Who Is Satan in Islam?

Who Is Satan in Islam?

He’s called the lurking whisperer, the one, the father of bitterness. In Islamic tradition, the devil is a bit different from how he’s conceptualized in Christianity. He’s not a fallen angel waging war on heaven, nor does he compete with God for dominion over humanity. Instead, he plays a more insidious role, tempting, deceiving, and challenging humanity from the shadows. Over the centuries, scholars, mystics, and theologians have wrestled with what he stands for and what lessons his story holds. One of the names of this figure is Ashaitan, that is the devil, the Satan. He’s also known as Aladu, literally the adversary, which you may know as a translation of the Hebrew word Satan as well. But the Quran gives him a specific name, Iblis. So, who is Iblis? Where did he come from? And what exactly is his deal? Why is he so obsessed with leading people astray? Now, Islamic tradition is incredibly diverse. There are, after all, almost two billion Muslims today, but it’s a fairly universal belief that Iblis is a corrupting force, seducing the sinful and luring them into gehenna or hell. He induces impious behavior in those he can deceive, particularly pride, envy, lust, gluttony, greed, and hatred. According to tradition, he can be invisible or take any human form except for that of the prophet Muhammad. He can manifest in dreams or enter people’s bodies like a disease. He’s also said to distract people during prayer, making them forget if they’ve already prayed or jumble their words so the prayer doesn’t count. One of his signature moves is whispering sinful suggestions in the ears of anyone who will listen. In fact, there’s even an Arabic word for his whispers, waswasa, which even sounds like a whisper. One hadith attributed to the prophet Muhammad illustrates the extremes to which Iblis will go to disrupt prayer.

The story goes that a man was mentioned to the prophet who had accidentally slept through the morning prayer. The prophet said Satan urinated in his ears. In other words, missing prayer was not just seen as oversleeping. It was framed as the result of satanic interference. And just to be clear, most Muslims understand the prophet was speaking metaphorically here. Iblis also commands lesser devils known as shiatin. But these devils are not the pop culture red-skinned horned creatures with pitchforks. In fact, the Quran is explicit that shiatin can be human or jinn, which are supernatural beings that can be good or evil. So, devils are not believed to be separate entities in the Islamic tradition. Rather, their opposition to Islam is what makes humans or jinn devilish. Openly condemning and rejecting Iblis is an important signifier of faith for many Muslims. One way they do that is through the tawood, a short prayer said before reading the Quran or starting an important task. It goes, I seek refuge in God from the devil. Another example happens during the Hajj pilgrimage, which every Muslim is expected to do at least once in their life if they’re able. One of the rituals conducted during this pilgrimage is the stoning of the devil, which involves literally throwing stones at a series of walls in the Valley of Mina. This commemorates a story about the prophet Abraham. According to Islamic tradition, when Abraham was preparing his son Ishmael to be sacrificed, Iblis tried to talk him out of it, but Abraham resisted. Each time Iblis showed up, Abraham threw stones at him until he disappeared into the earth. As with Christian tradition, Iblis is identified as the one who tempted Adam and Eve out of paradise. Though in Islamic tradition, he doesn’t show up as a serpent. For example, check out this 14th century drawing of Adam and Eve in the garden, which depicts Iblis as an old man. That humanlike depiction actually lines up with how many Muslims understand Iblis more broadly.

