The Qur'an refers to this figure only by title, Malak al-Mawt, the angel of death, and never supplies a proper name. Azrael, the name most widely used today, does not appear in the Qur'an and is not agreed upon even across the major hadith collections, and its widespread use owes more to later Islamic folklore, popular literature, and cross-cultural exchange than to a single authoritative textual source naming him that way. The name and concept show a notable resemblance to Malakh HaMavet, the angel of death in Jewish rabbinic tradition, a similarly personified figure responsible for separating soul from body at the appointed hour, and historians of religion generally treat this resemblance as evidence of shared angelological ideas circulating between Jewish and Islamic communities in the medieval Near East rather than as a case of one tradition simply copying the other outright.
Because the underlying function, an angel appointed specifically to take souls at death, appears independently across several Near Eastern religious traditions with different names attached, the popular convergence on a single name like Azrael for the Islamic figure reflects a later, less formally settled stage of tradition than the Qur'anic text itself, which is content to identify the role without personalizing it under any specific proper name.