Azrael

In later exegetical and folkloric Muslim accounts (extra‑Quranic traditions), Azrael is said to have earned the office of angel of death before the creation of humanity by succeeding in taking dust from the earth when other angels failed; as a reward he was appointed to the office and given a register of all mankind. This account is presented in the sources as a later interpretive tradition rather than a Quranic narrative.

Physical descriptions of Azrael in the cited literature are drawn from extra‑Quranic, hadithic, and exegetical traditions and vary widely. Reported narrations include a form resembling "a blue colored ram" (attributed via commentators), enormous scale (e.g., so vast that the earth on his shoulder would be like a bean), colossal numbers of wings (one account gives 4,000 wings, described as of two types—"wings of grace" and "wings of punishment," the latter said to be made from iron rods, hooks, and scissors), multiple faces (one source reports four faces), a body composed of eyes and tongues corresponding to the number of humans, reputedly 70,000 limbs of foot in one narrator's report, and an attribution of armament such as a flaming whip. The Quranic text itself supplies no physical portrait; these particulars are recorded in later commentaries and extra‑Quranic works.

Across the cited sources Azrael's primary functions are taking and transporting souls at death (psychopomp) and maintaining an administrative register (a scroll listing human fates, with names recorded at birth and erased at death) as portrayed in later Islamic exegetical traditions. He is consistently presented as acting only upon God's command—being "informed by God when the time is up"—and is associated in exegesis with a multitude of subordinate angels of death who assist in the process. In some apocryphal Christian versions he is tied to punitive activity in the afterlife (an angel of hell who avenges wrongs). The sources also report narrations linking him to calendrical or temporal signs (e.g., a tradition that a leaf is dropped beneath the divine throne 40 days before a person's death, from which Azrael reads the name of the one to be taken).