Idris: The Enoch of the Quran

In shortIdris is a prophet mentioned twice in the Quran. Sura 19 says that he was a man of truth and a prophet and that God raised him to a high place, and sura 21 counts him among the patient. The Quran gives no further details about him.

There is a prophet in the Quran about whom everything that is said fits into two lines. The nineteenth sura says: mention Idris in the Book, he was a man of truth and a prophet, and we raised him to a high place. In the twenty-first sura he appears in a short list, beside Ishmael, among those who knew how to endure. That is all. No story, no father's name, no city and no era.

But a religious tradition cannot bear empty spaces. Within a few generations those two lines had filled up with a complete biography, and most of the material it was built from is very familiar to anyone who has read the Books of Enoch.

A high place

Who is the man? The first commentators on the Quran, among them the great historian al-Tabari, answered almost with one voice: Idris is Enoch, the son of Jared and the great-grandfather of Noah, and they even gave his name in its Hebrew form, Akhnukh. The clue that led them there was the raising to a high place. In the whole biblical tradition there is only one man from the generations of Genesis of whom it is said that God took him.

The Quran itself does not connect the two, and present-day scholars point out that the identification is an interpretation and not a fact. Still, it was accepted, and once it was accepted the whole great storehouse of Enoch traditions stood open to Idris.

The first to write with a pen

Muslim tradition credits Idris with a series of inventions. He was the first to write with a pen. He was the first to study the stars and arithmetic. And according to one tradition he received thirty scrolls from God.

Anyone who knows the Enoch literature will recognize every detail. The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish work of the second century BCE, says that Enoch was the first human being to learn writing, and that he recorded the signs of heaven in a book according to the order of their months. 1 Enoch devotes eleven chapters to the paths of the sun and the moon. And 2 Enoch describes the moment when Enoch receives his writing tools:

God called one of his archangels, named Pravuil, whose wisdom is quicker than that of all the other archangels, and who writes down all of God's deeds. God said to Pravuil: Bring the books out of my storehouses, and the pen for quick writing, and give it to Enoch. And hand over to him from your hand the chosen and comforting books.

2 Enoch 22:10

There, three hundred and sixty-six books come from his hand, and with Idris it is thirty scrolls. The number changed along the way, but the figure remained: the first person to understand that knowledge which is not written down gets lost.

One detail in the Muslim tradition is more surprising. Idris, it is said, was also the first to sew clothes, and before him people covered themselves with skins. What has a prophet to do with a needle? Perhaps this is the tradition's way of saying that all of civilization, from the alphabet to the shirt, began with one man. It is curious that a later Jewish tradition, from the Middle Ages, also describes Enoch as a cobbler who, with every single stitch, turned his heart to heaven.

A meeting in the fourth heaven

The most famous tradition about Idris is tied to Muhammad's night journey to the heavens. In each heaven Muhammad meets a different prophet: Adam in the first, Moses in the sixth, Abraham in the seventh. In the fourth heaven it is Idris who receives him, and greets him with the words: welcome, upright brother and upright prophet.

How did he get there? One story, handed down in the name of Ka'b al-Ahbar, a Jew from Yemen who converted to Islam, tells that Idris had a friend among the angels. The angel carried him on his wings to the fourth heaven, and there the two met the angel of death, who was astonished to see him. I was ordered, said the angel of death, to take the soul of Idris in the fourth heaven, and I could not understand how a man whose place is on earth would get here. And so Idris died in heaven, and stayed there.

This story solves a problem that troubled the Jews as well. Can a human being really skip death? 1 Enoch leaves the question open:

Before all these things happened, Enoch was hidden away, and no one among humankind knew where he was hidden, where he lived, or what had become of him. In his days, all his doings were with the holy ones and with the Watchers.

1 Enoch 12:1–2

Some of the sages in the midrash Genesis Rabbah insisted that Enoch died like anyone else. The story about Idris found a middle way: he went up alive, and died up there. The two traditions wrestled with exactly the same question, and each solved it differently.

Enoch, Idris, Hermes

In the ninth century, in Baghdad, Idris acquired a third identity. The astrologer Abu Ma'shar wrote that the ancient Hermes, the legendary sage to whom the Greeks and the Egyptians attributed the beginning of the sciences, is the man the Hebrews call Enoch and the Arabs call Idris. This Hermes was known as the Thrice-Great, and the writings attributed to him kept the scholars of Europe busy down to the days of Newton. According to Abu Ma'shar, he lived in Egypt before the flood, foresaw its coming, and built temples on whose walls he engraved all knowledge, so that it would not be lost in the water.

So three great civilizations met around a single figure, a man who lived before the flood. The Jews told of a scribe who went up to heaven, the Greeks of a sage who discovered the sciences, and the Muslims of a prophet who received scrolls. The scholars of Baghdad looked at all three and decided they were the same person. There was a logic to it: every culture needs someone to stand at the head of its chain of knowledge, and when cultures meet, it is more convenient to merge the founding fathers than to fight over them.

A name without a solution

One thing remains obscure to this day, and that is the name. The Arab grammarians derived it from the root that means study, the same root that gives Hebrew the word midrash: Idris is the one who studied much. Modern scholars have proposed that the name comes from a Greek name that was garbled along the way, and they do not agree on which name it was.

Perhaps there is something fitting in that. Genesis gives Enoch four verses, the Quran gives Idris two lines, and in both cases later generations built an entire tower on that narrow base. We are used to thinking that great figures are born from long stories. Enoch and Idris show that sometimes a single sentence is enough, if it ends in the right place: and he was not, for God took him. And we raised him to a high place.