Hud (prophet)

Hūd (Arabic: هود‎), sometimes called Eber, is believed in Islam to have been a messenger sent to ancient Arabia before Muhammad. Hud is repeatedly mentioned in the Quran, whose eleventh chapter is also named after him (although a small portion of it is actually about him).

Hud has sometimes been identified with Eber, an ancestor of the Ishmaelites and the Israelites who is mentioned in the Old Testament.

Hud is said to have been a subject of a mulk (Arabic: مُلْك‎, lit. 'kingdom') named after its founder, 'Ad, a fourth-generation descendant of Noah (his father being Uz, the son of Aram, who was the son of Shem, who in turn was a son of Noah):

The ʿĀd people, with their prophet Hud, are mentioned in many places. See especially 26:123–140 ^{-Yusuf Ali}, and 46:21–26 ^{-Yusuf Ali}. Their eponymous ancestor ʿAd was fourth in generation from Noah, having been a son of 'Aus, the son of Aram, the son of Sam, the son of Noah. They occupied a large tract of country in Southern Arabia, extending from Umman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Hadhramaut and Yemen, Oman at the southern end of the Red Sea. The people were tall in stature and were great builders. Probably the long, winding tracts of sands (ahqaf) in their dominions (46:21) were irrigated with canals. They forsook the true God, and oppressed their people. A three years famine visited them, but yet they took no warning. At length a terrible blast of wind destroyed them and their land, but a remnant, known as the second ʿĀd or the Thamud (see below) were saved, and afterwards suffered a similar fate for their sins. The tomb of the Prophet Hud (qabr Nabi Hud) is still traditionally shown in Hadhramaut, latitude 16 N, and longitude 491⁄2 E, about 90 miles north of Mukalla. There are ruins and inscriptions in the neighborhood.

— Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary, Note 1040

The other tribes said to be present at this time in Arabia, were the Thamud, Jurhum, Tasam, Jadis, Amim, Midian, Amalek Imlaq, Jasim, Qahtan, Banu Yaqtan and others.

The Quran gives the location of ʿĀd as being Al-Aḥqāf (Arabic: ٱلْأَحْقَاف‎, lit. 'The Sandy Plains / The Wind-curved Sand-hills'). It is believed to have been in South Arabia, possibly in eastern Yemen and/or western Oman. In November 1991, a settlement was discovered and hypothesized to be Ubar, which is thought to be mentioned in the Qur'an as Iram dhāt al-ʿImād ("Iram of the Pillars" or "Iram of the tentpoles"), and may have been the capital of ʿĀd. One of the members of the original expedition, archeologist Juris Zarins, however, later concluded that the discovery did not represent a city called Ubar. In a 1996 interview on the subject, he said:

If you look at the classical texts and the Arab historical sources, Ubar refers to a region and a group of people, not to a specific town. People always overlook that. It's very clear on Ptolemy's second century map of the area. It says in big letters "Iobaritae". And in his text that accompanied the maps, he's very clear about that. It was only the late medieval version of One Thousand and One Nights, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that romanticised Ubar and turned it into a city, rather than a region or a people.