According to the Islamic perception,
the devil was born of fire and was most probably not an
angel although he was also asked to prostrate before Adam
just like them. Unlike them, he refused on the grounds
that he was born of fire while Adam was created from clay.
Rather than repenting, he asked for a respite till the
Day of Judgment so he may misguide the human beings.
In the Quran, the devil has been
called Iblis (apparently derived from the same Greek root
as the words devil and diabolical: diabolos,
meaning slanderer or accuser) and Shaytan (the Arabic
equivalent of Satan). In some Muslim literature his personal
name is given as Azazil.
Curiously, the treatment of the devil
in the classical Muslim literature (especially the writings
of Hallaj, Attar and Rumi) reflects some aspects of the
devil’s equivalents from the ancient Greece and
Persia: respectively, Prometheus the titan who defied
Zeus in favor of the human being and Ahriman, the spirit
of evil whose conflict with the supreme deity Ahura-Mazda
is taken out only against the human being.
These Sufi traditions may have played
a greater role in the portrayal of the devil in the works
of Iqbal than did the Western sources, such as Prometheus
Bound by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, Paradise
Lost by the English poet John Milton and Faust
by Goethe – although Iqbal was familiar with all
of these and was happy to have been influenced by Goethe
in other things (see chapters
31 and 38 in A Novel of
Reality).
Contrary to the stereotype of Western
literature, Iqbal’s devil is sober, erudite and
majestic as well as being unrelenting (see chapters
34, 73, 74,
75, 88,
96, 97,
98 and 99
in A Novel of Reality). “A drunkard, a
scholar, a philosopher, a mystic and an ascetic”,
he well deserves the title given to him in Javid Nama,
“The Lord of the Separated Ones”.
However, the combined effect of this
portrayal is not to develop a soft corner for the diabolical
in the minds of the readers. Quite the contrary: he becomes
more real through his portrayal as a well-rounded personality.
Hence, when he turns out to be the ultimate adversary
– the antagonist of the entire narrative –
the reader is likely to take the conflict more seriously
than if the adversary was a mere “bogey-devil”.
Special
thanks to Iqbal Academy Pakistan