Unlike in Christianity, where Satan is often described as a fallen angel, most Muslims today believe Iblis was never an angel at all. Instead, he’s usually seen as one of the jinn, which as I mentioned already is a different being altogether. More on them in a bit. It’s also important to note that Iblis is not seen as the ultimate source of evil in Islam. While he tries to trick mortals into committing evil acts, he’s not their cause. In fact, the story of his fall from grace told in the Quran implies that he gets God’s permission to tempt humanity. The story in the Quran goes like this. When God created Adam from clay and breathed life into him, he called together the angels and told them to bow to this new human. Iblis refused. And when God asked him why, he replied, since he’s made of fire and Adam is made from clay, he is superior to Adam and will not bow. For that defiance, God expelled Iblis and placed a curse on him. But before he left, Iblis asked for a delay in his punishment. He wanted to be allowed to roam the earth until the day of resurrection when all souls are judged and either sent to paradise or to hell. God agrees and that’s when Iblis declares his intention to deceive and corrupt mortals except for God’s chosen servants. God allows the plan and tells Iblis that those who follow him will join him in hell. There’s a lot to unpack from the story. First, notice that his disobedience before God is not the sort of militarized rebellion that say John Milton describes in Paradise Lost, where Satan leads an armed insurrection against heaven. Instead, it’s a simple refusal. A refusal to follow God’s commandment to bow before Adam. You might be asking, why were the angels supposed to bow to Adam in the first place? Well, the Quran doesn’t say outright, and Muslims have debated this for centuries. His defiance before God is not implied to reflect any attempt to compete with God. Instead, it seems to reflect his arrogance or stubbornness.

Nor does Iblis hide his intentions to lead mortals astray. In fact, God specifically postpones his punishment so that he’ll be able to do so. This is a vitally important idea often articulated in the Quran. Evil exists not because God can’t stop it, but because he explicitly allows it. See for example surah 6 verse 112 which reads and thus we have made for every prophet an enemy devils from mankind and jinn inspiring to one another decorative speech in delusion but if your lord had willed they would not have done it so Iblis is not conceptualized as god’s archenemy nor does he have any pretensions about being equal to god. But despite these differences, the Islamic concept of Iblis is closely connected to the character of the Satan in the Hebrew Bible and Christianity’s notion of the devil in fact. Many scholars believe that the name Iblis, which does not appear in any known source prior to the rise of Islam, may actually derive from the Greek word diabolos, which is the root of the English word devil and diabolical, and which itself is a direct translation of the Hebrew word Satan. Though it’s unclear exactly how diabolos might have morphed into Iblis, the phonetic shift is unusual and still very much debated. Other theories link the name to Arabic roots meaning despair or confusion. Although the story of Satan refusing to bow down before Adam does not appear in most Christian sources, remarkably similar versions do show up in some pre-Islamic texts. One example is the Syriac Christian Book of the Cave of Treasures, which scholars date before the Quran. In that text, God presents Adam in a glorious manner to the angels who are then commanded to bow themselves before him. And when the prince of the lower order of angels saw what great majesty had been bestowed upon Adam, he was jealous of him from that day on, and he did not wish to worship him. And he said to his hosts, you shall not worship him, and you shall not praise him with the angels. It is more seemly that you should worship me because I am fire and spirit, and not that I should worship a thing of dust. According to the text, for this offense, God expels him from heaven.

A similar story appears in a 4th century Coptic text from Egypt. The Archbishop Timothy of Alexandria describes God placing a crown on Adam’s head and a scepter in his hand and then commanding the angels to worship him. But Satan refuses since he was a being of great pride. He drew himself up in a shameless manner and said, it is more seemly that this human should come and worship me, for I existed before he came into being. According to this version, God orders the other angels to strip Satan naked and torture him as humiliation for his pride before casting him out of heaven. So the Quranic account of Iblis’s fall from grace is strikingly similar to several apocryphal Christian texts. These texts were circulating throughout the near east in late antiquity and they portray Satan as a being overcome with pride who refuses to bow to Adam and as a result is punished by God. Their echoes in the Quranic story suggest a shared conceptual framework and highlight how the Quran engages with, adapts, and reinterprets earlier Near Eastern traditions and situates them within its own theological framework. Now, as I mentioned earlier, most modern Muslims agree that Iblis was never an angel, but rather one of the jinn. Today, angels and jinn are understood as distinct supernatural beings. Angels are God’s obedient servants, often described as lacking free will. Jinn, on the other hand, are unpredictable. They have free will and can be either good or evil. The Quran quotes a group of jinn saying, among us are Muslims, literally those who submit to God and among us are the unjust. So like humans, jinn exist in both righteous and wicked forms. They live alongside humanity but can remain invisible or take various shapes including appearing as humans. However, while most modern Muslims accept that Iblis was a jinn, early Islamic thought was not so uniform. In fact, the idea that he was an angel had notable support in Islam’s first several centuries. In the early 10th century, one of the most famous early Muslim theologians, Al-Tabari, not only affirmed that Iblis was an angel, but he also cited a number of traditions, claiming that he was once a kind of angelic general. According to these reports, Iblis led heavenly armies against a group of jinn who had departed from paradise and made their home on earth where they were spreading corruption. After defeating them, Iblis grew proud of his own power. And this arrogance ultimately led to his defiance of God and refusal to bow before Adam. What’s really interesting though is some of these traditions that Al-Tabari cites give the name of Iblis before his fall. He was once called Azazil. This sounds a lot like Azazel which is the name of a fallen angel linked with a group of angels called the watchers in the first book of Enoch. The Watchers teach mankind the art of warfare and sorcery among other things. So, it seems that by the early 10th century, traditions echoing the book of Enoch had entered elite Muslim discourse, shaping interpretations of Iblis’s backstory. These parallels suggest a broader cross-pollination between Jewish, Christian, and early Islamic thought.

