Ali ibn Abi Taleb and the Inner Ascent of the Human Soul
The Isra and Miʿraj refers to the two-part night journey described in Islamic tradition in which the Prophet Muhammad, in a single night, is taken from Mecca to Jerusalem (Isra), traditionally said to be carried on a luminous steed and guided by the angel Gabriel. There, he arrives at the sacred precinct associated with earlier prophets, prays among their spiritual presence, and symbolically gathers the entire lineage of revelation into his own being, before being lifted beyond the physical world into the unseen realms. He is then raised through successive levels of heavenly reality (Miʿraj), each level understood as a different order of existence and awareness. On this journey, he encounters angelic intelligences and prophetic figures who embody distinct dimensions of divine truth, until he reaches the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary, the limit beyond which created consciousness cannot pass, and stands in direct proximity to the divine that dissolves all separation, time, and form. This event is remembered not only as a miracle of transport but as a disclosure of the full vertical depth of the human soul and what consciousness can become when nothing stands between it and the Real.
The Quran itself gestures toward this event not as a myth but as a rupture in ordinary perception, with Chapter 17 beginning with the words, “Glory be to the One who carried the servant by night from the Sacred Place of Prayer to the Farther Place of Prayer,” and later describing the Prophet’s nearness to God as “two bows’ length or nearer”—a language that abandons measurement and enters the realm of pure relational proximity rather than physical distance.
This is not an event that lives well in the language of calendars.
The Isra and Miʿraj was never meant to be remembered the way empires remember victories or the way religions remember anniversaries. It was not a spectacle in time. It was a rupture in consciousness. And this is precisely why Ali ibn Abi Taleb, more than anyone else in early Islam, understood it not as a journey through space but as a revelation of what the human being actually is when it is no longer trapped inside the illusions of the world.
Most retellings reduce the Isra and Miʿraj to a supernatural itinerary: Jerusalem, seven heavens, angels, Sidrat al-Muntaha, the Throne. That language is not wrong—but it is shallow. It treats a mystical unveiling as if it were a travelogue. Ali did not speak this way.
Ali spoke as someone who had already made that ascent within himself.
Ali ibn Abi Taleb was not a distant theologian reflecting on someone else’s miracle. He was raised in the household of the Prophet, the first male to believe in his message, and the one who grew into spiritual maturity inside the same atmosphere of revelation that produced the Miʿraj itself. His understanding of this event did not come from later commentary; it came from having lived beside the human being whose consciousness made the ascent possible.
There is a line attributed to Ali that is one of the most dangerous lines in spiritual history because it exposes the lie of religious distance:
“If the veil were lifted, my certainty would not increase.”
What he is saying is not that he is arrogant. He is saying that he already lives in the state that the Miʿraj discloses. The Prophet was taken to the unseen so the unseen could be revealed to humanity. Ali had already crossed the veil by annihilating the self that blocks it.
This is exactly how Ibn Arabi, centuries later, understood Ali’s station. In his metaphysical writings on the Perfect Human, Ibn Arabi describes a being who has passed beyond the veils of ego and multiplicity into direct witnessing of the Real, where certainty no longer depends on appearances. Ali’s statement is not metaphor; it is the condition Ibn Arabi calls subsistence in God—a state in which the lifting of veils changes nothing because nothing stands between the heart and truth.
To understand what the Miʿraj actually was, you must understand what Ali taught about the soul.
Ali did not see God as a being located somewhere above the sky. He rejected spatial theology entirely. In sermons preserved in Nahj al-Balagha, he insists that God is not contained in direction, place, or movement. God is not above you in the way a star is above you. God is the ground of being itself—nearer to you than you are to yourself.
So what, then, was the Prophet ascending toward?
Not location.
Depth.
Here again Ibn Arabi becomes our guide. He taught that the heavens of the Miʿraj are not places but modes of being—ascending levels of consciousness through which the human reality unfolds toward unity. What Ali intuitively lived, Ibn Arabi later articulated: that the Prophet’s ascent was a traversal of the inner architecture of existence itself, revealing that what seems “above” is in fact what is most inward.
The Miʿraj was the Prophet moving through layers of reality as consciousness moves through layers of truth—from the sensory to the imaginal, from the imaginal to the intelligible, from the intelligible to the pure unity where separation dissolves.
Ali understood this intuitively because he lived there.
There is another saying attributed to him:
“I saw nothing except that I saw God before it, with it, and after it.”
