Texts of Islam

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Elias, Elish...

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This is an Islamic religious narrative — drawn from hadith, tafsir, and the accounts of the Shia Imams — retelling the life and legacy of the prophet Elijah (Ilyas/Elias). It recounts how God sent Elijah to a tribe settled in Baalbek that had fallen into Baal-worship under a corrupt king and his notoriously immoral wife; Elijah repeatedly called them to repentance, survived assassination attempts, and after seven years of drought-as-divine-punishment, finally brought some of the people back to faith before they relapsed again and were destroyed. A distinctive claim of the text is that Elijah never died: God removed his need for food and drink, clothed him in feathers and light, and raised him to heaven as a kind of human-angel, with several traditions explicitly equating him with the immortal figure Al-Khidhr. The text further asserts that Elijah continues to interact with the living — meeting annually with Al-Khidhr at Mount Arafat during the Islamic pilgrimage, and holding recorded theological conversations with Shia Imam Al-Sadiq on the secrets of prophecy and Imamism. Elisha is treated as Elijah's cousin, pupil, and designated successor, and is defended against Christian claims about Jesus's uniqueness by noting Elisha too walked on water and raised the dead. The compiler presents this as a synthesis of multiple competing traditions (some identify Elijah with Enoch) while anchoring the account in Quranic verse and Shia devotional sources.

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: Elias, Elish...

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