The Essence of the Holy Qur’an

Dear brothers and sister,
You are probably familiar with the old saying “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Actually it is an essence of a lot historical evidence, scientific knowledge and religious wisdom. As a Muslim, We are advised to sleep early and then wake up in the third stage of the night before sunrise, though this night-time prayer is voluntary. It’s called Tahajjud, the Arabic word for night prayer.
Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep early at night and rise at midnight. During this waking period people were quite active. They read, wrote and often prayed His book ‘At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past’ unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature.
To rise from sleep during the night was the natural habit of humankind. But this natural habit started to disappear during the late 17th Century, in the time of industrial revolution. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has recently published a research mentioning that “We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.”
The above mentioned Ayah shows that there is one supplementary mode of requesting God, the Exalted for His compassion, which is performed during night time, and it results in finding a blessed rank in this World and the Day of Resurrection. The prayer that has been referred to here is indeed the salah of Tahajjud. We should get up to pray in the middle of the night.
Jobayer Al Mahmud
Student, Uludag University, Bursa, Turkey.