Prophet Abraham was known as Khalilullah, the beloved of God. Such a title is indeed profound. His love for God wasn’t one-sided or acknowledged partially. Prophet Abraham loved God, and God reciprocated his love.
Love, by its nature, is replete with trials. Prophet Abraham was tested at his weakest point – as a parent. God commanded him to sacrifice his only beloved son.
We can hardly imagine the situation of Prophet Ismail being sacrificed if Ismail, who was then still a teenager, had strongly resisted for various reasons. Surprisingly, it was Prophet Ismail’s strong faith that reassured his father that he was ready to be sacrificed.
Imagine if Siti Hajar, his wife, had refused to let her husband sacrifice their beloved son. Had she not been Siti Hajar, she probably would have strongly resisted and regarded her husband as a hallucinating psychopath.
Historical accounts that we read affirm that when Ismail was tempted by the devil, he repelled it with stones. Similarly, when Siti Hajar was lured by the devil to resist her husband’s actions, she also stoned the cursed creature.
Abraham succeeded in transcending his paternal feelings, Siti Hajar set aside her maternal instincts, and Prophet Ismail overcame his fear of death and pain of being sacrificed. They did this out of their shared love for God, a love that essentially becomes the source of all other forms of love.
In other words, a mother’s love for her child should support the mother’s love for God. This was practiced by Siti Hajar. A father’s love for his child should do the same. This was exemplified by Prophet Abraham. Fear of death should strengthen one’s love for God. This was demonstrated by Prophet Ismail. This is a godly family.
On the contrary, love for family should not serve as a barrier that distances one from God. If this happens, parents, in the name of love for their children, might do anything, even if it displeases God.
Loving Humanity
It’s difficult for us to interpret a dream that contains a message as a command from God to sacrifice our own child. Even for Prophet Abraham, he needed to experience the dream three times to ensure its purpose, going through stages of doubt, understanding, and execution.
If there’s doubt, the received information is half accepted and half rejected. When it reaches the level of understanding, it means recognizing that it is indeed a command from God, and the information is fully accepted. But it’s not necessarily implemented until the third stage, when understanding becomes conviction that leads to action.
Prophet Abraham’s conviction was firm, but he was not authoritarian. He discussed it first with his family. His family agreed. They shared the same strong faith. According to Prof. Quraish Shihab, this demonstrates Prophet Abraham’s success in molding his noble personality and instilling the same in his family.
So it’s no surprise that a teenager like Prophet Ismail – who could typically be unstable and skeptical, hence prone to teenage misdemeanors – actually had a heart as firm as his father’s towards God. The key to a family lies with the father as the head of the household.
When God commanded the Prophet to sacrifice his son, three crucial messages were embedded in it:
First, human sacrifices were common in certain rituals at that time. If people were willing to sacrifice human lives to fulfill their needs, then sacrificing everything, including humans, for God should be prioritized and strived for. God’s command to Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son fits into this context.
Second, the replacement of Prophet Ismail with a ram symbolizes an important message that God highly values humans. It’s not appropriate for lives to be sacrificed in the name of anything, including in the name of God. Besides refusing human sacrifices, God also urges humans to take good care of themselves. This includes protecting one of the five essential elements of life.
The essence of loving God is to love humans as His creations. Fight for God by respecting others. Sacrifice all that you have for God by helping others. If someone is sick, visit them, for God is there. If someone is hungry, feed them, for God is also there. This is truly a humane message.
Third, when the ram was sacrificed by Prophet Abraham, there’s also a significant message that we should ‘sacrifice’ the beastly tendencies within us. Inside us, there are animalistic traits constantly driving us to hurt others, deplete natural resources, and be extremely selfish. These need to be ‘sacrificed’. They need to be given up for us to love God even more.
