Idrīs — إدريس

Idrīs is named only twice in the Qur'an, yet both mentions carry unusual weight. In Sūrah Maryam he is placed among the line of prophets granted favour — descendants of Ādam and of those Allah carried with Nūḥ — and is described directly as a man of truth, a prophet. In Sūrah al-Anbiyāʾ he is named alongside Ismāʿīl and Dhū al-Kifl among those who bore hardship with patience and were admitted into Allah's mercy, counted among the righteous.

The brevity of these mentions has never been read by the scholars as a sign of lesser rank. Rather, the Qur'an is economical by design: it tells the stories that carry the lessons the community most needed, and lets other figures stand as brief but firm signposts of the same truth — that the line of prophecy from Ādam onward was continuous, and that truthfulness and patience were its defining marks.

The verse in Sūrah Maryam ends with a phrase that has drawn the attention of every generation of commentators: "and We raised him to a lofty station." The wording is deliberately open. Some early exegetes understood it as an honour granted to him in this world or the next in a general sense, a rank of nearness and esteem among the righteous, without specifying place.

Others, drawing on reports transmitted through the earlier scriptural tradition and repeated in works of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, read it more literally, and later Muslim tradition came to associate Idrīs with the sky through the account of the Prophet's night journey, in which he is described meeting Idrīs in one of the heavens during al-Isrāʾ wal-Miʿrāj. Scholars have always been careful to keep the Qur'anic statement — a lofty station — as the firm, agreed core, while treating the additional narrative detail as something related, not something to be asserted with the same certainty as revelation itself.

In Sūrah al-Anbiyāʾ, Idrīs is grouped with Ismāʿīl and Dhū al-Kifl under a single description: "and each was of the patient." The surrounding verses praise them as being admitted into Allah's mercy for this very quality. This is significant, because unlike Nūḥ or Ayyūb the Qur'an does not narrate a specific trial that Idrīs endured; the patience attributed to him is stated as a settled trait of his character rather than illustrated by a single crisis.

The lesson drawn by commentators is that patience need not always be dramatic to be counted as righteousness before Allah. A life lived in steady truthfulness, sustained worship, and quiet endurance — without a single narrated catastrophe to mark it — is treated by the Qur'an as fully worthy of being named among the patient and the righteous.

Because the Qur'an says so little about Idrīs directly, much of what later generations came to know or repeat about him — that he was among the first to write with a pen, to study the movement of the stars, or to sew garments rather than wear skins — comes from reports outside revelation, some traced to earlier scriptural communities and preserved in the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ literature. Ibn Kathīr collects a number of these narrations while candidly noting that many rest on transmissions from Israelite sources that cannot be verified with certainty.

The sound principle applied by careful scholars, and stated plainly by Ibn Kathīr himself, is that such reports may be related for interest but neither affirmed nor denied outright unless they are confirmed by the Qur'an or authentic hadith, and never used to add binding belief. What is certain is only what the Qur'an itself states: that Idrīs was truthful, a prophet, patient, and raised to a station of honour.