A Name the Qur'an Never Uses

Unlike Jibril and Mikail, Israfil does not appear by name anywhere in the Qur'an. His entire identity as the angel who will sound the trumpet announcing the resurrection comes from hadith literature and later Islamic tradition, which is why classical scholars discussing him rely on prophetic reports and exegetical works rather than being able to point to direct Qur'anic text the way they can for Jibril and Mikail. The trumpet motif itself is not unique to Islamic tradition.

Comparable last day trumpet imagery appears in the New Testament, where Paul describes a trumpet call accompanying the resurrection of the dead without naming which angel sounds it, and in earlier Jewish apocalyptic literature that associates a great trumpet blast with the ingathering of Israel at the end of days, again generally without a single fixed angelic name attached.

Scholars of comparative religion generally read Israfil as part of a broader shared apocalyptic vocabulary current across the late antique Near East, in which a climactic trumpet signaling resurrection or final judgment was a recognisable motif that different traditions incorporated and, in the Islamic case, eventually attached to a specific named archangel to complete a scheme alongside Jibril and Mikail, even though the Qur'an itself leaves that particular angel unnamed.