Aaron  ·  Harun

Aaron in Islam

Aaron is Harun in Arabic, written هَارُون. The two names belong to the same person, and the two traditions tell his story differently enough to be worth reading side by side.

English
Aaron
Arabic
هَارُون
Read as
Harun
Status
Prophet in Islam
Where the English comes from
Hebrew Aharon, of uncertain meaning; mountain of strength is the traditional reading.
What the Arabic carries
Harun, the Quranic form of the same name.
Full name page
Harun on AsrNaam

Is Aaron the same as Harun? Yes. Aaron is the English form and Harun the Arabic form of one name. He is in the Quran because Musa asked for him, saying his brother was clearer in speech than he was.

Harun in the Quran

Harun is in the Quran because his brother asked for him. Musa, sent to Pharaoh, says that his brother is clearer in speech than he is and asks that Harun be sent with him as a helper to confirm him. God grants it, and the request itself is preserved in Surah Ta-Ha and Surah Al-Qasas.

He is left in charge while Musa goes to the mountain, and the calf is made in his absence. The Quran has him warning the people and being overpowered, and when Musa returns and seizes him by the head, Harun says only that he feared Musa would say he had divided the children of Israil. He is not blamed in the Quranic account.

Harun and Haroon are both common as given names, and the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, of the Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights, carried it into a second kind of fame.

Using the name

The full entry for Harun carries the Arabic spelling, the Urdu, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading, along with every romanisation the name is written in.

Open the full Harun page →

Questions about Aaron and Harun

Is Aaron the same name as Harun?
Aaron is the English form and Harun is the Arabic form of the same name. They refer to the same figure.
Is Harun the same as Aaron?
Yes. Harun is the Arabic form of the Hebrew Aharon, the brother of Musa.
Is Harun blamed for the golden calf in the Quran?
No. The Quranic account has him warning the people and being overruled, and Musa prays for him after.
Can a Muslim family use the name Harun?
Yes. Harun is used as a given name across the Muslim world. AsrNaam carries its full page with the Arabic spelling, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading.

Other names the two traditions share

Every one of these is one figure under two names.

Jesus and IsaMoses and MusaMary and MaryamAbraham and IbrahimJoseph and YusufDavid and DawudSolomon and SulaymanNoah and NuhJohn and YahyaJacob and YaqubJonah and YunusJob and AyyubIsaac and IshaqIshmael and Ismail

Or start from the full list of Biblical names in Islam.

The letters of Harun

Ilm ul Huroof reads a name through the Arabic letters it is written with. Each carries a traditional numeric value and a principle. Harun is written هارون, and reads as follows.

ه5the divine breath and presenceا1origin and the upright singularر200the head, motion that returnsو6joining, the link betweenن50the inkwell, the written word

The values total 262, which reduces to 1. This is a reading of the name's written structure in the letter-science tradition, not a claim about anyone who carries it.

How one name became two

Aaron and Harun are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is אַהֲרֹן (Aharon), meaning of uncertain meaning, possibly mountain of strength. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Harun with its consonants largely intact. It reached English by the longer road: Hebrew into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English, each language reshaping the sounds it could not make. That is why Aaron and Harun look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.

The same name, other languages

Aarón, Aronne, Aharon, Harun, Haroun, Haroon.