Enoch · Idris
Enoch in Islam
Enoch is Idris in Arabic, written إِدْرِيس. 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
- Enoch
- Arabic
- إِدْرِيس
- Read as
- Idris
- Status
- Prophet in Islam
- Where the English comes from
- Hebrew Chanokh, dedicated.
- What the Arabic carries
- Idris, traditionally linked to the root d-r-s, to study.
- Full name page
- Idris on AsrNaam
Is Enoch the same as Idris? Yes. Enoch is the English form and Idris the Arabic form of one name. The Quran names him twice and says God raised him to a high station; the identification with Enoch is traditional rather than stated.
Idris in the Quran
Idris is named twice in the Quran, in Surah Maryam and Surah Al-Anbiya, and both mentions are short. He is called truthful, a prophet, and one whom God raised to a high station, and that raising is the whole of what the text says.
The identification of Idris with the Enoch of Genesis is traditional rather than stated. It rests on the shared detail of a man taken up rather than dying in the usual way, and it is held by most classical commentators, but the Quran does not make the equation itself. That distinction is worth keeping.
The name is usually connected to dars, study, and Islamic tradition credits Idris with the first writing with a pen and the first tailoring of cloth. Idris and Driss are both common, particularly in Morocco.
Using the name
The full entry for Idris 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 Enoch and Idris
Is Enoch the same name as Idris?
Is Idris the same as Enoch?
What does Idris mean?
Can a Muslim family use the name Idris?
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. Idris is written إدريس, and reads as follows.
The values total 275, which reduces to 5. This is a reading of the name's written structure in the letter-science tradition, not a claim about anyone who carries it.
Enoch and Idris are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is חֲנוֹךְ (Chanokh), meaning dedicated. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Idris 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 Enoch and Idris look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.
Énoch, Enoc, Chanokh, Idris.