Prophet Ibrahim Story for Kids

Looking up

The Quran gives Ibrahim's reasoning as a sequence. He saw a star and said, This is my lord — and when it set, he said, I do not like those that set. Then the moon, and the same. Then the sun, larger than both, and the same again. And then: Indeed, I have turned my face toward He who created the heavens and the earth (6:76-79).

Tell this exactly as the Quran has it, in three steps, because the steps are the story. He was not given the answer. He tried something, noticed what was wrong with it, and kept going.

The idols and the axe

His people worshipped statues. He asked his father and his people plainly, What are these statues to which you are devoted? (21:52), and got the answer children hear everywhere: we found our fathers doing it.

So he broke them — all except the largest, that they might return to it (21:58). When they came back and demanded to know who had done it, he said: Rather, this — the largest of them — did it, so ask them, if they should speak (21:63).

Then comes the best moment in the passage. They turned to one another and said, Indeed, you are the wrongdoers (21:64) — for a moment they worked it out themselves. Then they went back to where they had started: You have already known that these do not speak (21:65).

Children find this funny, and they are meant to. Ibrahim did not lecture anybody. He set up a question they had to answer, and for one moment they answered it honestly.

The fire

Their response was to burn him. They said: Burn him and support your gods, if you are to act (21:68). And then one of the shortest and most quoted verses in the Quran: We said: O fire, be coolness and safety upon Ibrahim (21:69).

The Quran adds: And they intended for him harm, but We made them the greatest losers (21:70). It does not describe the fire, how long he was in it, or what he felt. One command, and it is over.

The son, and the valley

Later, Ibrahim saw in a dream that he was sacrificing his son, and told him. The son's answer is what the passage is built around: O my father, do as you are commanded. You will find me, if Allah wills, of the steadfast (37:102). At the moment of doing it he was called and told he had fulfilled the vision, and a great sacrifice was given in the son's place (37:104-107).

The Quran also records the du'a he made when he left his family in a barren valley by the Sacred House (14:37), and it records him and Isma'il raising the foundations of that House together, saying, Our Lord, accept this from us (2:127).

Muslims remember Ibrahim’s obedience every year at Eid al-Adha. What a family does on that day, and why, is on our page on Eid for kids.

Where the story is in the Quran

Read the passage itself with your child rather than only the retelling. Four verses of the actual Quran are worth more than a page of summary, and a child who has heard the story then meets it in the words it was revealed in.

The one idea to leave a child with

He asked questions, and asking was never the opposite of believing. The Quran shows him testing the star, the moon and the sun, and even asking to be shown how the dead are given life (2:260) — and none of it counted against him.

What age is this story for?

The idols and the axe work from about five and are genuinely funny to children. The reasoning about the star and moon suits six or seven. The sacrifice in 37:99-113 is for about nine, and it must be told with the son's own answer in it, because that is what makes it bearable.

Which son was it, and what else got added

The passage in Surah as-Saffat (37:99-113) does not name the son. Classical scholars differed, the majority holding that it was Isma'il, and the ordering of the passage — the news of Ishaq comes afterwards, in 37:112 — is the main argument for that view.

The honest thing to tell a child is that the Quran does not name him and that most scholars have held it was Isma'il. That is more truthful than stating it flatly, and it costs the story nothing, because its weight is in the son's answer and not in his name.

Two other things worth knowing: the familiar details about the king's name and about a catapult being built for the fire come from later material rather than the Quran. The Quran records the argument with a king (2:258) without naming him, and gives the fire exactly one verse.