This is not poetry. This is ontology. It is a description of what existence looks like when the ego—the thing that thinks it stands apart from reality—has been burned away.
Ibn Arabi would later give philosophical language to this vision when he wrote that existence is one reality appearing in countless forms. To see God “before, with, and after” all things is to see that nothing stands outside the divine presence. Ali’s gaze was the gaze of unity—what Ibn Arabi would call the eye of the Real looking through the human.
The Isra, the night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, is the outward mirror of what happens inwardly when the heart is purified. Jerusalem is not just a city. It is the meeting place of prophetic consciousness—the lineage of awakening that runs through Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and now Muhammad. The Prophet was not being shown geography. He was being shown continuity—that his consciousness now carried all of their light.
Ali would have understood this instantly, because he never separated revelation from being. For him, prophets were not miracle workers. They were fully realized human beings. They were what humanity looks like when it remembers what it is.
The Miʿraj then moves upward—not upward in the sense of space, but upward in the sense of unification. Each heaven is a level of awareness. Each prophet encountered is not an external meeting but a resonance—the Prophet aligning with different dimensions of divine truth embodied by earlier messengers. Adam, Moses, Jesus, Abraham—these are not stops on a ladder; they are dimensions of the human soul that must be integrated.
When the Prophet reaches the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary, language finally collapses. This is the limit of created perception—the edge where even angels cannot pass. Ali taught that this is the point where duality ends. Where the knower and the known dissolve into one.
It is no accident that tradition places prayer in the wake of this encounter. Not as a transaction or obligation, but as a rhythm of return—a way for the human being to repeatedly realign with the nearness revealed in the Miʿraj. In Ali’s understanding, prayer is not a demand made by God but a discipline that protects the human from forgetting what was seen. It is the echo of ascent carried back into ordinary life, a means of standing again and again at the edge of presence without needing another night journey.
And it is here that the Prophet stands alone.
Not because he is physically isolated, but because no ego can pass that boundary. Only a being who has died before dying can enter.
Ali knew this state. That is why he could say:
“I am the point beneath the B”—a reference to the Arabic letter ba (ب), which is written as a simple horizontal line only made into a letter by the single dot beneath it. In classical spiritual symbolism, that dot represents the origin of all meaning, the hidden point from which language, form, and creation unfold. By calling himself that point, Ali was not claiming status but describing annihilation of the separate self into the primal source from which all truth flows. He was not claiming divinity. He was claiming extinction—that the self had been erased so completely that only divine truth remained speaking through him.
Ibn Arabi echoes this precisely when he writes that the true knower disappears as an independent identity and becomes a locus through which divine meaning flows into the world. The “point beneath the ba” is, in his cosmology, the hidden source from which all multiplicity unfolds. Ali was naming himself not as an ego, but as the place where the One becomes many without ceasing to be One.
So what did the Miʿraj actually change?
It did not make the Prophet greater.
It revealed what a human being becomes when nothing blocks the divine.
And Ali saw this not as something reserved for one night, but as the destiny of humanity itself.
The tragedy of religion is that it turned the Miʿraj into a legend instead of a map—a story to be repeated, regulated, and ritually owned by institutions rather than a living path meant to be walked by the soul. In this reduction, ascent became spectacle, and consciousness was replaced by choreography.
But Ali never confused spiritual awakening with religious administration. For him, the Miʿraj was not proof of supernatural privilege but a demonstration of what happens when a human being is emptied of ego and filled with truth. Where organized religion later built hierarchies, doctrines, and intermediaries around the event, Ali kept it naked—a direct encounter between the human and the Real, requiring no priesthood, no permission, no system of control.
For him, the Miʿraj was proof that the human soul is not meant to live in gravity—psychological, political, or spiritual. It is meant to ascend out of fear, out of greed, out of separation, into unity. And if you listen closely to Ali’s worldview, you begin to see that the word “gravity” is not metaphorical. Gravity is what keeps a person pinned to survival thinking. It is what makes the heart negotiate with truth. It is what convinces a human being that safety is worth more than integrity, that belonging is worth more than awakening, that obedience is worth more than clarity.
In that sense, the Miʿraj does not merely describe a miracle; it exposes a human possibility. It says: you do not have to remain trapped in the lowest contract you have signed with the world. You can rise beyond the bargains. Beyond the compulsions. Beyond the small humiliations we normalize as “realism.” That is why Ali reads the Miʿraj as an unveiling of what the human is when the inner idol falls—when the self that needs approval, status, protection, and control finally collapses and the heart becomes clean enough to see.
