Abraham · Ibrahim
Abraham in Islam
Abraham is Ibrahim in Arabic, written إِبْرَاهِيم. 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
- Abraham
- Arabic
- إِبْرَاهِيم
- Read as
- Ibrahim
- Status
- Prophet in Islam
- Where the English comes from
- Hebrew Avraham, read as father of many nations.
- What the Arabic carries
- Ibrahim, the Quranic form of the same name.
- Full name page
- Ibrahim on AsrNaam
Is Abraham the same as Ibrahim? Yes. Abraham is the English form and Ibrahim the Arabic form of one name. The Quran calls him Khalilullah, the intimate friend of God, and Muslims ask for blessing on his family in every prayer.
Ibrahim in the Quran
Ibrahim is the point at which the three traditions meet and then separate. The Quran calls him Khalilullah, the intimate friend of God, and describes his faith as neither Jewish nor Christian but hanif, upright and turned toward the one God before either community existed. Muslims are told to follow millat Ibrahim, the way of Ibrahim.
The Quranic account keeps the fire, the smashed idols, the argument with his father, the sacrifice and the building of the Kaaba with his son Ismail. It differs from Genesis on the son taken for sacrifice: Islamic tradition overwhelmingly names Ismail, the Hebrew Bible names Isaac, and the Quranic text itself does not name him at that point in the passage.
Two of the five daily prayers close by asking God to bless Muhammad as he blessed Ibrahim and the family of Ibrahim. Few names in any language are spoken by more people more often.
Using the name
The full entry for Ibrahim 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.
Questions about Abraham and Ibrahim
Is Abraham the same name as Ibrahim?
Is Ibrahim the same as Abraham?
Which son did Ibrahim take to be sacrificed?
Can a Muslim family use the name Ibrahim?
Other names the two traditions share
Every one of these is one figure under two names.
Or start from the full list of Biblical names in Islam.
Ilm ul Huroof reads a name through the Arabic letters it is written with. Each carries a traditional numeric value and a principle. Ibrahim is written إبراهيم, and reads as follows.
The values total 259, which reduces to 7. This is a reading of the name's written structure in the letter-science tradition, not a claim about anyone who carries it.
Abraham and Ibrahim are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is אַבְרָהָם (Avraham), meaning father of many. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Ibrahim 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 Abraham and Ibrahim look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.
Abram, Abraão, Abramo, Avraham, Ibrahim, Brahim, Ibrahima.