5 prophets in the Quran you may not know

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The Quran names twenty-five prophets and says there were others.[1] Everyone knows Moses and Jesus. The five here appear briefly, and the brevity is part of the story: “There is no community to which a warner has not come.”[2]

The scholar Ismail al Faruqi drew from verses like this the conclusion that no people was left without knowledge of the one God.[3] Each entry below gives what the Quran says, what the commentators added, and where they disagree, so that the reader can tell the text from the tradition built around it.

“Mention in the Book Idris. He was a man of truth, a prophet, and We raised him to a high station.”[4] That is nearly everything the Quran says. He is also counted with the patient, alongside Ishmael and Dhul-Kifl.[5]

Many commentators identified him with Enoch, of whom Genesis says that he walked with God and “God took him.”[6] In the hadith of the night journey, reported in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the Prophet met Idris in the fourth heaven, and Idris greeted him as a righteous brother and prophet.[7] Some commentators read “a high station” as a reference to that ascent, and others as a rank of honour.

A sceptic may say the commentators simply borrowed Enoch’s story. That fairly describes how the identification was reached, and it was an inference by scholars, not a statement in the Quran. Others disagree with it. The Quran gives neither his people nor his message.

Hud was sent to ‘Ad, “their brother”, and told them to worship God alone and to be grateful for what they had.[8] The Quran says they had been made successors after the people of Noah, were large in build, and put up monuments on every height as if they would live for ever.[9] They asked for proof, and he answered that he relied on God, his Lord and theirs.[10]

The people were destroyed by a furious, roaring wind that blew for seven nights and eight days, and Hud and the believers were saved.[11] Surah 11 is named for him. Where ‘Ad lived is disputed, and later writers located them in southern Arabia, in the region of the dunes. The pattern of the story is the same for all of these prophets: a warning, a refusal and consequences. The point of the telling is the pattern, and the Quran gives no date for it.

“Remember Ishmael, Elisha and Dhul-Kifl, all of them among the best.”[12] The name means “the one of the portion” or “the guarantor”. Commentators have identified him with Ezekiel, with Joshua and with others, and the proposals rest on guesses about the name, not on anything the Quran says.

The Quran places him with Ishmael and Idris among those who were patient, and says that God admitted them into his mercy, for they were among the righteous.[13] Some early authorities held that he was a righteous man who undertook an obligation and kept it, and that he was not a prophet at all. Others counted him a prophet because of the company in which the verses place him.

The honest statement is that the Quran names him and says he was of the patient, and nothing more is known. A reader who finds that thin should note that the Quran itself says it has told of some prophets and not of others.

Elisha (al-Yasaʿ) is named twice, among the prophets whom God preferred above the worlds.[14] He is the successor to Elijah in the Bible, where Elijah calls him from the plough and he takes up his master’s work.[15] The Quran adds nothing to the story.

The Bible gives him a long career, with healings and the raising of a child, none of which the Quran repeats. A critic can say that the Quran therefore leaves the Elisha of the Bible unconfirmed. That is correct, and the Quran also does not deny it. It treats the prophets as a family with a common message, and each name it mentions stands for that message.

His place is as a name in a line of prophets, and a reminder that the chain was long.

Elijah (Ilyās) is among the prophets who were upright, and the Quran gives a short passage: “He said to his people, ‘Will you not be mindful of God? Will you call on Baal and leave the best of creators?’”[16] Baal was the god of the Canaanite worshippers whom Elijah confronted in the Bible, in the contest on Mount Carmel, and the Bible also says he was taken up in a whirlwind.[17]

The Quran says his people denied him, and that those chosen servants of God among them were spared.

The account is brief and recognisable, and it ends with a blessing: “Peace be upon Elijah.”[18] The Arabic form there is Ilyasin, which some commentators took as another form of the name and others as a reference to his followers. Its chief interest is the agreement on the content of his preaching. The Quran and the Bible give the same call to worship the one God and leave Baal.

The bottom line

The Quran says what it says about these five prophets and stops. The evidence does not allow a reader to say more about Idris, Dhul-Kifl or the others than the text itself says, and the commentators who did so were offering informed guesses. Their identifications are worth knowing, and none of them is a requirement of belief.

The Prophet gave guidance for this situation. When the People of the Book told Muslims things from their own scriptures, he said to neither believe nor disbelieve them, and to say that we believe in what has been revealed to us.[19] The sensible conclusion is that these prophets are real figures in a long chain, that the chain is longer than any list, and that the Quran names them in order to show the chain, not to complete a biography of each.

Notes

  1. Quran 40:78, which says that some messengers are not recounted. The number twenty-five is the traditional count of the prophets named in the Quran.
  2. Quran 35:24.
  3. Ismail R. al Faruqi, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1983), III.A.
  4. Quran 19:56–57.
  5. Quran 21:85.
  6. Genesis 5:22–24.
  7. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the accounts of the night journey and ascent (Isra and Miraj).
  8. Quran 7:65; 11:50.
  9. Quran 7:69; 26:128–129.
  10. Quran 11:53–56.
  11. Quran 69:6–7; compare 41:16 and 46:24–25.
  12. Quran 38:48.
  13. Quran 21:85–86.
  14. Quran 6:86; 38:48.
  15. 1 Kings 19:16–21; 2 Kings 2.
  16. Quran 37:123–125.
  17. 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 2:11.
  18. Quran 37:130.
  19. Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Commentary (Tafsir), on Quran 2:136. Sahih al-Bukhari 4485, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 8, p. 170 (Shamela text).