters.

It is Peace:

This until the rise of daybreak.

I will never forget the Night of Power that shook me, not during the holy month of Ramadan, but in the hot, humid summer of 1995, when I sat on death row’s Phase II with a date to die.

The sun had set behind the hills of West Virginia amid ominous thunderheads, and now the forces of nature struck like a divine assault team.

Lightning stabbed the earth as if in the throes of celestial passion, and so powerful were the bolts that the lights in the block—indeed, the whole jail—flickered out.

On Phase II, lights are kept burning twenty-four hours a day—bright during the day, dim at night—though in fact “dim” at two in the morning is hardly less than bright at noon. Tonight—for now at least—it was completely dark.

I sat on the cool metal table and looked out into the night. Cell lights, hall lights, yard lights, black lights, perimeter lights, and lights on poles had died, and not even stars broke the black carpet. So dark!