Stories of the Qur’an or Stories of the Prophets and Kings

The story of Abraham preparing to carry out God’s request to sacrifice his son, and immediately being stopped by a celestial voice, with an animal taking the place of the child, is recounted in the Bible (Genesis 22). It had a profound echo in Christianity: Saint Paul (Heb. 11:17–19) refers to it to show that faith contains the prefigurement of the world to come (i.e. the resurrection), and Saint James (James 2:21–23) interprets it as meaning that without acts faith is inoperable. The story is also present in the Qur’an (37:100–111), and accentuated in the Muslim tradition (‘the history of the prophets’), as this miniature attests. Here, we see the father holding a knife preparing to cut his son’s throat, and an angel descending from the sky with a ram that will be sacrificed instead. The Qur’anic story differs considerably from the Biblical version: the son is consenting, while in Genesis he remains ignorant of the father’s intentions. In the Qur’an, the son is not identified. Most Muslim scholars agree that it was Ishmael, born of Agar, before Isaac; but certain other scholars, like the great exegete Tabarī (d. 923) believe it was indeed Isaac.

Obviously God did not want the sacrifice to take place, so what was the real intention behind the request? Most interpretations hold that God wished to test Abraham’s faith. However, many theologians have remarked that God was already aware of Abraham’s faith, and that there was no need to put it to the test. More importantly, the mystics have observed that the decision to obey God—through actions and not mere declarations of faith—produced a profound internal transformation in Abraham, and this was the real aim of the test. Through his decision, Abraham rid himself of all his terrestrial bonds, even the most powerful of them: he emptied his heart of everything that was not God, and he was invested with God alone. As the mystics say, this is how he acquired his title of friend (khalīl) of God (the idea and the expression were already mentioned in the epistle of James 2:23)

The tale of the sacrifice of Abraham teaches us about the essential points of God’s intentions for man: God wants to remove men from their ordinary terrestrial condition and elevate them to a superior condition. He wishes to confer his own qualities on man. Maybodī, the Persian exegete mystic of the eleventh century, imagined a discussion about which of the two men would have made the greatest sacrifice: Abraham says that as he was about to kill his beloved son, his would have been the greatest sacrifice. Ishmael replies that he was prepared to give his life, soul, and body. True, replied Abraham, but Ishmael’s sacrifice would have only lasted a moment, while he would have suffered for the rest of his life. At last God intervened, saying that it was He who was the most generous, because he had accepted the sacrifice even though the son was not killed, and gave compensation that had not been requested.

To conclude, one might say that God wanted Abraham to change from a state of having to one of being. Abraham has put himself in God’s standpoint: in pure being. The accomplished man that Abraham has become reflects this divine image inscribed in each man (see Genesis 1:27).