Ibrahim

Ibrahim is a patriarchal figure recalled through two linked acts: leaving Hagar and their son, Ismail, in a waterless valley, and becoming the honored visitor whose presence the people of Jahilia celebrate. The contrast between Hagar’s peril and the pilgrims’ festive remembrance makes his story a point of tension between survival, religious authority, and public commemoration.

Identity and remembered history

Ibrahim does not appear as a participant in the novel’s present-day action. Instead, his history is retold within Gibreel Farishta’s visions and invoked in Jahilia’s religious calendar. In the account of Hagar and Ismail, Ibrahim brings them into the wilderness and leaves them there. When Hagar asks whether this is God’s will, he answers that it is, then departs. The narrative treats that appeal to divine purpose uneasily, observing that men have used God to justify what cannot be justified.

Hagar, Ismail, and the Zamzam Spring

After Ibrahim leaves, Hagar nurses Ismail until her milk runs out. Desperate for help, she runs between the hills of Safa and Marwah, searching for signs of human habitation, but finds none. Gibreel then shows her the waters of the Zamzam Spring, allowing Hagar and Ismail to survive. The account gives Ibrahim’s departure a lasting consequence, but its emphasis falls on Hagar’s search and the water that answers it.

Gibreel’s visions extend the spring’s history beyond this first revelation. After the Jurhum fill Zamzam with mud and golden gazelles, the spring is lost for a time; Gibreel later points it out to Muttalib, the father of the silver-haired child who will father the businessman. The repeated revelation connects Hagar’s rescue to a longer history of loss and rediscovery, while keeping Gibreel—not Ibrahim—as the figure who reveals the water.

Jahilia’s commemoration

Jahilia celebrates the Festival of Ibrahim with a great fair. Pilgrims gather in the valley, drink date-palm wine, and move among stalls and perfumes. Yet the narrator distinguishes what they commemorate from what Hagar’s story might lead a reader to expect: they are not gathered to celebrate her survival, but to honor the valley through Ibrahim’s visit. Worship and spending accompany that choice of emphasis.

The juxtaposition makes Ibrahim’s remembered authority more than a family story. Hagar’s abandonment and rescue supply the account’s human stakes; the festival turns the same sacred history toward the prestige of a patriarchal visitation and a public gathering. The distance between those emphases gives the episode its critical force.