ughaibu

There's a notorious Bible story in which a guy is willing to kill his son to satisfy what he believes to be an instruction from god. Can somebody tell me if this same, or a similar story, is included in the Koran, please.

Toto

You are writing about Abraham, who came close to sacrificing his son Isaac. The Koran has a similar story about Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), but claims that he was told to sacrifice Ishmael.

Google a few key terms and take your pick:

link

ughaibu

Thanks. For me, the only relevant point is the infanticide, if the Koran also touts infanticide, I've got what I wanted.

Sheshbazzar

You may not have what you "wanted" then, as according to The Holy Koran, Ishmael was also NOT sacrificed, but also lived on to become the father of many people.

Assuredly, if you only look for "what you want", you will certainly "find" only what you want.

neilgodfrey

Infanticide is the killing of an infant. I don't know about the story in the Koran but few discussions about the Abraham-Isaac passage in the Bible seem to think of Isaac as an infant at the time. Some speak of the story being about an adult Isaac willingly going along with the command to be sacrificed.

Toto

Infanticide may be the wrong term. Both accounts show a willingness to contemplate human sacrifice.

Sheshbazzar

He must have been a rather precocious "infant" to have been able to carry on a conversation with Abraham his father in Gen. 22:7,
As he also does in the Koran 37.102

"Willingness", or "contemplation of", or to "give consideration to", does NOT constitute the performance of any act, and does not establish guilt.
This long established legal principal comes up in Law cases every day.
By record of both accounts Abraham remains innocent of the actual act.

Flagg

What about Jephthah?

neilgodfrey

The question is not the guilt of Abraham in carrying out the act, but in what is religiously sanctioned. The story makes a hero of a devotee for his willingness to unquestioningly carry out the act. God rewards him for the fact that he does not for a minute baulk at the suggestion like modern readers do.

God rewards him for being a fully willing filicide.

He is not rewarded for changing his mind: "Because you have . . . not withheld your son, your only son, . . . I will bless you . . . " (Gen 22:16-17)

Sheshbazzar

Actually, the question is not one of "guilt" or "innocence" at all, but one of substance.
The stories are nothing but stories, The "characters" and their alleged "words" nothing more than a medium to carry ideas.
These "characters" whether being designated as "God", "gods", "angels", "demons", or just men and women, all have less substance than even the thinnest of soap bubbles, and have no impact upon, or interaction with reality, beyond what is conceived in, and believed in, within the minds of men.
Sometimes actual individuals are incorporated as characters into the story, with dialog placed into their mouth, and sometimes the narrator is content to use them only as simple "stage pieces" employed only to give a semblance of an actual setting. The theme of the story may coalesce around an "individual", or a group, whether real or entirely imaginary.

The "story" of "Jephthah" is being discussed in another thread, and as it also is with this story of the character "Abraham" there was a political and religious agenda underlying and providing the motivation for the carefully crafted construction of these stories.

The man (or woman) that professes to be an unbeliever needs to be on particularly alert, that when reading these kinds of stories, they not become so caught up in them as to become the unawares victims of that very mind manipulation that they were so carefully contrived to elicit by playing upon unrecognized or unacknowledged biases, through the propaganda medium of their "STORY", making you to "choose sides" and so subtly situating it, and so maneuvering it, that you will be maneuvered into such a position as can ultimately be demonstrated as "being on the WRONG side", to your humiliation, and for their show of an "ethical" triumph over you.

Yes, there were ancient priests that "religiously sanctioned", accepted, and even demanded human sacrifices, and also virtually anything else that the human mind has ever been able to conceive of.

Yet there were also those who resisted, and as scholars, with what should be a genuine commitment to impartiality, we need to attain the detachment, and ability to recognise such stories as were carefully composed in an underlying spirit of strong opposition and aversion to what was commonly being done.

These Bible stories are virtually all, the written productions of those believers who were in a strenuous opposition to those practices that they are the recorders of.
As such the stories were contrived with a specific agenda and aim to "entrap" anyone who would attempt to oppose their position, or accuse them of doing of those things to which they were opposed.
Thus throughout the Books, there is a need to keep in mind who (or not knowing the individual, what party) was writing, and what their actual position would have been, particularly in the case of any text that might seem to condone, or to advocate an endorsement of such acts as human sacrifice, particularly if such a "conclusion" requires, or stands upon the "reading into the text" of such words, or of an"expanded translation" conforming to a preconceived personal bias or opinion.