ABSTRACT
After God created Adam, the devil (originally an angel or jinn) refuses to obey God’s order, which enjoins the angels to bow or to prostrate before the first man. God curses and banishes the devil but grants him respite until the Day of Judgement and allows him to lead astray all who are not true servants of God. The devil’s first evil deed is to incite Adam and his wife to disobey God’s command not to eat from the forbidden tree. Throughout history the devil is, and will be, active to counter God’s divine plans concerning the well-being of mankind in this world and in the afterlife. The devil is known under two desig-
nations in the Qur ) an: Iblis, used always
as a proper name, and al-shaytan (‘the satan’), originally a generic designation but with the definite article used as a proper name as well. The generic shaytan (pl. shayatin) takes up a pre-Islamic notion of a superhuman entity not unlike the jinn, which may govern the words and deeds of humans as did the pagan demons and deities. An Arab poet was seen as possessed by a jinn or a shaytan. This is probably alluded to when the Qur
) an insists on its divine
origin and says of itself: ‘Not by the satans has it been brought down’ (26.210). In 6.112 it is asserted that God created ‘satans’ for all his prophets: ‘We have appointed to every prophet an enemy – satans of men and jinn’, which implies that metaphorically men can also be called ‘satans’. A certain ambiguity between shaytan and al-shaytan prevails in the Qur
) anic text. The name Iblis is
usually seen as derived from the Greek diabolos, the name of the devil in Christian scripture, and is thus etymologically related to the word ‘devil’. Shaytan is most probably derived from the Hebrew shatan (Satan). Arab-Muslim philologists suggest different etymologies. They
derive Iblis from an Arabic root, meaning ‘to render hopeless’, and find also an Arabic etymology for shaytan. (Al-) Shaytan in its different forms occurs more frequently in the Qur
) an than
Iblis.