Now, you might be asking, how is it possible that Muslims could disagree about whether Iblis was an angel or a jinn? Didn’t I just say that his fall from grace is told multiple times in the Quran? Well, yes, it is. But what the Quran has to say about his origins is complicated. Sometimes it seems to endorse the idea that he’s an angel. Surah 15:31. So the angels prostrated all of them entirely except Iblis. At other points it implies that he’s a jinn. Surah 7:12 says, you created me from fire. While surah 15:27 says, the jinn were created from scorching fire. And then there’s one verse that seems to support both sides at the same time. Surah 18:50. We said to the angels, prostrate to Adam. And they prostrated except for Iblis. He was of the jinn and departed from the command of his lord. So what’s going on here? The first half of the verse seems to include him as part of the angels. The second seems to state clearly that he’s one of the jinn. And proponents of Iblis being a jinn will point to that phrase. He was of the jinn. Matter settled, right? They’ll correctly observe that the prior phrase doesn’t clearly state that he was one of the angels. Like consider this phrase. The headmaster told the students to raise their hands. Everyone did except the teacher. Clearly the teacher here is not considered one of the students just as Iblis may not be one of the angels. According to this interpretation, he’s understood to be one of the pious jinn who once held a seat on the heavenly council without himself being angelic. According to one version of this, Iblis was captured by the angels during an earlier heavenly war and while he was still young was raised among the angels. But although he was grouped with the angels and shared their company, he remained fundamentally different. A jinn, not an angel. But proponents of Iblis being an angel will suggest a different reading of the phrase he was of the jinn. See the Arabic word for paradise is jannah. And some of the most famous early Muslim theologians including the 10th century jurist al-Ash’ari plausibly argued that the passage didn’t mean that Iblis was one of the jinn but that he was of jannah of heavenly origin as opposed to Adam who was constructed of earthly clay. So who’s right? Well if we’re going with modern consensus then Iblis is one of the jinn not an angel. But what if both sides were right? Some early Islamic sources suggest that angels and jinn were not always seen as separate beings. In fact, some traditions cited by Al-Tabari in the 9th century described the jinn as a type of angel. Writing Iblis belonged to a tribal group of angels called jinn. Among the angels, it was they who were created from fire. Another says the angels who were the gatekeepers of paradise were called jinn.

