Texts of Islam

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Adam: About some conditions of the father of Human beings ''Adam'' (PUH)

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is an Islamic theological and exegetical text rooted in Shia Muslim tradition, drawing on hadith attributed to Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib and other figures from the Ahlul Bayt to elaborate on the Quranic account of Adam's creation. Its central argument is that God's appointment of Adam as "viceroy" on Earth necessarily implies the prior existence of earlier intelligent beings — specifically the Djinn and a creature called the Nesnas — who occupied and ultimately corrupted the earth before humanity, which is offered as the explanation for the angels' foreknowledge of human destructiveness. The text then details the physical and spiritual composition of Adam: his body was fashioned from multiple types of clay (varying in color and mineral quality), which the author uses to explain human racial and temperamental diversity, and from four types of water mixed into specific bodily locations with distinct physiological functions. A notably distinctive claim is the quasi-scientific rationalization of bodily fluids — sweet water in the throat for digestion, saline water in the eyes to preserve ocular tissue, bitter water in the ears as a pesticide against brain-invading organisms — presented as divinely engineered design, with appeals to Platonic-era medical cases as corroboration. The work blends classical Islamic cosmology, Shia chain-of-transmission scholarship, and pre-modern humoral physiology into a unified narrative of human origins.

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Adam: About some conditions of the father of Human beings ''Adam'' (PUH)

Related pages View as graph →