Solomon  ·  Sulayman

Solomon in Islam

Solomon is Sulayman in Arabic, written سُلَيْمَان. 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
Solomon
Arabic
سُلَيْمَان
Read as
Sulayman
Status
Prophet in Islam
Where the English comes from
Hebrew Shlomo, from shalom, peace.
What the Arabic carries
Sulayman, the Quranic form, from the same root as salam.
Full name page
Sulayman on AsrNaam

Is Solomon the same as Sulayman? Yes. Solomon is the English form and Sulayman the Arabic form of one name. The Quran gives him command of the wind and the jinn and the speech of birds, and names a chapter after an ant he stopped for.

Sulayman in the Quran

Sulayman inherits from his father Dawud and is given a kingdom the Quran says was granted to no one after him. He is taught the speech of birds, given command of the wind and of the jinn, and given a spring of molten copper. Surah An-Naml carries the exchange with the hoopoe and the letter to the Queen of Sheba.

The famous scene is the ant. Sulayman, at the head of an army, hears an ant warn the colony to get out of the way, and he smiles. A king with wind and jinn under his hand stops for an insect, and the Quran records that he then asked God to help him be grateful. The chapter is named after that ant.

The Quran is careful to separate him from the magician of later legend: it states that Sulayman did not disbelieve, and that it was others who taught people sorcery in his name.

Using the name

The full entry for Sulayman 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 Sulayman page →

Questions about Solomon and Sulayman

Is Solomon the same name as Sulayman?
Solomon is the English form and Sulayman is the Arabic form of the same name. They refer to the same figure.
Is Sulayman the same as Solomon?
Yes. Sulayman is the Arabic form of the Hebrew Shlomo, son of Dawud and king after him.
Why is Surah 27 called An-Naml, the Ant?
Because of the passage in which Sulayman overhears an ant warning her colony, stops, and smiles.
Can a Muslim family use the name Sulayman?
Yes. Sulayman 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 DawudNoah and NuhJohn and YahyaJacob and YaqubJonah and YunusJob and AyyubAaron and HarunIsaac and IshaqIshmael and Ismail

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

The letters of Sulayman

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

س60support, the spine that carriesل30reaching, the extended armي10the hand and the bondم40inward mercy, love returning to its sourceا1origin and the upright singularن50the inkwell, the written word

The values total 191, which reduces to 2. 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

Solomon and Sulayman are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is שְׁלֹמֹה (Shlomo), meaning from shalom, peace. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Sulayman 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 Solomon and Sulayman look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.

The same name, other languages

Salomon, Salomone, Shlomo, Suleyman, Sulaiman, Sleiman.