Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Satan's Fall According To The Quran

The serpent appears in Genesis 3 with no provided backstory, tempts Adam and Eve, and is cursed by God along with other parts of creation.  The opposite end of the Bible identifies Satan with this serpent (Revelation 12:9), and the closest the Bible ever comes to detailing his origins and corruption is Ezekiel 28:11-19, where a fallen cherub that walked in Eden is called the king of Tyre and is eventually to be punished by being burned into nonexistence.  Notions one might hear of like Satan convincing a third of the angels to fall into sin are not ever mentioned.  In reality, it is not even clear if the cherub of Ezekiel 28 is Satan, though this is probably the case.  The Quran is actually the text that, within the framework of its separate religion, talks of Satan's fall.

Surah 7:11 says God tells all of the angels to bow down before Adam, and the only angel listed as refusing is Iblis, or Satan.  Now, the act of bowing before a human would in this case be nonsinful because God commanded it, as anything that God demands would be obligatory or at least permissible--any contradictory moral ideas would not be grounded in the same righteous entity.  Morality is whatever the divine moral nature is.  This is ironically why Allah's "justice" in the afterlife as put forth in the Quran means Allah could not be the uncaused cause that exists: eternal conscious torment for a limited number of finite human sins is disproportionate [1].  Thus, if there is such a thing as morality, some other deity is the one in existence, for Allah is unjust by logical necessity.

God does not speak of the nature of suffering in hell here in Surah 7, though.  After the sin of Iblis, the offender says, in reference to Adam, "'I am better than him: You created me from fire and him from clay.'" (7:12).  Allah tells the angel to depart because there is no place before him for arrogance, without specifying where he is to depart to, yet when Iblis asks for respite until the Day of Resurrection, he is granted this (7:14).  However, the rebellious angel promises to be a force opposing God and righteous humanity in the meantime, prompting God to say, "'I swear I shall fill Hell with you and all who follow you!'" (7:18).  Right after God banishes him at this point, the name of Iblis is switched in the text to Satan, and he then focuses on Adam and Eve (7:20).

The Biblical account of the serpent appearing in Eden does not directly contradict these basic, allegedly preceding events, yet the Quran's story of Satan's first sin typifies how it retells narratives from the Bible, especially the Torah, and adds dialogue references.  In this case, the story being retold is not the fall of Satan, which is at most ambiguously touched upon in Ezekiel 28 of the Bible, but the fall of humanity, which Surah 7's fall of Satan leads into.  It might surprise some people that the Quran frequently alludes to or outright cites the Bible, albeit with additions that sometimes amount to very unbiblical doctrines.  Many Christians I have interacted with do not know what the Quran actually does and does not teach, insisting that whatever news media says about various Middle-Eastern countries reflects true Islam.

That Satan is featured in the Quran along with figures like Jesus and Mary might be unheard of for them.  Even if whatever they have been told about Islam was the case, they could not know apart from reading the Quran!  With the Bible itself, they also often do not know what is actually said or left unaddressed about things like Satan's backstory.  The Bible is largely silent on things like the origins of Satan and other demons.  If they were exposed to the Quran's version of Satan's initial rebellion against God, they might scoff, but they have likely never realized what the Bible does not say about Satan.  It is not necessary to read the Quran or any other text to become deeply familiar with the Bible, but some might be shocked at how reading another religious text might lead a less familiar Christian to focus on relatively little-discussed aspects of Christianity.


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