Jonah  ·  Yunus

Jonah in Islam

Jonah is Yunus in Arabic, written يُونُس. 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
Jonah
Arabic
يُونُس
Read as
Yunus
Status
Prophet in Islam
Where the English comes from
Hebrew Yonah, dove.
What the Arabic carries
Yunus, the Quranic form of the same name.
Full name page
Yunus on AsrNaam

Is Jonah the same as Yunus? Yes. Jonah is the English form and Yunus the Arabic form of one name. He is Dhun-Nun, the one of the fish, and the words he said in the dark are among the most repeated prayers in Islam.

Yunus in the Quran

Yunus is the prophet who left. The Quran says he went off angry, thinking he would not be constrained, and that is the whole of the failure it records. The ship, the lot, the sea and the fish follow. He is called Dhun-Nun, the one of the fish, and Sahib al-Hut, the companion of the whale.

What he says inside the dark is one of the most repeated sentences in Muslim practice: there is no god but You, glory be to You, I have been among the wrongdoers. Hadith records that no Muslim ever prays with those words without being answered, and it is said quietly by a great many people who could not name the chapter it comes from.

Surah Yunus, the tenth chapter, notes that his was the one town whose people believed in time and were spared. The prophet who ran is the prophet whose mission worked.

Using the name

The full entry for Yunus 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 Yunus page →

Questions about Jonah and Yunus

Is Jonah the same name as Yunus?
Jonah is the English form and Yunus is the Arabic form of the same name. They refer to the same figure.
Is Yunus the same as Jonah?
Yes. Yunus is the Arabic form of the Hebrew Yonah, the prophet swallowed by the great fish.
What is the dua of Yunus?
La ilaha illa anta, subhanaka, inni kuntu min az-zalimin: there is no god but You, glory be to You, I have been among the wrongdoers. It is given in Surah Al-Anbiya 21:87.
Can a Muslim family use the name Yunus?
Yes. Yunus 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 YaqubJob and AyyubAaron and HarunIsaac and IshaqIshmael and Ismail

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

The letters of Yunus

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

ي10the hand and the bondو6joining, the link betweenن50the inkwell, the written wordس60support, the spine that carries

The values total 126, which reduces to 9. 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

Jonah and Yunus are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is יוֹנָה (Yonah), meaning dove. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Yunus 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 Jonah and Yunus look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.

The same name, other languages

Jonas, Giona, Yonah, Yunus, Younes, Yunis.