The Sparest of Portraits
Of all the prophets named in the Qur'an, none is drawn in fewer strokes than Idrīs. He appears twice: once among the company of the truthful and near, and once in a list of those who were guided and chosen, “of the descendants of Ādam, and of those We carried with Nūḥ.”12 Beyond his truthfulness, his patience, and the honour of being “raised to a high station,” the Qur'an offers no narrative — no people to whom he was sent, no confrontation, no ark, no city overturned. It is, in the sīrah scholars' own idiom, a portrait in miniature.1
Two words carry almost the whole of what is certain about him. He is ṣiddīq — a superlative of truthfulness the Qur'an applies elsewhere to Yūsuf, to Maryam, and to Ibrāhīm, denoting not merely one who does not lie but one whose whole being conforms to the truth he affirms. And he is nabī, a prophet. The Qur'an then adds patience, placing him among those who “were of the patient” alongside Ismāʿīl and Dhū al-Kifl.12
What the Exegetes Added, and How Far to Trust It
This spareness has not stopped a long exegetical tradition from filling in a life around it. Many commentators, from al-Ṭabarī onward, place Idrīs before Nūḥ, among the earliest generations after Ādam, and describe him as the first to write with a pen, to study the movements of the stars, and to sew garments rather than wear skins — attainments that later Muslim historians read as the origin of writing and of civilised craft. Some add that he was the first to bear arms in the path of God, or that a great portion of the sciences was disclosed to him.34
The classical scholars themselves handled this material with visible caution. Ibn Kathīr collects the reports and then observes, with characteristic economy, that most of what is related about Idrīs traces back to the Isrāʾīliyyāt — narrative material absorbed from earlier Jewish and Christian tradition — which the Prophet ﷺ permitted Muslims to relate without either affirming or denying it, and which cannot be used to establish belief. The greatest of the exegetes were careful, on this prophet above almost any other, to mark the difference between what the Qur'an states and what later report supplies.35
Idrīs and Enoch
From the earliest centuries of Islam, scholars in contact with Jewish and Christian tradition identified Idrīs with Enoch (Akhnūkh), the seventh generation from Ādam in the Genesis genealogies, of whom it is said that he “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” The parallel with the Qur'an's own “raised to a high station” struck commentators as more than coincidental, and the identification became the standard one in later Muslim biographical literature, repeated by Ibn Kathīr and the popular Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ collections alike.36
Modern scholarship of religion notes the identification is traditional rather than textually certain — the Qur'an itself makes no such equation, and a minority of Muslim scholars have questioned it — but it is the reading nearly every Muslim biographer of the prophets has carried forward, and it is why Idrīs is remembered above all as a figure of learning: a man, tradition says, given wisdom and taught the pen before the Flood that would sweep his era away and open the era of Nūḥ.46
A High Station
What the Qur'an will not let recede, however brief the mention, is the honour God accorded him: “And We raised him to a high station” — a phrase the Prophet ﷺ himself is reported to have illuminated on the Night Journey, when, ascending through the heavens, he was greeted at the fourth heaven by a man whom Jibrīl introduced as “your brother Idrīs,” and Idrīs welcomed him: “Welcome, O righteous prophet and righteous son.”7 The exegetes divided over whether the “high station” of the verse refers to that heaven, to the rank of prophethood itself, or to nearness to God in a sense that place cannot capture; Ibn Kathīr notes all three readings without insisting on one.37
It is a brief meeting in a brief account, but it is enough. The Qur'an's silence about the shape of his mission has never been read by the tradition as silence about his rank. Idrīs stands among the first to prove a principle that recurs across this whole collection of lives: that God's regard for a prophet is not measured by the length of his story, and that a man of whom scripture records only that he was truthful, patient, and raised high has been given more than most histories can hold.12