Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DISCOVERING SCRIPTURE IN SCRIPTURE t 15
rate story of the births of Ishmael and Isaac. It was left for the later
Muslim tradition, which had access to a variety of Jewish and
Christian information, to spell out the details of how Abraham
and Ishmael got from the land of Palestine to Mecca. There was
more than one Muslim version of how that occurred, but the chief
events were understood as follows: As Isaac, Abraham’s son by
Sarah, grew up, his mother began to be jealous of her bondswoman
Hagar and the boy Ishmael. She planned to mutilate her
rival, and in the end Sarah chose to circumcise her. “Hagar took a
piece of cloth to wipe the blood away. For that reason,” the historian
al-Tabari (d. 923) explained, “women have been circumcised
and have taken pieces of cloth (as sanitary napkins) down to today.”
In the biblical account, Sarah forces Abraham to drive Hagar
and Ismael into the wilderness. In the Muslim tradition, or at least
one version of it, Abraham takes the two by God’s command, and
with Gabriel’s guidance, to Mecca, which explains the quranic
verse 14:27, where Abraham says, “My Lord, I have settled some
of my posterity in an uncultivable valley near Your Holy House.”
Then Abraham leaves the two of them there and returns to Palestine,
and to the biblical narrative.
At his expulsion from Abraham’s household, Ishmael must have
been about sixteen old, certainly old enough to assist his father in
the construction of the Kaaba, as described in the Quran and implicit
from the last line of the preceding. The traditional version of
what next occurred is derived from Genesis 21:15–16, transferred
from a Palestinian setting to a Meccan one. Mother and child
barely survived in the inhospitable environment of Mecca. With
her son nearly perishing from thirst, Hagar rushed back and forth
between the two hills called Marwa and Safa—the origin of the
running between the two hills on the eastern side of the Meccan
Haram that became part of the Muslim pilgrimage ritual—until
God caused the spring called Zamzam to gush up from the valley
floor to save them both. The object of the story is now clearly to
provide an “Abrahamic” explanation for some of the landmarks
of the Mecca sanctuary and features of the pilgrimage. The helpless
Ishmael sounds much younger than sixteen in the tale, and
some Muslim versions of the story do in fact make him a nursing