Ishmael in the Quran and Genesis: 6 facts

Surah Maryam, a Meccan surah, sets out a line of prophets: Zechariah عليه السلام, John, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Ishmael and Idris. Of Ishmael it says: “Mention in the Book Ishmael. He was true to his promise, and he was a messenger and a prophet. He used to enjoin on his people prayer and almsgiving, and he was pleasing to his Lord” (19:54–55).^[1]

The verse uses the same pair of words, rasulan nabiyya, that it uses three verses earlier for Moses عليه السلام (19:51). It gives Ishmael a people to teach, ahl, and the two practices it most often links with true religion, salah and zakah. The commentators took the phrase “true to his promise” as the quality that set him apart, and al-Tabari records reports that he once waited at an agreed place for days so as not to break an appointment.^[2]

Ishmael also appears in the Quran’s lists of those who received revelation (2:136, 3:84, 4:163), among the prophets God preferred above the worlds (6:86), and among the patient and the righteous (21:85–86, 38:48).^[3] Verse 2:133 has the sons of Jacob promise, at their father’s deathbed, to worship “your God and the God of your fathers, Abraham عليه السلام, Ishmael and Isaac”. The Quran counts him among the ancestors of Israel’s faith as well as of the Arabs.

The critic’s claim that commentators could not treat Ishmael as a prophet in his own right, and transferred the honour to his seed, does not fit these verses. The Quran names him personally, describes his teaching and calls him by both titles.

The book of Genesis does not call Ishmael a prophet. It also does not reduce him to a desert chief whom God set aside. Its account gives him a series of divine promises that stand beside those made to Isaac.

Before his birth, the angel of the Lord meets Hagar in the wilderness and tells her: “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude” (16:10). His name, Yishmael, means “God hears”, and the angel explains it: “the Lord has listened to your affliction” (16:11).^[4] When Abraham asks that Ishmael might live before God, God answers: “As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation” (17:20).^[5]

When Hagar and the boy are sent away, God tells Abraham: “I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring” (21:13). In the wilderness, God hears the voice of the boy, an angel calls to Hagar from heaven, shows her a well, and the text adds: “God was with the boy, and he grew up” (21:17–20).^[6] Ishmael is circumcised with Abraham on the day of the covenant of circumcision (17:23–26), and he stands beside Isaac at their father’s burial (25:9).^[7]

Genesis places the covenant in Isaac’s line (17:21). It does not place God’s presence there alone. “God was with the boy” is the language Genesis uses of Joseph (39:2) and that later books use of the prophets and judges. A Muslim reading these chapters finds a son whom God heard, blessed, protected and promised a great nation, which is close to the figure the Quran describes.

The low estimate of Ishmael that the critic repeats owes more to a later reading than to Genesis. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul turns the two sons into an allegory: Hagar stands for the covenant of Sinai and “present Jerusalem”, which is in slavery, and Sarah for the Jerusalem above, which is free. He quotes Sarah’s demand, “Cast out the slave woman and her son”, and applies it to his opponents in the church (Galatians 4:22–31).^[8] The allegory served an argument about the Law. It added nothing to what Genesis says of Ishmael himself, and the narrative it draws on still has God answer the cast-out boy’s cry. Christian readers who take their picture of Ishmael from Galatians are reading Genesis through Paul.

Genesis 16:12 is the other verse usually cited: Ishmael will be “a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him”. In the setting of the chapter the words are part of an annunciation to a runaway servant, and they promise her son freedom and independence, the life of the desert onager that answers to no master. Jewish commentators read the phrase in more than one way, and several modern commentaries take it as a description of a free nomadic life rather than a curse.^[9]

The critic’s portrait puts Ishmael on the borders of the Holy Land. The Quran places him in the valley of Mecca, building the House with his father.

Verse 2:127 says: “And when Abraham and Ishmael were raising the foundations of the House: Our Lord, accept this from us.” The prayer continues: “Our Lord, make us submissive to You, and of our descendants a community submissive to You … Our Lord, raise up among them a messenger from among themselves who will recite to them Your verses” (2:128–129).^[10] The Quran thus presents the coming of Muhammad as the answer to a prayer of Abraham and Ishmael together.

