The Dream, the Answer, and Which Son

The Qur'anic telling differs in ways that change the emotional centre of the episode. The command arrives as a dream, and Ibrahim tells his son what he has seen and asks what he thinks; the son answers that he should do as he is commanded and that he will be found, God willing, among the patient. The submission is therefore shared and spoken aloud rather than silent and one-sided. When both have submitted and the son is laid down, the call comes that the vision has been fulfilled, and a great sacrifice is given in exchange. The commemoration of this event is the festival of sacrifice observed across the Muslim world.

The son is not named in the passage. Early Muslim exegetes divided over the question, and the division is genuine rather than a later invention: some of the earliest authorities, including a number of the companions and successors, held that the son was Ishaq, while others held that he was Ismail, and the arguments turned on the surrounding verses and on the traditions attached to Mecca. From roughly the third Islamic century onward the identification with Ismail became the dominant position and is now the standard one in Sunni and Shia teaching alike. Christian reading has taken a different route again, treating the episode from the second century onward as a figure of the crucifixion, with the son carrying the wood up the hill, the three days, and the substitute provided by God read as a prefiguration rather than as a parallel.