Uzair

The site is traditionally described as the tomb of Uzair at Al-Uzayr near Basra.

Uzair is a figure who is mentioned in the Quran, Surah at-Tawbah, verse , which states that he was "revered by the Jews as the son of God". Uzair is most often identified with the biblical Ezra. Historians have described the reference as enigmatic since such views have not been found in Jewish sources. Islamic scholars have interpreted the Quranic reference in different ways, with some claiming that it alluded to a "specific group of Jews". When awaken he was asked by God how much he slept and he said "maybe a day or a part of a day" while God then said that he was like it for a hundred years.

Ezra the priest is sometimes mentioned as being "raised to divine" or closely divine in some Syriac texts like Visions of Ezra as a metaphor. Which may have been the Quran's rebuttal of it.

Hythem Sidky and Holger Zellentin identified Uzayr as Eliezer ben Hurcanus, one of the most prominent Rabbinic sages of the Mishnah. Additionally, Ibn Ishaq's biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad describes that some Jews of Medina believed that Uzayr was the son of God, and that the Quranic revelation relates to that belief.

According to Ibn Kathir, Uzair lived between the times of Sulaiman and the time of Zakariya, father of John the Baptist Some Islamic scholars held Uzayr to be one of the prophets. Although there is a hadith that reports that God expunged Uzayr from the list of prophets because he refused to believe in predestination, this hadith is considered da'if (weak) and is rejected by most Islamic scholars.

Authors of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia viewed the Quranic reference as a "malevolent metaphor" for the reverence accorded to Ezra in Judaism. Some modern historians have favored the theory that a Jewish sect in Arabia venerated Ezra to the extent of deifying him. Gordon Darnell Newby has suggested that the Quranic expression may have reflected Ezra's possible designation as one of the Sons of God by Jews of the Hijaz.

Other scholars proposed emendations of the received spelling of the name, leading to readings ‘Uzayl (Azazel), ‘Azīz, or ‘Azariah (Abednego). The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of God,” while the Christians say, “Christ is the son of God.” Such are their baseless assertions, only parroting the words of earlier disbelievers. May God condemn them! How can they be deluded ˹from the truth˺?

In February 624, when the qibla (direction of prayer) changed from Jerusalem to Mecca. Sallam ibn Mishkam, a Jew who lived in Medina and his friends asked Muhammad: “How can we follow you when you have abandoned our qibla and you do not allege that Uzair (Ezra) is the son of God?” This verse is situated in a context of theological disputes with the Jewish community of Medina.

According to the classical Quranic exegete Ibn Kathir, after Ezra questioned how the resurrection will take place on the Day of Judgment, God had him brought back to life many years after he died. He rode on his revived donkey and entered his native place. But the people did not recognize him, nor did his household, except the maid, who was now an old blind woman. He prayed to God to cure her blindness and she could see again. He meets his son who recognized him by a mole between his shoulders and was older than he was. Ezra then led the people to locate the only surviving copy of Torah as the remaining were burnt by Nebuchadnezzar. It was rotting and crumpled, so Ezra had a new copy of the Torah made which he had previously memorized. He thus renovated the Torah to the Israelites. Ibn Kathir mentions that the sign in the phrase "And that We may make of thee a sign unto the people" was that he was younger than his children. After this miracle, Ibn Kathir writes that Jews began to claim that Ezra was the 'son of God'.

The modern Quranic exegesis of Abul A'la Maududi states:

According to the Ahmadiyya Muhammad Ali's Quranic commentary, there indeed existed a group of Jews who venerated Ezra as the son of God. According to Ali, al-Qastallani held that in the Kitan al-Nikah there was a party of Jews who held this belief.

Alleged falsification of scripture

Ibn Hazm, an Andalusian Muslim scholar, explicitly accused Ezra of being a liar and a heretic who falsified and added interpolations into the Biblical text. Ibn Hazm provided a polemical list of what he considered "chronological and geographical inaccuracies and contradictions; theological impossibilities (anthropomorphic expressions, stories of fornication and whoredom, and the attributing of sins to prophets), as well as lack of reliable transmission (tawatur) of the text", Hava Lazarus-Yafeh states. In response to attacks on the personality of Ezra, the Byzantine emperor Leo III defended Ezra as a pious, reliable person. The Book of Ezra, which Judaism accepts as a chronicle of the life of Ezra and which predates Muhammad and the Qur'an by around 1000 years, gives Ezra's human lineage as being the son of Seraiah and a direct descendant of Aaron. Tractate Ta'anit of the Jerusalem Talmud, which predates Muhammad by two to three hundred years, states that “if a man claims to be God, he is a liar.” Exodus Rabba 29 says, "'I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God' I am the first, I have no father; I am the last, I have no brother. Beside Me there is no God; I have no son." However the term 'sons of gods' occurs in Genesis. The Encyclopedia of Judaism clarifies that the title of 'son of God' is attributed a person whose piety has placed him in a very near relationship to God and "by no means carries the idea of physical descent from, and essential unity with, God".

