Ma`rifat Adyan

The holy Qur'an mentions the event of testing prophet Ibraham's faithfulness and readiness to give his son as ar offering to God. It represerts a turning point in the life of this great divine prophet. Due to the equivocation in the Qur'anic verses about the story of Ibraham's oblation and not stating who was to be offered and the place where the oblation was to take place, at first the name of Ibraheem's son who was to be given an offering was a matter of dispute among Muslim commentators of the Qur'an, but the dispute ended in the seventh century A.H., and it was found and confirmed in the Islamic tradition that Ishmael was the one whom prophet Ibraham intended to offer as oblation. Today, some of the orientalists claim that the earlier Islamic sources state that Isaac was the one to be offered to God, and that, for some reasons, such as rivalry with Judaism, Ishmael's name was introduced in the Islamic texts and commentaries after many centuries. The present study, which sheds light on the sunnah (Islamic tradition) and the sayings of the Infallibles in this concern, elaborates on the Qur'anic view about who Ibraham's oblation is