Presented at
2025 Abraham and His Family Conference
Saturday, May 3 and Saturday, May 10, 2025
Sponsored by The Interpreter Foundation, Brigham Young University Religious Education,
Scripture Central, and FAIR Latter-day Saints
The figure of Ibrahim—Abraham, “the friend of God”—looms large in Islam and in its holy book, the Qurʾān. When assembled from the references to him that are scattered throughout the pages of the Qurʾān, much of the biblical narrative about him can be seen to be present. However, the emphases of the two scriptural texts are occasionally different, and the Qurʾān includes some story elements that are absent from the Bible. This paper will identify the parallels and comment upon some of the areas where the Qurʾān diverges from Abraham’s treatment in Genesis.
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Daniel C. Peterson
Daniel C. Peterson (PhD, University of California at Los Angeles) is a professor emeritus of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University, where he founded the University’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. He has published and spoken extensively on both Islamic and Latter-day Saint subjects. Formerly chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and an officer, editor, and author for its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, his professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Qur’an and on Islamic philosophical theology. He is the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God (Eerdmans, 2007). With his wife, he is executive producer of the films Witnesses (2021), Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (2022), and Six Days in August (2024).