The longest hadith on the subject, narrated by Ibn Abbas in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, tells how Abraham brought Hagar and the infant Ishmael to the valley, left them with a skin of water and a bag of dates, and how Hagar ran between al-Safa and al-Marwa looking for help before the spring of Zamzam appeared. It continues with the tribe of Jurhum settling by the water, Ishmael growing up among them, learning Arabic from them and marrying from them, and Abraham returning to build the House with his son.^[11] The rites of the Hajj, the running between the two hills and the drinking from Zamzam, commemorate these events.

Genesis places Hagar’s wanderings in the wilderness of Beersheba and Ishmael’s later home in the wilderness of Paran (21:14, 21:21). Muslim writers from the early centuries identified Paran with the mountains of the Hijaz, and Christian writers placed it in Sinai. The two accounts agree that Ishmael’s descendants lived in Arabia: Genesis 25:18 says that they settled “from Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria”.^[12]

The objection treats the link between Ishmael and the Arabs of the Hijaz as a Muslim invention, made to give Muhammad a prophetic pedigree. The Prophet stated the link as common knowledge, and in contexts where nothing turned on it.

Salama ibn al-Akwa reports that the Prophet passed by men of the tribe of Aslam practising archery in the market and said to them: “Shoot, children of Ishmael, for your father was an archer.”^[13] The remark matches Genesis 21:20, which says that Ishmael “became an expert with the bow”. It was addressed to a tribe that was not the Prophet’s own, and it assumes that they already knew who their father was.

Wathila ibn al-Asqa reports in the Sahih of Muslim that the Prophet said: “God chose Kinana from the descendants of Ishmael, and chose Quraysh from Kinana, and chose Banu Hashim from Quraysh, and chose me from Banu Hashim.”^[14] The genealogists of Arabia, whose lists the early historians preserved, traced the northern Arab tribes through Adnan to Ishmael. Modern historians cannot verify every link in those lists, any more than they can verify the genealogies of Genesis. The claim itself predates Islam in Jewish and Christian sources: Josephus in the first century describes the Arabs as descendants of Ishmael who practise circumcision at thirteen because Ishmael was circumcised at that age, and the fifth-century church historian Sozomen calls the Arabs “Ishmaelites” who once held to the religion of Abraham.^[15]

A frequent Muslim claim is that the son whom Abraham was told to sacrifice was Ishmael. Critics answer that Genesis names Isaac. On this point the honest answer begins with the Quran’s own silence.

Surah 37 tells the story: Abraham asks for a righteous son, is given “a forbearing boy”, sees in a dream that he is sacrificing him, and the son replies: “Father, do as you are commanded; you will find me, God willing, among the patient.” The son is ransomed “with a great sacrifice”. Only after the story is finished does the passage add: “And We gave him the good news of Isaac, a prophet from among the righteous” (37:100–112).^[16] Most commentators read the order of the passage as showing that the son of the sacrifice was the first son, born before the good news of Isaac. Others pointed out that the Quran never names him in the scene.

The early authorities divided. Al-Tabari collected reports for both sides and himself preferred Isaac. Ibn Kathir, writing later, argued for Ishmael, on the ground that Genesis 22:2 calls the son “your only son”, which could only have been true of Ishmael before Isaac’s birth.^[17] The disagreement is old, it was conducted openly among Muslim scholars, and neither answer is required for faith. Ishmael’s status in the Quran rests on 19:54, not on the identity of the son in Surah 37.

The objection adds that Muslim expositors refer the role of prophethood to the “seed” of Isaac, Ishmael and Jacob because no one normally thinks of Ishmael, Isaac or Lot as prophets.

The Quran calls Isaac a prophet in so many words: “We gave him the good news of Isaac, a prophet from among the righteous” (37:112). Of Abraham’s household it says: “We gave him Isaac and Jacob, and each of them We made a prophet” (19:49). Lot is “one of the messengers” (37:133), sent to a people who denied him (26:160–162).^[18] Verse 29:27 then adds that God “placed prophethood and the Book among his descendants”. That verse speaks of Abraham’s offspring as a line in which prophecy continued; it does not take the title away from the individuals already named.

The idea that prophethood ran in a family is also biblical. God tells Abraham that “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 22:18), and Psalm 105:15 calls the patriarchs God’s “anointed ones” and “prophets”. The Psalm uses the same Hebrew word, nevi’ai, that the Quran’s nabi corresponds to.^[19] Genesis 20:7 has God call Abraham a prophet. A Muslim who calls Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael prophets is using a title the Hebrew Bible already gives to the patriarchs.