The lengthy devotional acts of the night of mid-Shaʿban: how can the time for performing them be accommodated?
Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah, our Sayed,
Among the devotional acts of the night of mid-Shaʿban in Karbala, there is a narration that mentions lengthy acts which the time of the night cannot accommodate. So how do we reconcile it with reality?
The narration is:
From Abu ʿAbd Allah (a), who said: Whoever spends the night of mid-Shaʿban in the land of Karbala:
and so recites a thousand times (“Say, ‘He is Allah, the One’” (Qurʾan 112:1)), and seeks Allah's forgiveness a thousand times, and praises Allah a thousand times, then stands and prays four rakʿas, reciting in each rakʿa Ayat al-Kursi a thousand times.
Allah, the Exalted, will assign to him two angels who guard him from every evil and from the evil of every devil and every ruler, and who record his good deeds for him, while no evil deed is recorded against him; and they seek forgiveness for him as long as they are with him [as long as Allah wills]. Kamil al-Ziyarat, p. 181.
Answer
In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful
And upon you be peace, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.
The night of mid-Shaʿban has great merit, and this merit is distributed among numerous acts; the believer can perform what he is able to perform, or give priority to the acts he needs most, according to his state and his needs. As for the narration mentioned, it contains a single act made up of parts, apparently; and from that, the length of time this act requires becomes apparent — [the act] that is performed in holy Karbala while spending that night there — in particular, the prayer that contains the recitation of Ayat al-Kursi a thousand times in its four rakʿas.
To make the possibility of that long act comprehensible, we place before you several feasible possibilities, which remove the astonishment at the impossibility of performing this long act.
The possibilities that we see as acceptable and possible are four:
1- That the act takes up the whole night or most of it, from the completion of the maghrib and ʿishaʾ prayers until dawn.
Reckoning on a person's ability to complete this act in ten to fourteen hours.
And the length of the night is more than sixteen hours, so it is something possible and within the capacity of some, depending on physical ability and speed of performance, which we have measured by several methods — manual, comparative, and by artificial intelligence; and in all of them the duration of performing the act does not exceed the whole night, but only part of it. Bear in mind that Ayat al-Kursi, whose recitation a thousand times in each rakʿa is mentioned, is limited to the single first verse.
This act is optional, for whoever wishes to keep the whole night alive with this worship, which has a great effect in this world and the Hereafter.
2- That the act takes longer than the time of the night, or that one does not hasten to perform the act from the beginning of the night but begins after part of the night has passed, so that the act ends after the night has ended.
One can hold this to be valid, on the consideration that what counts is beginning the act during the night, and it is not a condition that it end within the same night.
This is analogous to one who prays the fajr prayer at the end of its time and catches one rakʿa, while the second rakʿa falls outside the time, according to the rule: whoever catches one rakʿa has caught the time.
Accordingly, if he began performing the act on the night of mid-Shaʿban and continued performing it into the morning, there would be no objection to that.
3- That the act is intended [to be performed] after spending the night of the fifteenth of Shaʿban, whether within the same night or after it, at a time customarily regarded as adjacent.
In the narration of Kamil al-Ziyarat (whoever spends the night... and so recites [fa-qaraʾa]..) and in the narration of al-Misbah (whoever spends the night.. and recites [wa-qaraʾa]..), they admit of that. The fa in (fa-qaraʾa) is causal, indicating the performance of the act, but not in an immediate manner; and if it is said that it indicates sequence, it is a customary sequence, such that the act begins on that night or on its day, i.e., after spending that night.
As for the narration of al-Iqbal and al-Wasaʾil, its more likely import is that the act is on the night itself; it is: (whoever spends the night.. reciting [yaqraʾu] a thousand times...).
So according to the narration of Kamil al-Ziyarat and al-Misbah, the devotional act can be performed after spending the night of mid-Shaʿban in Karbala, and then let it take whatever time it takes, with no limit to its end — though the better understanding is customary subsequence, such as performing the act on the following day.
4- On the consideration that the night is attached to the day that follows it, the day of the fifteenth of Shaʿban is attached to its night and shares its ruling; so there is no objection to continuing the act into it, or performing all of it on the following day, especially if it is a completion of it.
Indeed, it can be said that the day of the fifteenth of Shaʿban is truly like its night, just as the Day of Qadr is like its night in merit; there is much evidence for that in the narrations of the Ahl al-Bayt (a), which there is no room to mention, to avoid prolixity.
We ask Allah to grant the believers success in seizing the virtues of the days, so as to attain their gains from Allah, the Exalted.
