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The story of Al-Uzayr (peace be upon him) in the Quran and the Islamic tradition: verses, hadiths and the views of the exegetes, faithfully translated from Arabic.
Updated on 06 September 2026 at 3:41 AM
This is the story of al-Uzayr. Al-Hafiz Abu al-Qasim Ibn Asakir said: he is Uzayr ibn Hawya – it is said ibn Surayqa ibn Irna ibn Ayyub ibn Dhurtha ibn Ara ibn Taqa ibn al-Sabu ibn Finhas ibn al-Azir ibn Harun ibn Imran; it is also said: Uzayr ibn Surukha. Some traditions mention that his tomb is in Damascus. Ibn Asakir reported a statement attributed to the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him), from Ibn Abbas:
"I do not know whether Tubba' was cursed or not, and I do not know whether Uzayr was a prophet or not."
with similar chains reported from Abu Hurayra.
By the way of Ishaq ibn Bishr – whose way is abandoned – from Juwaybir and Muqatil, from al-Dahhak, from Ibn Abbas: Uzayr was among those whom Bukht Nassar took into captivity, while he was still a young boy; when he reached forty years, Allah gave him wisdom, and no one memorized the Torah better than him nor knew more of it. He was mentioned among the prophets until Allah erased his name from that group, when he questioned his Lord about the decree. "This report is weak, interrupted and objectionable. And Allah knows best."
Ishaq ibn Bishr reported, from Sa'id ibn Abi Aruba, from Qatada, from al-Hasan, from Abdullah ibn Salam: Uzayr is the servant of whom Allah said: "We caused him to die a hundred years, then We raised him up."
Ishaq ibn Bishr said: Sa'id ibn Bashir, from Qatada, from Ka'b; Sa'id ibn Abi Aruba, from Qatada, from al-Hasan; Muqatil; Juwaybir, from al-Dahhak, from Ibn Abbas; Abdullah ibn Ishaq al-Suddi from his father, from Mujahid, from Ibn Abbas; Idris from his grandfather; Wahb ibn Munabbih – "all of them reported the story of Uzayr to me, some adding to others": Uzayr was a righteous, wise servant. One day he went out to a property of his that he tended; on his way back he came upon ruins as mid-afternoon rose and the heat seized him. He entered the ruins mounted on his donkey, dismounted – with him a basket of figs and a basket of grapes – and sat in the shade of those ruins. He took out a bowl he had, pressed the grapes into the bowl, threw into it a piece of dry bread to soak it and eat it, then lay back, resting his feet against the wall, and looked at the roofs of those houses and what was in them, standing on their rooftops, their people gone.
He saw decayed bones and said: "How will Allah give life to these after their death? – not doubting that Allah would revive them, but saying it in wonder. Allah sent the angel of death, who took his soul; Allah kept him dead a hundred years, and during those hundred years affairs and events passed through the children of Israel. Allah sent to Uzayr an angel who created his heart so he might understand by it, and his two eyes so he might see by them – so he might understand how Allah gives life to the dead – then reassembled his creation while he watched, clothed his bones with flesh, hair and skin, then breathed into him the spirit – all of it while he saw and understood.
He sat up. The angel said to him: "How long did you remain? He said: "I remained a day or part of a day" – for he had slept at the start of the afternoon and was raised late in the day, the sun not yet set – "or part of a day: a full day did not pass for me. The angel said: "You remained a hundred years.
Look at your food and your drink" – the food: the dry bread; the drink: the juice he had pressed into the bowl. There they were, unchanged, the juice and the dry bread – that is His saying "has not altered", meaning has not changed; likewise the figs and the grapes, fresh, having changed nothing of their state.