Reuven Firestone says: It is possible that there were some Hashemite groups that went beyond the accepted faith with an important figure such as Ezra. Two ancient books that originally linked the divine or angelic center with Ezra and Enoch from the Tanakh figures.

The title of son of God (servant of God) is used by the Jews for any pious person as is evident according to Encyclopedia of Judaism which states that the title of son of God is attributed by the Jews "to any one whose piety has placed him in a filial relation to God (see Wisdom ii. 13, 16, 18; v. 5, where "the sons of God" are identical with "the saints"; comp. Ecclus. [Sirach] iv. 10). It is through such personal relations that the individual becomes conscious of God's fatherhood."

Many Jews have recorded a legend that light emanates from Ezra's tomb in Iraq. According to historians, the tomb was considered a holy place for some Jews, as they would make pilgrimages to it.

Moshe Idel, an Israeli historian and philosopher who specializes in Jewish mysticism, is an emeritus professor of Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Indeed in the Qur’an 9:30, some Jews were described critically as believing in a form of sonship relating to the mysterious figure of Uzair, who was designated as the Son of God, and Muslim authors even reported that some Jews worshipped him as such. This means that long before the emergence of the Ashkenazi esoteric literatures to be discussed below in chapter 2, concerning a hypostatic versus a national understanding of sonship, some Jews entertained concepts of or even practiced worship related to figure described as a Son of God. Do these two references to sonship reflect a broader historical situation? At least in principle, we should be aware of the possible role played by the vast poetic literature written in the land of Israel in the early Middle Ages, and its impact on southern Italian poems since the ninth century, and also of the role played by Ashkenazi religious poetry in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in transmission of mythologoumena from East to West. Since those literatures are quite abstruse, and many of them have not yet been analysed from the conceptual point of view, they may constitute another potential bridge between continents and historical periods.

Historical analysis

In A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam, scholar Gordon Darnell Newby notes the following on the topic of Uzair, the angel Metatron and the Bene Elohim (lit. "Sons of God"): ...we can deduce that the inhabitants of Hijaz during Muhammad's time knew portions, at least, of 3 Enoch in association with the Jews. The angels over which Metatron becomes chief are identified in the Enoch traditions as the sons of God, the Bene Elohim, the Watchers, the fallen ones as the causer of the flood. In 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra, the term Son of God can be applied to the Messiah, but most often it is applied to the righteous men, of whom Jewish tradition holds there to be no more righteous than the ones God elected to translate to heaven alive. It is easy, then, to imagine that among the Jews of the Hijaz who were apparently involved in mystical speculations associated with the merkabah, Ezra, because of the traditions of his translation, because of his piety, and particularly because he was equated with Enoch as the Scribe of God, could be termed one of the Bene Elohim. And, of course, he would fit the description of religious leader (one of the ahbar of the Qur'an 9:31) whom the Jews had exalted.

Also per The Concise Encyclopaedia Of Islam there seem to have been some Jews in pre-Islamic Arabia that equated Ezra with Enoch and said that Enoch was assumed into Heaven stripped of his humanity and transformed into Metatron

Mark Lidzbarski and Michael Lodahl have also hypothesized existence of an Arabian Jewish sect whose veneration of Ezra bordered on deification.

The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia says that the saying of Uzair son of God, may be an oral tradition of the Jews of Yemen and linked to the Book of Second Esdras. Hirschberg suggested that some Yemenite Jews called Ezra the son of God because they believed that Ezra was the Messiah.

Alternative readings of the name

Eliezer Al-Samawal al-Maghribi, a Moroccan Jew who converted to Islam in 1163 CE, read the name as Eliezer; he mentioned this in his Ifham al Yahud. Moshe Perlmann translates:"This Ezra is not al-Uzayr as people think. For al-Uzayr is the Arabic for Elazar (Eliezer). [But] the name Ezra would not change in translation to Arabic at all for it is a name whose vowels and consonants fit [the Arabic]." Hythem Sidky and Holger Zellentin view the name Uzair as the Arabic rendering of the Hebrew name "Eliezer" borrowed via phonosemantic matching. They propose that the Quran is referring to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurcanus, and this proposition is supported by the context of the verse, as well as intertextual evidence. In Moed Katan 3:1 of the Jerusalem Talmud, the Bat Kol refers to Rabbi Eliezer as 'My son' while affirming his legal position:"There came an unembodied voice and said, practice follows My son Eliezer."

Other speculations Some scholars proposed emendations of the received spelling of the name, عزير. J. Finkel instead reads the name as ‘Azīz (عزيز, potentate), connecting it to the phrase "thou art my son" in Psalms 2:7.