Introduction

ʿUmar Sulaymān al-Ashqar was born in Palestine in 1940 and pursued advanced Islamic studies in Egypt before establishing himself as one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Islamic creed and eschatology. He taught for many years at the University of Jordan and at the Islamic University of Madinah, and his output covers jurisprudence, creed, and a celebrated series on the unseen world that became standard references in Arabic-language Islamic education. ʿĀlam al-Malāʾika al-Abrār, translated here as The World of the Angels, is the first volume in that series and was first published in the 1980s. It brought together in a single, systematically organized work the entirety of what the Quran and authentic Sunnah disclose about the angelic creation, a task that had not been undertaken with the same comprehensiveness in modern Arabic scholarship, and it established the framework for the volumes on the jinn, the resurrection, paradise, and the fire that followed.

The book is organized around the major questions a believer might ask about the angels: their creation from light, their physical descriptions as conveyed in ḥadīth, their numbers and ranks, their functions in relation to creation and to human beings specifically, the roles of named angels such as Jibrīl, Mīkāʾīl, Isrāfīl, and Mālik, and the theological implications of belief in them as one of the six pillars of faith (īmān). Al-Ashqar's methodology is consistently empirical in the Atharī sense: he cites the Quranic verse or prophetic report, identifies its grade of authenticity where relevant, and draws only those conclusions the text supports. He avoids speculative elaboration and corrects popular misconceptions, including some that entered Islamic culture through Isrāʾīliyyāt narratives or through philosophical traditions that are not grounded in revelation. The result is a work that is simultaneously accessible to a general Muslim reader and rigorous enough to serve as a reference for students of ʿaqīdah.

The scholarly reception of this work has been strongly positive across the Sunni world. It was widely adopted in Islamic studies curricula in the Arab world and translated into multiple languages, becoming a principal reference for Friday sermon preparation, classroom teaching, and personal study on the topic of the angelic realm. Its influence can be seen in the way subsequent popular works on Islamic creed discuss the angels: they largely follow al-Ashqar's framework of questions and his habit of grounding every claim in textual evidence. The broader series of which this is the first part has been described by educators as filling a significant gap in modern Islamic literature, providing what the medieval encyclopedic works contained but in a language and format suited to contemporary readers who may not have access to the classical sources directly.

A reader approaching this book should keep two purposes in mind. The first is doctrinal: belief in the angels is obligatory, and understanding what one is obliged to believe, and on what evidence, is itself an act of worship and a strengthening of īmān. The second is practical: al-Ashqar consistently draws connections between the roles the angels play, in recording deeds, in accompanying the believer, in seeking forgiveness on behalf of the righteous, and the conduct befitting a Muslim who is aware of this unseen companionship. Readers unfamiliar with the ḥadīth sciences will benefit from paying attention to the author's remarks on the authenticity of individual reports, as this habit of discrimination between strong and weak narrations is itself a valuable introduction to the Sunni approach to religious knowledge.