Ishmael

Ishmael is a figure whose significance divides sharply between the traditions that claim him. In Genesis he is Abraham's firstborn, son of the Egyptian bondwoman Hagar, conceived when Sarah despaired of children; when Sarah later bears Isaac, Ishmael and his mother are cast into the wilderness, where an angel saves them and promises that Ishmael too will father a great nation. The Hebrew narrative treats him as the son of the rejected line, the covenant passing through Isaac. Islam reverses the emphasis.

In Muslim tradition Ishmael (Ismail) is a prophet, the son whom Abraham is commanded to sacrifice (rather than Isaac, as in the Genesis account), and with his father he raises the foundations of the Kaaba at Mecca; the rites of the Hajj, including the running between Safa and Marwa, re-enact Hagar's desperate search for water for her child. The Arabs are traditionally reckoned his descendants, making him an ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. The same figure is thus the discarded elder son in one scripture and a patriarch of the sacred sanctuary in another.

The Genesis account of Abraham's near sacrifice explicitly names Isaac as the son commanded to be bound, and Jewish and Christian tradition have consistently followed that identification without significant dispute. Islamic tradition tells substantially the same underlying story of a father commanded to sacrifice his son, but the Qur'an itself does not name which son was involved in that particular episode, and it was later tafsir and hadith literature, working through the question over succeeding generations, that generally settled on Ishmael rather than Isaac as the intended son in the majority Islamic reading, a conclusion reached by interpretation rather than stated outright in the Qur'anic text. This divergence is well documented and openly discussed within Islamic scholarship itself, including some early disagreement among commentators before the Ishmael identification became dominant. The two traditions also diverge sharply on Ishmael's broader significance beyond this one episode.

Genesis treats him mainly as the son sent away with his mother Hagar after the birth of Isaac, a departure the text frames as necessary but sorrowful, and gives him a comparatively minor ongoing role in the larger patriarchal narrative. Islamic tradition instead gives Ishmael a central and honoured position, as a prophet in his own right and, through his descendants, the traditional ancestor of the Arab peoples and a figure closely associated with the founding of the Kaaba alongside Abraham.