And this is where the separation begins, not as a sectarian dispute, but as a civilizational fork.
Ali’s Islam, in this context, is not an institution. It is not a managerial religion. It is not a system whose primary purpose is to produce conformity. It is a state of being whose primary purpose is to produce truth. If the Miʿraj teaches that the Prophet passed beyond every hierarchy of created existence, then any religious structure that re-inserts hierarchy between human beings and reality has fundamentally missed the event. The miracle becomes the very thing we use to justify distance: The Prophet ascended, therefore you cannot. The Prophet was chosen, therefore you must submit to the chosen class. The Prophet saw, therefore you must merely repeat.
Ali does not allow that logic to survive.
Because Ali understands the Miʿraj as both affirmation and indictment. Affirmation of what is possible. Indictment of what we will later build in the name of what is possible. The Miʿraj is a living critique of every system that turns spiritual elevation into spiritual dependency—where the believer is trained to need intermediaries, where the sacred is fenced off, where “faith” becomes a substitute for clarity rather than a path toward it.
This is why Ali’s Islam is so dangerous to power.
Not because Ali is rebellious for its own sake, but because an awakened human being cannot be ruled in the same way. When you believe that the highest truth is accessible only through an institution, you can be managed. You can be priced. You can be intimidated. You can be kept in a posture of smallness, forever waiting for permission to be near God. But if the Miʿraj is read the way Ali reads it—as an event that reveals the vertical dimension inside the human—then the believer is no longer a customer of spirituality. The believer becomes a traveler. A witness. A person who measures authority not by titles, but by proximity to truth.
That changes everything.
This is where both Ibn Arabi and Rumi converge. Ibn Arabi warned that when institutions claim ownership of the sacred, they turn living truth into dead form. Rumi, in his poems, wept over the same tragedy—that people cling to the shell of religion while missing the fire inside it, as when he writes in the Masnavi, “You are busy with the shell; seek the kernel, for the fire is in the heart of the fruit.” Together they preserved what Ali embodied: that the Miʿraj is not a credential for power but a call to inner transformation.
Because once you understand that the Prophet traveled beyond all hierarchies—beyond angels, beyond heavens, beyond authority itself—you realize that no king, no cleric, no empire has the right to stand between you and truth. Not by fear. Not by wealth. Not by inherited status. Not by sacred branding. The Miʿraj becomes an anti-idolatry event in the deepest sense: It destroys not only the idols of stone but the idols of structure, the idols of prestige, the idols of “we speak for God.” It declares that the ultimate boundary is not guarded by human hands.
And this is where organized religion, in its most common form, begins to diverge. The institution tends to translate mystery into membership. It turns the infinite into a rulebook, the ascent into a timetable, the living God into a regulated relationship. It reduces the experience of transformation into the performance of loyalty. It can even weaponize reverence: “Do not ask. Do not seek. Do not approach too closely. Repeat what we repeat. Feel what we tell you to feel. Remember the night, but do not pursue its meaning.”
Ali’s posture is the opposite. Ali refuses to let remembrance replace realization. He refuses to let story replace inner work. He refuses to let ritual replace moral transformation. In Ali’s reading, the Miʿraj is not given so people can be impressed by the Prophet; it is given so people can be invited into the discipline of becoming human. The ascent is not an ornament. It is a demand.
So the Miʿraj is not about how high Muhammad went.
It is about what had to be removed from Muhammad for that ascent to be possible—the last traces of selfhood that cling to identity, fear, reputation, and control—and what must be removed from us if we are to stop living in spiritual gravity, that invisible weight that keeps the heart orbiting survival rather than truth. To ascend in this sense is not to acquire something new, but to be stripped of what is false: the anxious self that bargains, the wounded self that hides, the obedient self that mistakes safety for meaning. And it is about how low we have fallen by forgetting that the same sky lives inside us—not as fantasy, but as latent capacity—the same vertical dimension of consciousness that can rise beyond resentment and scarcity, the same call toward unity that dissolves separation, the same inner freedom that refuses to be owned by fear, hierarchy, or the small contracts we sign with the world.
Ali ibn Abi Taleb does not let the Miʿraj become a relic.
Rumi would later write that the heavens are not above us but within us, and that the journey to God is the journey into the deepest chamber of the heart. This is the poetic continuation of Ali’s insight: that the same sky the Prophet traversed lives inside every human being who dares to step beyond fear and separation.
He keeps it as a mirror.
Ali ibn Abi Taleb never forgot.
