Israfil

He has been standing in the same posture since before there were any people to end. The horn rests against his lower lip, its wide bell turned out over the sky, and his head is tilted slightly, the way a man tilts his head when he is straining to catch a sound from another room. He is listening for one word. It has not come.

The Qur’an does not name him. It names Jibril, it names Mikal, it names the two who taught sorcery at Babylon, and on the question of who holds the trumpet it says nothing at all. What it gives instead is the noise. The horn will be blown, and everyone in the heavens and on the earth will fall, except whom God wills; then it will be blown a second time, and they will be standing, looking about them. More than twenty verses circle that sound without once turning to look at the figure making it. The name Israfil arrives afterwards, out of hadith and commentary, and once it arrives it never leaves.

Where he appears by name in the canonical collections, it is not as a destroyer. Aisha was asked what the Prophet said when he rose in the night to pray, and she reported that he opened with this: God, Lord of Jibril and Mika’il and Israfil, Originator of the heavens and the earth, knower of the unseen and the seen. Three names spoken in the dark, by a man about to ask for guidance. The angel of the world’s end is called on there as a kind of witness.

The waiting itself is the oldest picture of him. One widely circulated report has the Prophet saying he could not be at ease when the keeper of the horn had already set it to his mouth, turned his ear and bent his brow, ready for the order. His companions found this unbearable and asked what they were supposed to do with it. He told them to say: God is enough for us, and an excellent guardian is He. The report never gives the keeper a name. Later commentary supplied one, and the identification hardened until it was simply assumed.

The physical description comes out of the eschatological handbooks, and it is unusually precise for a being nobody claims to have seen. The Kitab ahwal al-qiyama gives him four wings: one reaching east, one west, one folded down over his legs, and one held up across his head and face, because he cannot bear to look at what he stands nearest to. No angel stands closer to the Throne. Seven veils hang between him and it, each one five hundred years of travelling from the next, and seventy veils hang between him and Jibril. While he stands, the trumpet rests on his right thigh with its mouth at his lips. Other traditions give him twelve wings rather than four, which is the sort of disagreement that usually means the number was never the point.

Elsewhere the picture is stranger and considerably larger. He is described with a vast hairy body covered over with mouths and tongues, stretching from the seventh heaven up to the Throne, and with a grief that takes him three times in every day and three times in every night, when he looks down into hell and weeps. Set beside the manuscript paintings, where he is a poised winged figure with a long slender horn, the two Israfils barely fit inside the same tradition. Both were copied for centuries. Nobody seems to have felt obliged to choose.

He is also, in several tellings, the one who writes. The Preserved Tablet is white pearl, its length seven times the distance from heaven to earth, fixed to the Throne, and everything that will happen up to the resurrection is written on it; Israfil carries the pen in one wing and sets down God’s commands for the other archangels to carry out. Al-Suyuti’s great collection of angel traditions makes him the nearest of all angels to God and the channel through which orders reach the rest. It is a peculiar double office. He is the clerk of everything that is going to happen, holding the instrument that stops it.

Where he came from is answered the way it is answered for all of them: the angels were made of light, the jinn of smokeless fire, and Adam of what has already been described. That is the whole account, and the tradition does not extend it much. What it does extend is his part in Adam’s making. In the storytellers’ expansions of the creation, God sends the great angels down to take a handful of earth from the four corners of the world, and the earth refuses them one after another, and Israfil comes back with nothing, as the others do. Only the Angel of Death takes what he was sent for. The angel who will end humanity failed to help begin it.

One tradition puts him far closer to human history than any of this. Ibn Sa’d preserves a report from al-Sha’bi that Israfil, not Gabriel, was attached to Muhammad for the first three years of his prophethood, present and known to him but never seen, until Gabriel took over and stayed. Ibn Sa’d also preserves the flat contradiction: al-Waqidi told him the learned men of Medina knew nothing of any such thing, and that from the first revelation to the Prophet’s last day there was never anyone with him but Gabriel. Both sit on the same page of the same book. The tradition kept the argument instead of settling it.

Then the order comes. The trumpet is brought up to his face, he folds the four wings in, and he blows, and the sound goes out through the heavens and the earth and takes the legs from under every living thing at once. The Qur’an gives two blasts. The commentators argue for three, splitting the first into a blast of terror and a blast of death before the blast that raises everyone. What nobody argues is that Israfil goes down with the rest. He is inside the creation he is dismantling.

His powers are all one power, and it is vast and entirely unusable at his own discretion. The horn does not wound; it simply ends the arrangement by which anything is alive, and then, blown again, undoes that ending too. He stands nearer to God than any other angel and passes on what he is given. His voice is held to be the most beautiful in creation, which is why one tradition makes him the muezzin of paradise, calling the blessed to prayer with the same throat that will call time on the world.

The limits are just as total. He cannot blow. He has held one attitude for the entire duration of everything, with the metal warm against his mouth, and nothing in his own will can shift him a hair. He cannot look at God, and spends part of his strength holding a wing across his face. He cannot look at hell without breaking down. And when the note finally leaves the horn it will kill him too, along with every other angel, and he will be raised with everyone else to stand in the crowd and wait on a verdict he spent eternity announcing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Israfil in Islam?

Israfil is the archangel who will blow the trumpet to announce the Day of Resurrection. He is not named in the Qur’an, but he appears by name in hadith and is described at length in later commentary and eschatological writing. Tradition counts him one of the four great archangels, alongside Jibril, Mika’il and the Angel of Death.

What is Israfil’s trumpet called?

The trumpet is called al-sur, and sometimes al-qarn, the horn. Traditional descriptions have it resting on Israfil’s right thigh with its mouthpiece already at his lips while he waits for the command. He has held that position since before the world was peopled and has never once sounded it.

How many times will the trumpet be blown?

The Qur’an describes two blasts: one that fells everyone in the heavens and the earth, and a second that raises them standing. Many commentators count three instead, separating an opening blast of terror from the blast of death, followed by the blast of resurrection. The disagreement is old and was never resolved.

Is Israfil the same as the archangel Raphael?

The two are often equated in Western writing, but the identification is a comparative convention rather than an Islamic claim. Israfil has no clear counterpart in Jewish or Christian angelology, and different writers have connected him instead to Uriel or to Seraphiel. Nothing in the Islamic sources makes the equation.

Does Israfil die when he blows the trumpet?

Yes. The blast that kills everything living kills Israfil as well, because the tradition places him inside the creation he is dismantling. He is then raised with everyone else for the judgement he spent his existence waiting to announce.

Related Entries

Angels, Buraq, Dajjal, Adam, Jesus, Ifrit, Shaitan, Ghoul, Marid, Heimdallr, Surtr, Grim Reaper