A Trial of Everything
The Qur'an gives Ayyūb's story almost none of the narrative scaffolding it gives Yūsuf's — no dream, no well, no court. What it preserves instead is the most concentrated portrait of affliction and restraint in the whole of scripture. He is named among the prophets guided by God and given revelation in the same list as Ibrāhīm, Mūsā, and ʿĪsā, so his standing is not in question; what the Qur'an chooses to record of his life is almost exclusively how he suffered.1
Classical commentary, elaborating from the Qur'an's spare outline and from material paralleled in the biblical Book of Job, describes a man of great wealth, many children, and deep faith stripped of all three in succession — flocks and land lost, sons and daughters lost, and finally his own body wasted by a long illness that drove away everyone but his wife. Ibn Kathīr, who reports this at length, is careful to mark which details rest on the Qur'an and which on the Isrāʾīliyyāt.2
The Courtesy of His Complaint
Through all of it the Qur'an records not one word of rebellion. Even his single recorded appeal is phrased with a courtesy that startles: “Indeed, adversity has touched me, and You are the Most Merciful of the merciful.”3 He does not ask for anything. He states his condition and names an attribute of God — and the exegetes note that he does not even say “remove it,” leaving the request to be inferred by the One who already knows it.
The second version, in Sūrat Ṣād, is the same in temper: “Indeed, Shayṭān has touched me with hardship and torment.”4 He attributes the affliction's distress to Shayṭān rather than complaining of his Lord — a distinction the commentators dwell on, because it is precisely the etiquette that distinguishes a complaint made to God from a complaint made about Him.
The Prophet ﷺ described the depth of such trials directly: asked which people are most severely tested, he said, “The prophets, then those nearest to them in rank, then those nearest to them. A man is tested according to the strength of his faith: if his faith is firm, his trial is severe.”5
The Wife Who Stayed
A widely transmitted report in the classical commentaries has Ayyūb's wife — unnamed in the Qur'an — remaining at his side through years of poverty and disfiguring illness after everyone else had withdrawn, working to feed him and, in one telling, selling her own hair when nothing else was left.2 It was in some moment of that exhaustion, the exegetes say, that she spoke words that angered him, and he swore an oath to strike her a hundred times if he recovered.
The Qur'an's resolution of that oath is one of the most humane passages in its legal-narrative material: “And take in your hand a bunch [of grass] and strike with it and do not break your oath.” He was to fulfil the letter of what he had sworn with a bundle of a hundred stalks struck once — the oath discharged, the woman who had nursed him unharmed.4 Later jurists cited the verse as an early basis for leniency in the discharge of oaths, and the classical commentators read it as God protecting a wife's loyalty from the consequences of a sick man's vow.24
Restoration
God's answer, when it came, came all at once: “Strike [the ground] with your foot; this is a cool bath and a drink.” A spring opened where he stood, and washing and drinking from it, he was restored.4 His family and wealth were returned, and the Qur'an says explicitly “the like thereof with them” — doubled rather than merely restored — “as mercy from Us and a reminder for those of understanding.”3
The verdict God pronounces over him is the one line by which he is remembered in every later work of Muslim devotion: “Indeed, We found him patient, an excellent servant. Indeed, he was one repeatedly turning back [to God].”4 A ḥadīth preserves the same character in a small and startling image: the Prophet ﷺ related that while Ayyūb was bathing, locusts of gold began falling upon him, and he started gathering them into his garment — and his Lord called to him, “Ayyūb, have I not made you independent of what you see?” He said, “Yes, my Lord, but I cannot do without Your blessing.”6