He seemed to deny it in his heart. The angel said to him: "Have you denied what I told you? Look at your donkey." He looked: his donkey, its bones bleached, become scattered bones. The angel called to the donkey's bones: they answered and came from every direction, and the angel assembled them while Uzayr watched; then he clothed them with sinews and tendons, covered them with flesh, caused skin and hair to grow on them, then breathed into it. The donkey stood up, head and ears raised to the sky, braying and thinking the Resurrection had come. That is His saying: "Look at the bones: how We raise them, then clothe them with flesh" (al-Baqara, 259) – that is: look at your donkey's bones, how We join them together in their joints until they become bones shaped like a donkey without flesh – then look how We clothe them with flesh. When it became clear to him he said: "I know that Allah has power over all things" – of reviving the dead and anything else.
He mounted his donkey until he came to his locality; the people did not recognize him, he did not recognize the people or their houses, and he went on bewildered until he came to his home. There was an old woman, blind and bedridden, on whom a hundred and twenty years had passed: she had been their servant, and Uzayr had gone out from among them when she was twenty – she knew him and recognized him; old age had brought her infirmity. Uzayr said to her: "O you there! Is this the dwelling of Uzayr?
She said: "Yes, this is the dwelling of Uzayr," then she wept and said: "I have seen no one, for so many years, mention Uzayr – the people have forgotten him. He said: "I am Uzayr: Allah kept me dead a hundred years, then raised me. She said: "Glory to Allah! Uzayr, we lost him a hundred years ago and have heard no mention of him.
He said: "I am Uzayr. She said: "Uzayr is a man whose supplications are answered: he prays for the sick and the afflicted health and healing. Pray to Allah to restore my sight so I may see you; if you are Uzayr, I will recognize you. He prayed to his Lord and passed his hand over her eyes: they were healed.
He took her hand and said: "Rise, by the permission of Allah"; Allah released her legs and she stood up, sound, as if she had sprung from a shackle. She looked and said: "I bear witness that you are Uzayr," and went to the quarter of the children of Israel, in their assemblies and gatherings – and Uzayr's son, an old man of a hundred and eighteen years, and his sons' sons, elders in the gathering, were there. She called to them: "This is Uzayr come to you. They called her a liar.
She said: "I am so-and-so, your freedwoman: his Lord prayed for me, restored my sight and released my legs; and he claims Allah kept him dead a hundred years then raised him. The people rose and came to him, looked at him, and his son said: "My father had a black mark between his shoulders. He uncovered his shoulders: it was him, Uzayr. The children of Israel said: "Among us, none memorized the Torah, according to what has reached us, except Uzayr – and Bukht Nassar burned the Torah and nothing remained of it but what the men had memorized: write it for us.
His father Surukha had buried the Torah in the days of Bukht Nassar in a place known to no one but Uzayr; Uzayr took them to that place, dug, and brought out the Torah – the leaves had gone moldy, the writing had faded. He sat in the shade of a tree, the children of Israel around him, and renewed the Torah for them. Two meteors descended from the sky and entered into him, and he remembered the Torah and renewed it for the children of Israel. It is from there that the Jews said: "Uzayr is the son of Allah" – Allah is transcendent and exalted – because of what happened with the two meteors, the renewal of the Torah and his taking charge of the children of Israel's affairs.
He had renewed the Torah for them in the Sawad, at Dayr Hazqil – the monastery of Ezekiel. The town in which he died is called Sayrabad. Ibn Abbas said: "he was as Allah said: that We might make you a sign for the people" – meaning for the children of Israel: he sat with his sons who were elders, him being young; for he died at forty and Allah raised him young, as on the day of his death. Ibn Abbas said: "he was raised after Bukht Nassar"; al-Hasan said the same.
Abu Hatim al-Sijistani composed, in the sense of Ibn Abbas's statement, these verses:
Black-haired, a youth before him his son, and before him his son's son, older than he; he sees his son's son an old man dragging on a staff, beard white and head gone grey. And the son has no strength or merit of vigor: he walks as a child walks, stumbling. His son is counted among the people ninety pilgrimages and twenty – he no longer runs nor struts. And his father's age has passed only forty of them, the grandson ninety years weathered among the people. This is not reasonable, if you are knowledgeable; and if you do not know, by ignorance you are excused.
