The Enigmatic Prophets of the Qur'an: Is'mā'īl, Id'rīs/al-Yasaʿa and Dhul-Kifl and ('The Companies of Prophets' of the Hebrew Bible: Samuel, Elijah and Elisha) (original) (raw)

Some prophets in the Qur’an, Id’rīs, Dhul-Kifl (also al-Yasa’a, Il’yāsa and ilyāsīn), still remain to be mysterious figures. Actually, there was another neglected mystery along with these names. Ismāʿīl, the assumed well-known figure of the Qur’an, was always preceding these enigmatic names whenever his name is called together with them, and in the end they were composing a trio as if there were a correlation among these three figures. Searching this correlation has led us into constructing a thesis like that; this Ismāʿīl, when called together with Id’rīs and Dhul-Kifl, was not the son of Abraham from Hagar, but rather this name was referring to the prophet Samuel (as a conjugation of Ismāʿīl) of the Bible. In other words, the trio Ismāʿīl, Id’rīs and Dhul-Kifl was in fact pointing at a well-known trio of the Biblical literature: “the Companies of Prophets”, or the “Sons of Prophets”, or the “School of Prophets”, namely Samuel, Elijah and Elisha. Accordingly, and as explained in the paper, Id’rīs and Dhul-Kifl were not the real personal names of these figures but rather the titles of Elijah and Elisha, representing their special characteristics featured in the Bible. In sum; we are proposing in this paper that the prophets Ismāʿīl, ʾId’rīs and Dhāl-kifl of the Qur’an were but no other than the prophets Samuel, Elijah and Elisha of the Hebrew Bible, “the Companies of Prophets”