A Word That Causes Confusion
Open almost any classical tafsīr, whether it is the commentary of al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, or al-Qurṭubī, and alongside rigorous linguistic and legal analysis you will find narratives: expanded narratives about the specific type of tree Adam and Eve ate from, the names of Pharaoh’s magicians, the precise dimensions of Nūḥ’s (Noah) Ark, or elaborate details about Sulaymān’s dealings with the jinn. Much of this material did not originate in the Qurʾān itself. It entered the tradition through converts to Islam—often from Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Christian backgrounds—who brought with them a rich store of exegetical and folkloric material from their prior traditions. Muslim scholars gave this body of material a name: Isrāʾīliyyāt, literally “Israelite narrations,” referring to material of Judeo-Christian provenance woven into Qurʾānic commentary.
For many contemporary readers encountering this term for the first time, it can be disorienting. If the Qurʾān is believed to be the final, complete, and preserved revelation, why does its most authoritative commentary tradition contain material borrowed from other scriptural traditions? Understanding the answer requires understanding how classical scholarship actually worked, its categories, its safeguards, and its own internal critique of this material, which was often far more rigorous than modern critics assume.
How the Material Entered the Tradition
The primary conduits for Isrāʾīliyyāt were a handful of early converts, most famously Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, a Yemenite Jewish scholar who accepted Islam either toward the end of the Prophet’s ﷺ life or, by the more common account, during the caliphate of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, and Wahb ibn Munabbih, a Successor (Tābiʿī) scholar of Yemeni and Persian descent known for extensive knowledge of earlier scriptural literature. These men possessed deep familiarity with the Torah, Talmudic material, and Midrashic storytelling traditions. Because the Qurʾān frequently references figures shared with the Bible: Ādam, Nūḥ (Noah), Ibrāhīm (Abraham), Mūsā (Moses), Yūsuf (Joseph), Sulaymān (Solomon), ʿĪsā (Jesus), etc., but often narrates their events with remarkable brevity, assuming listener familiarity with the broader narrative, early Muslims naturally turned to those among them with expertise in the earlier scriptures to fill in circumstantial detail: names, numbers, locations, and sequences of events not specified in the Qurʾānic text itself.
This was not, at first, considered a scandalous practice, because the Prophet ﷺ had given explicit license for it. ʿAbdullāh b. ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ narrated that the Prophet ﷺ said,
“Convey from me, even if it is [only] one verse, and narrate from the Children of Israel, and there is no restriction [in doing so]; but whoever intentionally attributes a lie to me, then let him take his seat in the Fire.” (Bukhārī)
This ḥadīth, recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, is the foundational text scholars cite for engaging with Isrāʾīliyyāt at all. It permits narrating from earlier traditions for illustrative or supplementary purposes while placing an absolute, uncompromising prohibition on falsely attributing anything to the Prophet ﷺ himself. The two halves of the hadith are not in tension; they are a single instruction. Material from the People of the Book may be transmitted as material from the People of the Book: it simply may never be dressed up as prophetic speech.
A Second Ḥadīth That Sets the Boundary
If the first ḥadīth grants permission, a second ḥadīth supplies the caution that keeps that permission from collapsing into credulity. Abū Hurayrah narrated the occasion of its utterance directly: the People of the Book used to recite the Torah in Hebrew and then explain it in Arabic to the Muslims, prompting the Prophet ﷺ to say,
“Do not believe the People of the Book, nor disbelieve them, but say, ‘We believe in Allah and what has been revealed to us.’” (Bukhārī)
This ḥadīth, recorded by al-Bukhārī, is arguably the single most important text governing how classical scholars approached Isrāʾīliyyāt, because it defines a third epistemic category beyond simple belief and disbelief: suspension. The scholar is neither obligated to accept such material as true nor required to reject it as false. He is instructed to hold it at arm’s length, neither affirming nor denying, anchoring his own certainty only in what has reached him through revelation.
