Iblis

The command was three words and it emptied the hall. All the luminous ranks went down at once, foreheads to the floor, with the soft collapsing sound of a field of wheat laid flat by wind. Then quiet. In the quiet, one figure was still standing.

That is the seed from which an entire theology of evil grew, and the Quran plants it seven times, in seven surahs, never quite the same way twice. God announces that he will place a deputy on the earth. The angels, who apparently already know how this ends, ask whether he really intends to put down there something that will spill blood and spread ruin, and God answers that he knows what they do not. He teaches Adam the names of things and has him recite them back while the angels stand by unable to. Then comes the order to bow, and the refusal, and a verdict delivered with no ceremony whatever: he refused and was arrogant, and he became an unbeliever.

His name is Iblis. It occurs eleven times in the Quran, always as a proper name, and every occurrence but one belongs to this single story. Where the name came from is genuinely unsettled. Muslim lexicographers, reluctant to admit foreign words into the text, traced it to the Arabic root b-l-s and the sense of being cut off or falling into despair, which would make him the one who despaired of mercy, though the grammar sits badly. Most Western scholars hear the Greek diabolos underneath it, the slanderer of the New Testament, arriving in Arabic through Syriac forms like diyabulus. The name appears nowhere in pre-Islamic writing. The story around it does. An angel thrown out of heaven for swollen pride turns up in 2 Enoch, in the Life of Adam and Eve, in the Gospel of Bartholomew, in the Syriac Cave of Treasures. In every one of those older tellings, the refuser is an angel.

Asked to explain himself, he does, at length, and the explanation is what made him dangerous to later theologians rather than merely wicked. I am better than him, he says. He was made first, and birth order has always counted for something in that part of the world. And he was made of fire while Adam was made of clay, or in the bleaker phrasing of one surah, of dried clay taken from dark altered mud. Fire outranks mud. It is a tidy piece of analogical reasoning, and that is exactly the trouble, because analogy is a working tool of Islamic jurisprudence and here is the devil demonstrating it in the first hour of human history. A famous hadith makes the point without subtlety: the first to use analogy was Iblis. Commentators have spent centuries taking his premise apart. Fire is bright and quick, they answer, and also fickle, reckless, destructive and vain, while clay is heavy and dark and low, and also patient, stable, humble, and capable of being washed clean with water in a way that fire never is. The deeper reply is simpler. God gave a command and offered no reason for it, and Iblis went looking for a reason anyway.

Whether he was an angel at all is the oldest argument about him, and it does not resolve, because the text pulls two ways. The command was addressed to the angels and he was standing among them, which implies one thing. Another surah states flatly that he was one of the jinn, which implies the opposite. The stakes are higher than taxonomy. Angels in Islam are the workforce of the cosmos, and their obedience is the guarantee that revelation arrives uncorrupted; if one of them could refuse, the whole delivery system trembles. The jinn, formed of scorching wind or smokeless flame, have free will as humans do, can be devout or vile, and will be judged for it. So the label solves one problem by opening a smaller one, which is roughly what he was doing when he opened his mouth in the first place. Al-Tabari, gathering the traditions of the earliest generations, offers several patches. Iblis was among the noblest of the angels, of their most honoured tribe, a keeper of Paradise, given authority over the lowest heaven and the earth, and his name before all this was Azazel, or Harith. His tribe were angels called jinn because the word is cousin to al-janna, the Garden. Or the jinn had lived on the earth before humanity and made it a slaughterhouse, and Iblis was sent against them at the head of an angelic army, and he won, and the winning went to his head.

What he asks for afterwards is strange, and the strangeness is easy to miss. Not forgiveness. Time. Respite until the day they are raised, and it is granted without argument. Then he tells God what he means to do with it. He will sit waiting on the straight path and come at them from in front and behind and from the right and the left, until gratitude has been bled out of them entirely. In one telling he blames God for setting him wrong to begin with. In another it is God who tells him to go ahead and lead astray whoever will follow, with the caveat that he will hold no authority whatever over God’s own servants. In a third he promises to do it by God’s power, which is either an accusation or a confession and reads like both.

He goes to the Garden. The commentators disagree about how he got in, which is the sort of detail a tradition invents when the text says nothing: he entered hidden in the mouth of the serpent, which in those days was beautiful and the size of a camel and walked upright, or else the peacock let him through. What he does there is whisper. He tells Adam and his wife that the forbidden tree is the Tree of Eternity, that God has kept it from them only to stop them becoming angels or living forever, and he swears he is giving them honest counsel. The claim is his own invention. God never said any such thing. They eat, and are ashamed, and are sent down, and are forgiven almost at once. There is no curse on the ground here, no thorns, no stain passed down the generations. The pair are as culpable as each other and no more culpable than anyone since. What follows them out of the Garden is a companion with a grievance and a very long appointment.

