Iblis's Refusal to Bow

The scene recurs at several points in the Qur'an with consistent elements. God announces to the angels that he will place a deputy on the earth, or that he is creating a human being from clay, and instructs them that when he has fashioned him and breathed into him of his spirit they are to fall down in prostration. They all prostrate together, with one exception. Iblis refuses, is asked what prevented him from prostrating when he was commanded, and gives his reason plainly: I am better than he, you created me from fire and created him from clay. He is told to descend from his position, since it is not for him to be arrogant there, and is named among the debased.

What follows is a negotiation rather than a simple expulsion. Iblis asks for respite until the day they are raised, and it is granted to a stated time. He then declares what he will do with it: because God has let him go astray, he will sit in wait on the straight path and come at them from before and behind, from the right and the left, and will find most of them ungrateful. In one telling he swears by the might of God to mislead them all together, and then makes the exception himself, except your sincere servants among them, which is the same limit God had already stated. The prostration commanded was to God through his creature, not worship of Adam, a point Islamic commentary is careful about.

A verse in the chapter of the Cave states that Iblis was of the jinn and departed from the command of his Lord, and this is the basis for the mainstream Islamic position that he is not a fallen angel. The distinction matters within Islamic theology, because angels in Islam do not possess the capacity to disobey, so a disobedient angel would be a contradiction; the jinn, made of smokeless fire, have free choice as humans do, and include believers and unbelievers among them. A minority of early commentators held instead that he was an angel who was made an exception, and the discussion of how he came to be among the angels when the command was given is old and not fully closed. He is also called al-Shaytan, and the plural of that term is used for the class of tempters descended from or associated with him.

The Jewish and Christian traditions do have narratives of angelic fall, but they are not this narrative and they arrive by a different route. The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch, and a related passage in Genesis, describe heavenly beings who take human wives and teach forbidden knowledge, and were widely read in the Second Temple period. Separately, a taunt-song in Isaiah addressed to a king of Babylon, which speaks of a shining one fallen from heaven, was read from the patristic period onward as a description of the fall of the devil, giving Western Christianity the name Lucifer. Neither text is about a refusal to bow before a human being, and the motif of the refusal, with its argument from the superiority of fire over clay, is distinctively Qur'anic among the three scriptures.