Conversely, the 9th century scholar Al-Jahiz argued the opposite. He classified jinn into three types. Evil jinn known as shiatin, powerful jinn as efrits, and completely pure jinn as angels. This is all to say that in the first few centuries of Islam’s history, at least some Muslims seem to have embraced the possibility that Iblis was both an angel and of the jinn. But it’s not an idea that’s widely accepted today. For nearly 1,400 years, Muslim mystics, intellectuals, and artists have offered novel and sometimes striking interpretations of his story. For example, the early Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj saw Iblis’s fall as a tragedy, not a tale of arrogance, but of devotion. In his view, Iblis refused to bow to Adam, not out of pride, but out of love for God. See, a central tenet of Islam is absolute monotheism. Only God is divine and only God may be worshiped. But according to Al-Hallaj, Iblis’s devotion to God was so profound that he was unwilling to bow before anyone else, even if that meant defying God’s commandment and being expelled from heaven. And that last part is critical. It’s not that Al-Hallaj believed that his punishment was undeserved or in any way unjust, only that it was the price of his devotion. Al-Hallaj’s depiction of Iblis as the tragic ultimate monotheist paved the way for later mystics. Mystics such as Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani propose that Iblis and his devils can be understood as servants of God and an extension of his will. By clearly delineating God’s faithful from the sinful, they are actually performing a sacred service to the divine. Now to be clear, these are pretty fringe ideas and both Al-Hallaj and Al-Hamadani were actually executed for heterodoxy. But they testify to the rich diversity of mystical interpretations that the story of Iblis has inspired among Muslim intellectuals throughout the medieval period and beyond. The story of his fall has been a way to explore both the nature of free will and theodicy, the problem of the existence of evil. In the first two centuries of Islam, a group called the Jabrites allegedly asked a thorny philosophical question. If God is the source of all actions and nothing happens without his will or permission, does that mean he compelled Iblis to disobey? Now, our understanding of the Jabrites comes mostly from their critics, which makes it tricky to pin down what exactly they believed. But in any case, Islamic Orthodoxy ultimately rejected their framing of the issue and embraced the doctrine that sufficient free will exists, that God can justly punish Iblis for his actions. The fact that God permits sinful behavior doesn’t excuse the sinner, who still bears responsibility for choosing to act sinfully. Moving away from the domain of intellectual elites, Muslim folklore often embraced the idea that Satan and his devils can inspire great works of art. One of the most celebrated poets of early Islam, Abu Nuwas, often invoked Iblis as his muse, especially in verses celebrating wine, revelry, and forbidden love.

When my beloved shunned me, and I received no word from him, I called upon Iblis and complained to him, shedding tears of desolation. Obey your uncle Iblis to do so is your religious duty and perfect your unbelief. Commit no minor sin. If you must sin, make it a great one. Iblis is also remembered as a master musician, someone who strikes deals and grants otherworldly skill to performers. In One Thousand and One Nights, for example, several legends feature Ibrahim al-Mawsili, a master musician who is said to have studied under Iblis himself. The connection between devils in the performing arts and Arab folklore is very old. Similar to the Greek conception of daimons, which were ambiguous intermediary spirits who could inspire people, pre-Islamic Arabs understood jinn or shiatin to be the inspiration behind creative works. And the Quran repeatedly emphasizes that Muhammad is not a poet and that its verses are not mere poetry. Surah 36:69 says, and we did not give him knowledge of poetry, nor is it befitting for him. It is not but a message and a clear Quran. Verses like this are widely understood to imply that in the prophet’s day, poetry was linked to the influence of malign spirits. So it was necessary to distinguish between divine revelation and demonic inspiration. Today, Iblis remains a symbol of corruption, temptation, and sin. But as with all religious figures, interpretations vary. And for over a thousand years, Iblis has embodied the tension between free will and divine commandments: arrogance and devotion, rebellion, and servitude. And while he may be one of the most infamous supernatural beings in the Islamic tradition, he’s far from the only one. As we’ve talked about, Iblis is one of the jinn, which are not fallen angels, but something else entirely. Invisible, unpredictable beings capable of both inspiring poetry and fear. I recently interviewed one of the leading experts of jinn, the Islamic studies scholar Dr. Ali Altafi, and we talked all about jinn, their origins, their role in Islamic cosmology, and how they were shaped by pre-Islamic Arabian belief. It’s a fascinating deep dive into a category of being that doesn’t fit neatly into a binary of evil versus good.

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