Question:

How was Eve created? Was she really taken from the rib of Adam (as)? And also for Habil and Qabil and the second generation of human beings: how did they reproduce? Since incest is haram, and Allah’s laws do not change [Sura 48:23], brothers and sisters could not have married. I have also heard a theory that angels or hoor-al-‘ein married the sons of Adam and Eve, but we are all humans, not semi-human semi-angels. This has been troubling me for some time.

Answer:

The claim that Eve was created from the rib of Adam is a Biblical claim.

According to the Holy Qur’an, Eve was not created from the rib of Adam. Allah (swt) clearly mentions in the Qur’an that Adam and Eve were both created from‘one soul’, and not that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. This ‘one soul’ refers to the general ‘human soul’ from which both Adam and Eve (male and female) were created. This expression is repeated three times in the Qur’an. Unfortuantely, it is mistranslated by some scholars as Eve having been created from Adam, but this is a mistranslation influenced by the Biblical version and some Israelite narrations. The correct translation is below:

“O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord Who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate” (4:1)

As for the issue of how the children of Adam and Eve would have reproduced, the most likely answer is the sons of Adam married the daughters of Adam. Even though incest is impermissible and has always been so, the definition of incest is marriage between relatives. However, since Adam’s children were the only people alive at the time, they were not relatives in the sense that they were not closer to each other in comparison to other people on Earth, because there was no one else on Earth. Therefore, the definition of incest cannot apply to that situation.

Answered by: Dr Ali Alsamail
Certified by: Sheikh Mansour Leghaei