The Classical Threefold Classification
What modern critics of tafsīr often miss is that classical scholars developed a sophisticated internal typology for evaluating this material rather than accepting it uncritically. Ibn Taymiyyah, in his short but highly influential treatise Muqaddimah fī Uṣūl al-Tafsīr, laid out the framework in its clearest form, and Ibn Kathīr, his student, adopted and popularized it in the introduction to his own celebrated tafsīr. The classification divides Isrāʾīliyyāt into three categories based entirely on its relationship to Islamic sources, and never on the mere fact of its non-Islamic origin.
The first category is material that Islamic sources corroborate, which are reports consistent with, or explicitly confirmed by, the Qurʾān and authentic ḥadīth. This material is accepted, but crucially, its acceptance rests on Islamic authentication, not on its Judeo-Christian provenance. In other words, it would be true regardless of which community first preserved it.
The second category is material that Islamic sources explicitly contradict, which are narrations inconsistent with established Qurʾānic statements or sound ḥadīths. This material is rejected outright, regardless of how widely it circulated or how many earlier commentators repeated it. Ibn Kathīr is notably blunt in rejecting reports he considers doctrinally incompatible, particularly anthropomorphic descriptions of God drawn from transmitted Jewish material, and narratives that malign the moral character of the Prophets, a category Islamic theology treats with particular severity, since the Qurʾān insists on the moral probity (ʿiṣmah) of the Prophets in matters of prophetic conduct and the conveyance of revelation.
The third category, and this is the one that accounts for the bulk of Isrāʾīliyyāt actually found in tafsīr, is material about which Islamic sources are simply silent, neither confirming nor denying it. This is precisely the category governed by the ḥadīth cited above, “Do not believe the People of the Book, nor disbelieve them.” Scholars transmitted such reports—the specific name of the youth Mūsā killed, the number of Nūḥ’s sons who boarded the Ark beyond what is named in the Qurʾān, the species of fruit in the Garden—not as binding doctrine but as illustrative color, explicitly flagged in careful scholarship with formulas such as qīla (“it is said”) or Allāhu aʿlam (“God knows best”), signaling their unverified status to any attentive reader.
Case Studies: Where the System Worked
The value of this typology becomes clearer with concrete examples. Consider the account of Hārūt and Mārūt mentioned in Sūrat al-Baqarah, where the Qurʾān states that magic
“Was sent down upon the two angels at Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt.” [Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:102]
The bare Qurʾānic text offers almost no narrative detail beyond this. Over centuries, an elaborate and theologically troubling story accumulated around these two names in popular literature, involving the angels descending to earth, succumbing to temptation, and being punished by suspension in a well until Judgment Day, tales that circulated widely enough to shape popular imagination far beyond anything the Qurʾānic text supports. Ibn Kathīr, in his treatment of this verse, is characteristically severe toward this material, explicitly stating that most of what is transmitted about Hārūt and Mārūt in this vein traces back to Jewish sources and should not be relied upon, since nothing in it is authenticated through a sound chain back to the Prophet ﷺ. This is the second category: contradicted or unverifiable in a way that compromises the moral standing the Qurʾān assigns to angels, which is being actively filtered out rather than passively absorbed.
Compare this to the far more mundane cases: the specific number of planks in Nuḥ’s Ark, or the particular tree from which Ādam and Ḥawwāʾ ate. These fall squarely into the third category: neither confirmed nor denied, and classical commentators typically report them with hedging language precisely because nothing hinges doctrinally on knowing the answer. A reader is free to find such details interesting without mistaking them for revealed fact.
Where the Tradition Became Careless — And Where It Corrected Itself
Honesty requires acknowledging that not every exegete exercised this discipline consistently. Some earlier and popular commentaries, along with the genre of Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ (“Narratives of the Prophets”) literature associated with figures like al-Thaʿlabī and al-Kisāʾī, absorbed material with less critical filtering than the standard demands. Unreliable or even fabricated narrations occasionally circulated widely enough to shape popular imagination—the Hārūt and Mārūt material already discussed being one example, and embellished tales about Sulaymān’s dealings with the jinn, going well beyond anything the Qurʾānic text supports, being another.
