Iblis

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Iblis is the being in Islam who refused the command to bow before Adam, and was expelled from God’s presence for it — thereafter the adversary of humankind, the one who whispers and misleads, called in his work of tempting al-Shayṭān, the Satan. The Qurʾān tells the scene more than once: God forms Adam from clay, orders the angels to prostrate, and all comply except Iblis, who answers that he will not bow to a creature of mud when he himself was made of fire. For that refusal he is cursed and driven out, but granted a reprieve — leave to tempt the descendants of Adam until the Day of Resurrection.

What he is, exactly, the tradition has never fully settled. The Qurʾān in one verse names him as one of the jinn, beings made of smokeless fire, which would explain the fire-against-clay argument and set him apart from the angels; yet the command to prostrate was given to the angels, and he is counted among those who disobeyed it. Muslim theologians divided over the question, some holding him a fallen angel, others a jinn who had risen to dwell among the angels before his fall. The disagreement is old and was never resolved into a single creed.

His sin is read, in the mainstream, as pride and disobedience — the refusal to submit, kibr, set against the obedience that the religion holds to be the whole of right relation to God. But a current within Sufism turned the story over and found something else in it. Certain mystics — the martyr al-Ḥallāj among the earliest, and later writers in his line — argued that Iblis was the purest of monotheists: commanded to bow to another than God, he would bow to none but God, and accepted damnation rather than betray that singular love. On this reading his fall is a kind of fidelity, and his torment the lover’s separation from the Beloved who ordered it. The reading was always a minority one, and to many it bordered on the scandalous; it survives chiefly in poetry and in the more daring mystical prose, never as doctrine.

The two readings do not cancel. The first takes the command at its word and calls the refusal arrogance; the second takes the love of God so absolutely that even God’s own order cannot move it, and finds in Iblis a figure for the soul wrecked by that absoluteness. Between them sits the unresolved question the texts leave open — whether obedience or love is the deeper thing asked of a creature, and what it costs to choose either when the two seem to part. Iblis endures in the tradition as the one who chose, and was not forgiven, and was granted his time all the same.

→ In the library: Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi (Whinfield, abridged, 1898)

→ Related: Mysticism · Gnosis · Raphael