The Valley With Nothing In It
Ibrāhīm's first son was born to Hājar after long years of childlessness, and the Qur'an records the father's gratitude in the form of a prayer: “Praise to God, who has granted to me in old age Ismāʿīl and Isḥāq. Indeed, my Lord is the Hearer of supplication.”1 But the child's earliest memory, had he been old enough to keep one, would have been of abandonment. On God's command Ibrāhīm carried mother and infant to a valley in the Ḥijāz with no water, no crops, and no people, left them a skin of water and a bag of dates, and walked away without turning back.2
The narration Ibn ʿAbbās gives in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī is one of the most vivid in the entire ḥadīth corpus. Hājar followed him, calling — “To whom are you leaving us?” — and he did not answer. Only when she changed the question did she get one: “Did God command you to do this?” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Then He will not neglect us,” and turned back to her child. Ibrāhīm, out of their sight at the ridge, raised his hands over the empty valley and prayed the words the Qur'an preserves: “Our Lord, I have settled some of my descendants in an uncultivated valley near Your sacred House… so make hearts among the people incline toward them and provide for them from the fruits.”23
When the water ran out and the infant writhed with thirst, Hājar ran between the two hills of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwah — seven times, up one and down the other, looking for any traveller at all — until she returned to find water breaking from the ground at the child's heel. She banked it with sand to hold it, and the Prophet ﷺ said that had she left it to flow, Zamzam would have become a river across the earth. “May God have mercy on the mother of Ismāʿīl,” he said.2
A Boy Among the Jurhum
The water drew birds, and the birds drew a passing tribe of Jurhum, who asked Hājar's permission to settle beside the spring. She agreed, on the condition that they had no claim to the water — and so a woman alone with an infant became the founder of a town.2 Ismāʿīl grew up among the Jurhum, learned their Arabic, and married among them; the classical genealogists name him the father of ʿArab al-Mustaʿribah, the Arabised Arabs, from whom the northern tribes and eventually Quraysh descend.4
Ibn ʿAbbās's narration preserves two later visits by Ibrāhīm, and both turn on a strange test. Arriving when Ismāʿīl was out, Ibrāhīm asked his son's wife about their state; she complained of hardship, and he left word: “Tell him to change the threshold of his door.” Ismāʿīl understood, and divorced her. Years later Ibrāhīm returned, asked the same question of a second wife, and heard praise of God and gratitude instead; the message this time was “tell him to keep firm the threshold of his door.”2 The exegetes read the episode as a father's instruction about the household a prophet's line would be built on — and it is one of the few glimpses the sources give of Ismāʿīl's adult domestic life.
The Trial of the Sacrifice
It was this son — on the position of the great majority of later exegetes, argued from the sequence of Sūrat al-Ṣāffāt itself — whom Ibrāhīm was commanded in a dream to sacrifice, and who, when the vision was put to him rather than imposed on him, answered: “O my father, do as you are commanded. You will find me, if God wills, of the steadfast.”56
The full treatment of that trial belongs to Ibrāhīm's own chapter; what belongs to Ismāʿīl's is the son's half of it. The Qur'an's phrasing is deliberately dual — “And when they had both submitted” — assigning the act of islām, submission, to father and son together. It is a boy's consent, freely given with full knowledge, that completes the trial; and it is that consent, as much as Ibrāhīm's obedience, that Muslims commemorate with every animal sacrificed at ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā.6
True to His Word
The Qur'an singles out one trait of Ismāʿīl's character for its own separate praise, apart from the sacrifice: he “was true to his promise” — ṣādiq al-waʿd — and God names him, in the same breath, both messenger and prophet, a pairing given to few.7 The verse continues with what he did with that character: “And he used to enjoin on his people prayer and zakāh, and he was to his Lord pleasing.”7
Later exegetes preserved a report explaining the epithet concretely: that Ismāʿīl once made an appointment with a man at a certain place, and waited there — by one telling a full day and night, by another far longer — because he had said he would.8 Ibn Kathīr transmits it as illustration rather than proof, noting that the Qur'anic praise stands regardless of which incident occasioned it.
The House and the Line
Father and son together raised the walls of the Kaʿbah on its ancient foundations, and the Qur'an records their work as prayer: “And [mention] when Ibrāhīm was raising the foundations of the House and Ismāʿīl [with him, saying], 'Our Lord, accept this from us. Indeed, You are the Hearing, the Knowing. Our Lord, and make us Muslims [in submission] to You and from our descendants a Muslim nation.'”3 They were charged together with the sanctuary's purity — “purify My House for those who perform ṭawāf and those who are staying [there] for worship and those who bow and prostrate” — and Ismāʿīl remained its custodian after his father.9
Ismāʿīl fathered twelve sons who became patriarchs of the Arab tribes of the Ḥijāz, and it is through this line — Ismāʿīl to ʿAdnān to Quraysh — that the Arabs of Makkah, and the Prophet ﷺ himself, traced their descent back to Ibrāhīm.4 Muslims are commanded to name him in the same declaration of faith as the greatest patriarchs, making no distinction: “Say: We believe in God and what has been revealed to us and what was revealed to Ibrāhīm and Ismāʿīl and Isḥāq and Yaʿqūb and the Descendants… we make no distinction between any of them, and we are Muslims to Him.”10