The Story of Noah, peace be upon him

Noah is the son of Lamech, son of Methuselah, son of Enoch—who is Idrīs—son of Yared, son of Mahalalel, son of Qaynan, son of Enosh, son of Seth, son of Adam, the father of mankind, peace be upon him.

According to Ibn Jarīr and others, Noah was born one-hundred-and-twenty-six years after Adam’s death. In the older scriptural chronology of the People of the Book, the span between Adam’s death and Noah’s birth is put at one-hundred-and-forty-six years.

Between the two there were ten generations. Ḥāfiẓ Abū Ḥātim Ibn Ḥibbān records in his Ṣaḥīḥ—with a chain that fulfils the conditions laid down by Muslim, although Muslim did not include the report—that Abū Umāmah said:

“A man asked, ‘O Messenger of Allah, was Adam a prophet?’ He replied, ‘Yes, a prophet to whom Allah spoke.’ The man asked, ‘How many generations separated him from Noah?’ He said, ‘Ten generations.’”

Al-Bukhārī likewise relates, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, that “there were ten generations between Adam and Noah, all of them upon Islam.”

If the word qarn (generation) is taken in its common usage to mean one hundred years, the interval between Adam and Noah would necessarily be one thousand years; it could be even longer, for Ibn ʿAbbās specifies that those ten generations were all upon Islam, implying the possible existence of later generations that were not. The report of Abū Umāmah, however, confines the span to exactly ten generations, and Ibn ʿAbbās adds that every one of them was on Islam. This refutes the claim—made by some chroniclers and certain People of the Book—that Cain and his descendants worshipped fire; Allah knows best.

Should qarn be understood instead as “a cohort of people,” as in the Almighty’s words, “How many a generation We destroyed after Noah” (al-Isrāʾ 17:17), “Then after them We brought into being another generation” (al-Muʿminūn 23:31), “And many a generation between them We raised” (al-Furqān 25:38), and “How many a generation We destroyed before them” (Maryam 19:74), and as in the Prophet’s saying, “The best of generations is my generation,” then the peoples before Noah lived for extraordinarily long spans of time. On this understanding, thousands of years would separate Adam and Noah—Allah knows best.