Prophet Ilyas (AS) – The Caller Against Baal حضرت الیاس علیہ السلام – بعل کے خلاف پکارنے والے

After the death of Sulaiman, the kingdom of the Children of Israel split and its people drifted. Within a few generations, the tribes that had received the Tawrah and seen the sanctuary of Jerusalem raised were worshipping the gods of their neighbours. The Quran mentions this decline only in passing, but it names one of the prophets who was sent to arrest it: 'And indeed, Ilyas was from among the messengers' (As-Saffat 37:123).

Ilyas is named only twice in the Quran, here and in the list of prophets in Surah Al-Anam, where he is counted among the righteous: 'And Zakariya and Yahya and Isa and Ilyas, and all were of the righteous' (Al-Anam 6:85). The commentators identify him with the prophet called Elijah in the Hebrew scriptures. Ibn Kathir records that he was of the descendants of Harun, the brother of Musa, and that he was sent to the people of Baalbek, a city west of Damascus in the Beqaa valley of present-day Lebanon, whose name itself preserves the name of the idol its people served. These details come from the historians and the People of the Book; the Quran gives us only the name of the idol and the substance of the call.

The idol was Baal. Baal was the storm and fertility god of the Canaanites and Phoenicians, the god to whom the farmers of that land attributed rain and harvest. His worship had spread among the northern tribes of Israel through intermarriage with the surrounding peoples and through the patronage of their kings. The Bible records that the kings of the northern kingdom built temples to Baal and that hundreds of priests served him; the Quran does not go into this but states the single fact that matters: a people who had been given the Book were calling upon a statue.

It is worth pausing on what this meant. The Children of Israel had not forgotten Allah altogether. They knew the stories of Musa and the parting of the sea, of Dawud and Sulaiman. But they had added Baal alongside Allah, or in place of Him, in the practical matters of life, the rain, the crops, the children. This is the form that shirk most often takes: not a denial of the Creator, but the attribution of His gifts to something else. Ilyas's whole message, as the Quran records it, is aimed at this precise error.

Ibn Kathir notes that among the reports of the historians there are stories of a great drought in the land in the days of Ilyas, of the king's hostility to him, and of his hiding in the wilderness. These reports echo the biblical narrative and have no chain of transmission to the Prophet ﷺ. They may be mentioned as what the People of the Book narrate, but nothing of them is established, and the Quran gives no hint of them. What the Quran establishes is that a prophet stood up in a land of Baal and spoke.

The Quran preserves the words of Ilyas's call in four verses, and they are a model of how a prophet speaks to a people who have known the truth and abandoned it. 'When he said to his people: Will you not fear Allah? Do you call upon Baal and leave the best of creators, Allah, your Lord and the Lord of your first forefathers?' (As-Saffat 37:124-126).

He begins where every prophet begins, with taqwa: 'Will you not fear Allah?' The question assumes that they know Allah; it does not introduce Him to them. Then he names their error without euphemism: 'Do you call upon Baal?' The verb is 'call upon,' the word for supplication and prayer. Their sin was not that they admired a statue but that they prayed to it, asked it for rain, thanked it for harvest. And he sets against the idol three descriptions of Allah that answer every excuse a Baal-worshipper could give.

First, 'the best of creators.' The Arabic phrase, ahsan al-khaliqin, is used in the Quran in only one other place, to describe the creation of man in the womb (Al-Muminun 23:14). The people of Baal believed their god gave fertility to the land and to women. Ilyas reminds them who it is that actually creates; whatever hands shape or fashion, the One who creates from nothing is Allah, and He is the best of all who are called creators or makers. Baal, a figure carved by men, could not create anything.

Second, 'your Lord.' Allah is their Rabb, the One who sustains them, provides for them, owns them. The rain they attributed to Baal came from Him; the crops they gave thanks to Baal for were His gift. To call upon Baal was to thank the wrong benefactor.