This is precisely why the later critical tradition—figures like Ibn Kathīr, Ibn Taymiyyah, and in the modern period reformist scholars such as Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā and Muḥammad al-Amīn al-Shanqīṭī—devoted considerable energy specifically to combing through earlier tafsīr and purging or clearly flagging Isrāʾīliyyāt material transmitted without adequate scrutiny. Ibn Kathīr’s tafsīr is in many ways a deliberate corrective project against the more permissive transmission found in al-Ṭabarī’s earlier and monumental compilation, which had gathered narrations broadly, including weak chains, for the sake of comprehensiveness, trusting later scholars to sort wheat from chaff. This was a scholarly method with real strengths (comprehensiveness, preservation of the full transmitted record) and real risks (the uncritical reader mistaking inclusion for endorsement).
In the twentieth century, this corrective project found its most systematic modern expression in the Egyptian Azhari scholar Muḥammad Ḥusayn al-Dhahabī, whose dedicated study al-Isrāʾīliyyāt fī al-Tafsīr wa-l-Ḥadīth remains the standard reference work on the subject in modern scholarship. Al-Dhahabī catalogued the historical entry points of this material, traced its transmitters, and applied the classical threefold framework systematically across the major works of tafsīr, effectively formalizing in a dedicated monograph what earlier scholars like Ibn Kathīr had practiced piecemeal within their running commentary. Muḥammad al-Amīn al-Shanqīṭī, in his Aḍwāʾ al-Bayān, pursued a related but stricter method, deliberately limiting his own exegesis to what could be established by the Qurʾān interpreting itself, ḥadīth, and the statements of the Companions, treating this as a methodological corrective to centuries of looser transmission.
This internal self-correction is itself significant evidence of a living, rigorous scholarly tradition; not one that passively absorbed outside material, but one that actively theorized, categorized, and progressively refined its handling of it across centuries, using its own methodology (isnād criticism, doctrinal consistency-checking, and textual comparison with the Qurʾān) as the filter.
Why This Matters for Modern Readers
For the contemporary Muslim reader, several practical lessons emerge from this history.
First, encountering an unusual or elaborate narrative detail in an older tafsīr is not evidence that the Qurʾān itself contains borrowed material. The Qurʾānic text and its exegetical literature are distinct layers, and conflating them is a basic category error common in polemical treatments of this subject. The Qurʾān’s own brevity regarding these figures is, if anything, evidence against dependence on earlier narrative traditions; later commentators had to go looking for supplementary detail precisely because the revealed text did not supply it.
Second, when studying tafsīr, it is worth learning to notice the epistemic markers scholars themselves used: “qīla,” “narrated from the People of the Book,” “Allāhu aʿlam”, since these are the tradition’s own built-in warning labels, present precisely so readers would not mistake illustrative material for doctrine. A reader who skips past these markers without registering their function will come away with a distorted sense of what the scholar actually claimed to know.
Third, this history offers a valuable model of intellectual honesty. Rather than pretending its exegetical tradition developed in isolation, classical Islamic scholarship openly acknowledged its points of contact with earlier scriptural communities, engaged that material critically over centuries, and left behind the analytical tools for every subsequent generation, including our own, to continue sorting sound transmission from later accretion. The existence of Isrāʾīliyyāt in tafsīr is not a cover-up the tradition is embarrassed by; it is a problem the tradition named, studied, and built a methodology to handle, in full view of anyone willing to read the commentary carefully.
Final Thoughts
Understanding Isrāʾīliyyāt, then, is not an embarrassing footnote to be avoided but a case study in how a mature scholarly tradition handles inherited material: neither with naive acceptance nor with anxious denial, but with disciplined, textually grounded discernment, precisely the disposition the Qurʾān itself commends when it describes those who
“listen to speech and follow the best of it.” [Sūrat al-Zumar, 39:18]
The believer encountering a strange detail in an old commentary is not meant to flinch from it or accept it uncritically, but to do exactly what the Prophet ﷺ instructed regarding the People of the Book themselves: neither affirm nor deny, and anchor certainty only in what revelation has actually established.
