Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)

¹⁰⁰ The classical commentators have indulged in much speculation as to what these commandments (kalimāt, lit., “words”) were. Since, however, the Qurʾān does not specify them, it must be presumed that what is meant here is simply Abraham’s complete submission to whatever commandments he received from God.

¹⁰¹ This passage, read in conjunction with the two preceding verses, refutes the contention of the children of Israel that by virtue of their descent from Abraham, whom God made “a leader of men”, they are “God’s chosen people”. The Qurʾān makes it clear that the exalted status of Abraham was not something that would automatically confer a comparable status on his physical descendants, and certainly not on the sinners among them.

¹⁰² The Temple (al-bayt) – lit., “the House [of Worship]” – mentioned here is the Kaʿbah in Mecca. In other places the Qurʾān speaks of it as “the Ancient Temple” (al-bayt al-ʿatīq), and frequently also as “the Inviolable House of Worship” (al-masjid al-ḥarām). Its prototype is said to have been built by Abraham as the first temple ever dedicated to the One God (see 3:96), and which for this reason has been instituted as the direction of prayer (qiblah) for all Muslims, and as the goal of the annually recurring pilgrimage (ḥajj). It is to be noted that even in pre-Islamic times the Kaʿbah was associated with the memory of Abraham, whose personality had always been in the foreground of Arabian thought. According to very ancient Arabian traditions, it was at the site of what later became Mecca that Abraham, in order to placate Sarah, abandoned his Egyptian bondwoman Hagar and their child Ishmael after he had brought them there from Canaan. This is by no means improbable if one bears in mind that for a camel-riding bedouin (and Abraham was certainly one) a journey of twenty or even thirty days has never been anything out of the ordinary. At first glance, the Biblical statement (Genesis xii, 14) that it was “in the wilderness of Beersheba” (i.e., in the southernmost tip of Palestine) that Abraham left Hagar and Ishmael would seem to conflict with the Qurʾanic account. This seeming contradiction, however, disappears as soon as we remember that to the ancient, town-dwelling Hebrews the term “wilderness of Beersheba” comprised all the desert regions south of Palestine, including the Ḥijāz. It was at the place where they had been abandoned that Hagar and Ishmael, after having discovered the spring which is now called the Well of Zamzam, eventually settled; and it may have been that very spring which in time induced a wandering group of bedouin families belonging to the South-Arabian (Qaḥṭanī) tribe of Jurhum to settle there. Ishmael later married a girl of this tribe, and so became the progenitor of the mustaʿribah (“Arabianized”) tribes – thus called on account of their descent from a Hebrew father and a Qaḥṭanī mother. As for Abraham, he is said to have often visited Hagar and Ishmael; and it was on the occasion of one of these periodic visits that he, aided by Ishmael, erected the original structure of the Kaʿbah. (For more detailed accounts of the Abrahamic tradition, see Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ, Kitāb al-ʿIlm, Ṭabarī’s Tāʾrīkh al-Umam, Ibn Saʿd, Ibn Hishām, Masʿūdī’s Murūj adh-Dhahab, Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al- Buldān, and other early Muslim historians.)

¹⁰³ This may refer to the immediate vicinity of the Kaʿbah or, more probably (Manār I ,461 f.), to the sacred precincts (ḥaram) surrounding it. The word amn (lit., “safety”) denotes in this context a sanctuary for all living beings.