Third, 'the Lord of your first forefathers.' Here Ilyas appeals to their own history. Their ancestors, Ibrahim, Ishaq, Yaqub, Musa, Dawud, worshipped Allah alone. Baal was not the god of their fathers but an import from the nations around them. In a single phrase, Ilyas told them that their new worship was a betrayal not only of Allah but of everything that made them a people.

The response was the one that prophets have faced in every age. 'And they denied him, so indeed, they will be brought for punishment' (As-Saffat 37:127). The Quran does not record their arguments, their threats, or what they did to him. It records only that they denied him, and it records the consequence: they will be brought, muhdarun, made to appear before Allah for punishment. Then it adds an exception that is the whole hope of the story: 'Except the chosen servants of Allah' (As-Saffat 37:128). Some among them believed and were saved from that fate.

The Quran tells us nothing about how many believed or how the confrontation played out. The historians, following the Bible, narrate a contest between Ilyas and the priests of Baal on a mountain, fire from heaven, the slaughter of the priests, and the end of the drought. Ibn Kathir mentions these as what the People of the Book relate, and no Muslim is bound to accept them; the Quran's silence is itself a lesson. What Allah wanted preserved was the call, not the spectacle. 'Will you not fear Allah? Do you call upon Baal and leave the best of creators?' Those words are enough, and they apply to every people in every age who ask of anything other than Allah what only Allah can give.

The Quran closes the story of Ilyas with the same honour it gives to Nuh, Ibrahim, Musa and Harun in the same surah: 'And We left for him favourable mention among later generations: Peace upon Ilyas. Indeed, We thus reward the doers of good. Indeed, he was of Our believing servants' (As-Saffat 37:129-132). Three things are given to him here. His name is preserved with honour among those who came after. Allah Himself sends peace upon him, a greeting recited by every reader of the Quran until the end of time. And he is placed among the doers of good and the believing servants, the two titles that the surah uses for the greatest of the prophets.

In the verse of greeting, the name appears in a lengthened form, 'Il Yasin.' The scholars of recitation and tafsir explain that this is a variant of the same name, used here for the rhythm of the verse, just as Tur Sina is also called Tur Sinin; Ibn Kathir and the majority understand 'Il Yasin' to mean Ilyas himself, or Ilyas and his followers. A minority of Shia commentators read it as 'Al Yasin,' the family of Yasin, and take it as a reference to the family of the Prophet ﷺ; this reading is not supported by the context, in which every greeting of peace is addressed to the prophet whose story has just been told.

Of his death, the Quran says nothing. The People of the Book relate that Elijah did not die but was raised to heaven in a chariot of fire, and some Muslim storytellers took this further, claiming that Ilyas is still alive, that he and Khidr meet every year at Hajj, and that Ilyas is in charge of the deserts while Khidr is in charge of the seas. Ibn Kathir examined these reports and judged them to have no sound basis; the hadiths narrated on the subject are weak or fabricated, and the claim that any prophet other than Isa (AS) is alive is not established. The sound position is that Ilyas was a mortal messenger who died as the other messengers died, and that Allah has concealed the time and manner of his death as He concealed those of many prophets.

Ilyas was succeeded in prophethood by Al-Yasa, who is named directly after him in Surah Al-Anam and who, according to the historians, had been his companion and student. Through Al-Yasa, the call that Ilyas had begun continued among the Children of Israel for another generation.

The lesson of Ilyas is not in events but in a sentence. He is the prophet whose entire recorded message fits in two verses, and those two verses are a complete argument against shirk: the one you call upon cannot create, cannot sustain, and was never the god of those who came before you. The Prophet ﷺ fought the same error in Makkah against Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat, and the Quran answered the pagans of Makkah with the same logic Ilyas had used: 'Is there a creator other than Allah who provides for you from the heaven and earth? There is no deity except Him' (Fatir 35:3). Baal has been forgotten; the words spoken against him are recited in every mosque on earth.