Nobody has ever described him. The Quran gives him no face, no wings, no height, nothing a painter could work from, and the horns and cloven hooves that decorate the European devil never fastened themselves to him in the same way. What the record hands over instead is a material and a voice. Later storytellers, needing something to put on stage, tend to dress him as an old man.

The mystics did something else with him entirely. In Sufi hands Iblis stops being a figure outside the believer and becomes a resident, and Attar tells a story that says so with real violence. Iblis leaves his son al-Khannas with Hawwa to mind while Adam is out; Adam comes home, learns whose child it is, kills him, cuts him into pieces and hangs them in a tree, and Iblis returns and puts him back together. It happens again, with fire this time, the ashes thrown half to the sea and half to the wind, and again the boy is reassembled. The third time, Adam kills the child, fries the flesh and shares it with his wife, and the two of them eat. Iblis comes back and is delighted. That was the whole point, he says. His house is inside their chests now. A hadith puts the same idea more soberly, that the devil runs in a man the way his blood runs, and in that reading the battlefield is the nafs, the lower self, where the enemy holds a permanent billet.

He also becomes, in some of the most uncomfortable pages in Islamic literature, sympathetic. Al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922, wrote a chapter in which Iblis is the only true monotheist in the room, refusing to bow to anything that was not God and taking the curse rather than the compromise. Rumi stages him at a bedside. The Caliph Muawiya is asleep behind locked doors before dawn when Iblis shakes him awake and warns him he will miss the prayer if he does not hurry. Muawiya, reasonably, disbelieves every word and demands the real reason. Iblis pleads his old love first: he was an angel once, he walked in the rose garden of God’s approval, and even now, thrown out, his eye stays fixed on that face. Then he claims to be a public service, the touchstone that tells true coin from false, a prompter and not a creator, a gardener stripping out dry wood so the good timber shows. Only when Muawiya presses a third time does he admit it. He woke him so that he would make the prayer, because the anguish of having missed it would have been worth more than the prayer itself.

His powers are all of one kind. He suggests. He whispers, and the Arabic word for it, waswas, is the sound it makes. He can plant a doubt, dress a bad idea in good reasons, and pick the moment when a person is most confident of their own piety, which is why so many of the stories put him in a mosque rather than a tavern. He commands the shayatin, the jinn who threw in with him. And he is patient in a way nothing mortal can match, having negotiated his own timetable with all of history to work in.

What he cannot do is make anyone do anything. The schools of Islamic theology fought bitterly over whether God causes evil, and arrived at the same limit from every direction: Iblis is a tempter and not a cause, a whisperer and not a commander, and the person who refuses him has already won. He was told outright that he would hold no power over God’s servants. The argument he was so proud of has never been accepted by anyone. And the respite he asked for is the sharpest limit of all, because a reprieve until a fixed day is not a pardon. He negotiated an ending and called it a victory.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Iblis in Islam?

Iblis is the devil of Islamic tradition, the being who refused God’s command to bow before the newly created Adam and was cast out of heaven for it. His name appears eleven times in the Quran, almost always within that single story, and his defining flaw is arrogant pride. After his fall he becomes al-Shaytan, the tempter of humankind.

Is Iblis an angel or a jinn?

The Quran points both ways, and the question has been debated for centuries. The command to prostrate was given to the angels and Iblis was standing among them, which suggests he was one; but another passage states plainly that he was one of the jinn, beings made of smokeless fire who possess free will. Early traditions tried to reconcile the two by making him a jinni raised among the angels, or an angel of a tribe called jinn.

Why did Iblis refuse to bow to Adam?

He argued that he was superior. He had been created first, and he was made of fire while Adam was made of clay, so he reasoned that the higher substance should not prostrate to the lower. Islamic commentators reject the reasoning on the grounds that nothing in revelation establishes fire as better than clay, and that God’s command required no justification in the first place.

Is Iblis the same as Shaitan?

They overlap without being identical. Iblis is a proper name belonging to one specific being, while shaytan is a common noun meaning any devil, and its plural covers a whole class of unbelieving jinn. The usual understanding is that Iblis becomes al-Shaytan once he is expelled from heaven and begins his work on earth.

What power does Iblis have over people?

Only suggestion. He whispers, plants doubt and makes bad choices look reasonable, but Islamic tradition is firm that he cannot compel anyone to sin, and that he holds no authority at all over the sincere servants of God. He was granted respite until the Day of Judgment to make his case, not power to force it.

Related Entries

Shaitan, Djinn, Qareen, Ifrit, Marid, Adam, Eve, Angels, Dajjal, Buraq (Burak), Satan, Lucifer, Melek Taus, Grigori, Angra Mainyu