The chapter
The species has been refused by five prophets. Adam pleads his tree, Nuh his question, Ibrahim his three words of debate-craft, Musa his struck Egyptian, Isa mentions no sin at all and still says: myself, myself, go to Muhammad, "a servant whose past and future have been forgiven." So the plea of mankind arrives at the door of the man who spent his nights weeping "my ummah, my ummah."
"I am for it," he ﷺ says twice in the narration, and goes, and falls in prostration beneath the Throne. He does not begin with the request. "Allah will open upon me of His praises and the beauty of extolment something He never opened for anyone before me", new praise, coined for that prostration, the Qur'an's promised "praised station" being minted in real time. Then: "O Muhammad, raise your head. Ask, you will be given. Intercede, you will be granted." This is al-Maqam al-Mahmud of 17:79, the station for which every adhan-answering du'a on earth has been a daily petition: "…and raise him to the praised station You promised him," and whoever says it, "my intercession becomes lawful for him."
The Great Intercession opens the Judgment itself, relief for all creation, believer and denier alike, from the unendurable Standing. But the reach of his ﷺ advocacy runs longer, and the Codex counts its kinds: intercession for the people of major sins of his ummah: "my intercession is for the people of the major sins of my nation"; for stalled believers on the Sirat; for the raising of ranks; for admission without account of seventy thousand, with each thousand, the narrations add, seventy thousand more; and for his uncle Abu Talib, lightened to the shallows of the Fire, the only exception, held in place by the honesty of the texts. Beside his station, the Day's other advocates take their posts by permission: the angels, the prophets, the martyrs, the memorizers' Qur'an itself: "Fasting and the Qur'an intercede for the servant", and the children who died young, dragging their parents toward the Garden by the hand, refusing to enter alone.
Every intercession runs on one axle, and the Qur'an fixed it against every pagan fantasy of pull and patronage: "Who is it that can intercede with Him except by His permission?" No advocate storms the court. The permission is the mercy; the intercessor is its instrument; and the instrument's own summary of his role survives in Muslim: "I will be the first intercessor and the first whose intercession is accepted."
One du'a keys the reader into this node's machinery, thirty seconds after every adhan, five times a day. The Codex assumes you will use it tonight.