Chapter. The well-known account is that Uzayr is a prophet of the prophets of the children of Israel, that he lived between Dawud and Sulayman, between Zakariya and Yahya, and that when there remained among the children of Israel no one memorizing the Torah, Allah inspired him with its memorization and he set it out before the children of Israel. Wahb ibn Munabbih said: Allah commanded an angel who descended with a ladle of light and cast it into the mouth of Uzayr, who copied out the Torah letter by letter until he had finished it.
Ibn Asakir reported from Ibn Abbas that he questioned Abdullah ibn Salam about the saying of Allah: "The Jews said: Uzayr is the son of Allah" (at-Tawba, 30) – why did they say that? Ibn Salam related to him the writing of the Torah by Uzayr for the children of Israel from memory, and the saying of the children of Israel: "Musa could not bring us the Torah except in a book, whereas Uzayr brought it to us without a book." Groups of them accused him and said: "Uzayr is the son of Allah."
That is why many scholars say the continuous transmission of the Torah was interrupted in the time of Uzayr – a very plausible view if Uzayr was not a prophet, as Ata ibn Abi Rabah and al-Hasan al-Basri held, in what Ishaq ibn Bishr reported from Muqatil ibn Sulayman, from Ata, and from Uthman ibn Ata al-Khurasani, from his father, and Muqatil, from Ata ibn Abi Rabah who said: "In the period of interruption there were nine things: Bukht Nassar, the garden of Sanaa, the garden of Saba, the people of the Trench, the affair of Hasura, the people of the Cave, the people of the Elephant, the city of Antioch, and the affair of Tubba'."
Ishaq ibn Bishr reported that Sa'id, from Qatada, from al-Hasan, said: "The affair of Uzayr and Bukht Nassar took place in the period of interruption." It is established in the Sahih that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said:
"The closest of people to the son of Maryam is me: there is no prophet between him and me."
Wahb ibn Munabbih said: he lived between Sulayman and Issa (peace be upon them).
Ibn Asakir reported, from Anas ibn Malik and Ata ibn al-Sa'ib, that Uzayr lived in the time of Musa ibn Imran and asked leave to see him, but Musa did not grant it – because of the question he had asked about the decree – and Uzayr left saying: "A hundred deaths are lighter than the humiliation of an instant."
And in the sense of Uzayr's saying, the saying of some poets:
The free man may endure the sword, and refuses patience before injustice; he prefers death to a state in which he cannot honor his guest.
As for what Ibn Asakir and others reported – from Ibn Abbas, Nawf al-Bikali, Sufyan ath-Thawri and others – that he questioned about the decree and his name was erased from the mention of the prophets: that report is objectionable, its authenticity requires examination, and it seems taken from the Israelite narratives. Abd al-Razzaq and Qutayba ibn Sa'id reported, from Ja'far ibn Sulayman, from Abu Imran al-Jawni, from Nawf al-Bikali who said: Uzayr, in his private words with his Lord, said: "Lord, You create a creature, and You lead astray whom You will and guide whom You will." He was told: "Desist from this." He returned, and he was told: "You will certainly desist from this, or I shall erase your name from the prophets: I am not questioned about what I do, while they are questioned." That implies the threat would have befallen him had he returned – he did not return, so his name was not erased. And Allah knows best.
The majority of reporters, apart from at-Tirmidhi, reported – from the hadith of Yunus ibn Yazid, from al-Zuhri, from Sa'id and Abu Salama, from Abu Hurayra, and Shu'ayb reported likewise from Abu al-Zinad, from al-A'raj, from Abu Hurayra – that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said:
"A prophet among the prophets sat under a tree; an ant bit him. He ordered his luggage removed and the ant taken out from under it, then ordered it burned with fire. And Allah revealed to him: why not one single ant?"
Ishaq ibn Bishr reported, from Ibn Jurayj, from Abd al-Wahhab ibn Mujahid, from his father: that prophet was Uzayr. And likewise it was reported from Ibn Abbas and al-Hasan al-Basri. And Allah knows best.