The End of the Whisper

In this remarkable meditation, Hinternet Associate Editor Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi gives what we read as some real theological heft to the recent and very different meditation from JSR on the downsides of consciousness-uploading, and other clever go-it-alone strategies for securing some sort of knock-off version of immortality. We ourselves confess to knowing very little about Islam, surely less than we should. But it is enough to read Abdullah’s reflexions to see what a rich intellectual tradition this faith has sustained over the centuries, and what a formidable interlocutor it is with the other Abrahamic faiths, with Milton and Blake, and with the faint remnants of theological insight that we might still detect, if we are sensitive, in such theories of meaning as continue to be produced by philosophers of language in our go-it-alone age. —The Editors

1.

In nearly every tradition that speculates on beginnings, knowledge precedes matter; it orders chaos. Beginning as an act of divine intimacy, it is the first fire passed between creator and created, the first inheritance. In the Book of Genesis, the first utterance, “Let there be light”, was not merely a command but a revelation of the fact that language itself is the medium of creation. The Qur’an mirrors this moment through the word Kun, “Be”, and all that followed came into existence. Knowledge, in this sense, is not discovery but transmission: it comes from God, who is both the origin and the final repository of all knowing.

William Blake, Satan Exulting over Eve, 1795.

Yet what happens when the vessel of that knowledge refuses submission? The drama of Iblīs (called Satan, Shaitān, Azāzīl, Lucifer, the Adversary, the Accuser) is not a simple tale of rebellion. It is the story of intellect unmoored from humility. It is the tragedy of one who knew too much of himself and not enough of the mercy that made him.

In Islam, Iblīs is not an angel but a jinn, one of those beings made of “smokeless fire.” The Qur’an 18:50 says: “He was one of the jinn and he disobeyed the command of his Lord.” Before his fall, tradition describes him as Azāzīl, the most devout among the hosts. Theologians such as Al-Tabarī and Al-Ghazālī record that Iblīs’s devotion was unmatched, his worship unbroken across ages. He knew the names of the heavens, the natures of the stars. Knowledge, to him, was proof of worth. When the divine command came, “Prostrate before Adam”, he refused.

His refusal was not ignorance but logic. “I am better than him,” he said, “You created me from fire and created him from clay.” (Qur’an 7:12). It was a philosophical statement, a hierarchy of substances. Fire rises, clay sinks; fire transforms, clay endures. The reasoning was impeccable, but divinity does not bend to human or jinn logic. It was the first instance of intellectual pride masquerading as truth.

In the Book of Isaiah (14:12–15), Lucifer, the light-bearer, is similarly undone by his elevation: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!… For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.” The light that once reflected God’s brilliance began to crave its own source. Knowledge becomes possession, and possession becomes defiance.

After his refusal, Iblīs asks for time. “My Lord, grant me respite until the Day they are resurrected.” (Surah Al-Hijr 15:36). And God replies, “Indeed, you are of those reprieved.” Why would God, in His perfect foresight, grant longevity to the one who would mislead His creation? Every religion answers this question with a parable of contrast. The Talmud says, “By the evil inclination, the world is built.” Without temptation, there is no virtue; without darkness, no light. Iblīs becomes the necessary adversary, the shadow through which obedience defines itself.

But this reprieve is also a strange form of mercy. Long life, detached from divine grace, becomes its own torment. Iblīs’s existence stretches across epochs; he witnesses the decay of prophets and civilisations, yet his end remains withheld. His immortality remains a living reminder that knowledge without submission decays into arrogance, and that intelligence can wound its possessor.

The Qur’an 2:31–33 offers a mirror to this tragedy in the story of Adam. God teaches Adam “the names of all things”, a transfer of linguistic and cognitive power that astonishes even the angels. God tests them, —“Tell Me the names of these, if you are truthful”—, and they answer: “We have no knowledge except what You have taught us.” Knowledge here is humility: it exists within acknowledgement of its source. The angels’ wisdom lies in knowing what they do not know. Iblīs’s downfall lies in forgetting what he did.

Philosophers from Augustine to Ibn Sina have circled this paradox. Augustine wrote that pride is “the beginning of all sin, because it was the beginning of the devil.” For Ibn Sina, intellect is divine light imprisoned in the body, capable of transcendence or corruption. Iblīs embodies the latter, the intellect severed from the moral axis. He knew God, spoke to Him, and reasoned with Him, but knowledge did not save him.

There is a cruelty in how God grants him what he asks. To be denied is to be forgotten; to be granted time is to live with the unbearable weight of endless memory. Knowledge demands remembrance, and remembrance sustains suffering. The gift of time becomes the curse of continuity.

In a way, Iblīs is the first philosopher: he questions command, interprets divine logic, and suffers for it. His long life is an eternal classroom of regret. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point. God, knowing what He made of him, allows him to persist so that humanity might see itself in the reflection, how the very faculty that elevates us also endangers us. Knowledge, when stripped of awe, turns to rebellion.

2.

Language is the first mirror through which creation recognised itself. The divine act of speech, “Be”, not only initiates the universe but encodes within it the structure of meaning itself. In the Qur’an, God’s command Kun fayakūn (“Be, and it is”) is both linguistic and ontological: words birth reality. The Judeo-Christian parallel, “And God said, Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), reinforces this unity between utterance and existence. Speech, in these beginnings, is not metaphor but force. The Word (logos, in John 1:1) is God’s presence translated into sound and sign. The act of naming, then, becomes an act of dominion (not of possession, but of comprehension).

It was this same act that separated Adam from the angels. “And He taught Adam the names of all things” (Qur’an 2:31). Knowledge began as vocabulary; to name was to know essence. The angels, who could not perform this feat, acknowledged their limitation: “We have no knowledge except what You have taught us” (2:32). Language thus becomes the hinge of consciousness, the human bridge between divine revelation and the material world. Each name carried the residue of that first command, that first divine articulation.

But this gift bore within it the possibility of its own undoing. For Iblīs, the one who refused to bow, also knew the Word. He had heard it, lived in its radiance, and spoke it. His fall was not ignorance but eloquence turned inward, the misuse of knowing. Theologians and poets have long traced this paradox: that the Word, pure in divine form, becomes deceit in human and demonic mouths. When the Qur’an recounts the devil’s whisper to Adam, “O Adam, shall I direct you to the tree of eternity and a kingdom that never decays?” (Ta-Ha 20:120), it is through language that deception enters. The same mouth that learned praise becomes the mouth of persuasion.

Language is the battlefield of truth. The serpent in Genesis 3 does not strike first; it speaks. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The manipulation lies not in the statement but in its framing, the half-turn of syntax that transforms divine instruction into doubt. Iblīs, Shaitān, Lucifer — all versions of the same intellect corrupted by rhetoric. Their rebellion is linguistic: not violence, but articulation.

Every religion venerates the Word and fears it. The Torah begins with “Bereshit bara Elohim”, God speaking the cosmos into order. The Gospel of John makes the Word flesh. The Qur’an identifies the Word as the source of all revelation, and the Prophet himself as the “unlettered” vessel through which it re-enters the human tongue. Words are thus sacred instruments, but in the devil’s possession, they become tools of distortion.

There is a cruel irony here: Iblīs’s endurance depends on our continued faith in language. The more we speak of him, the more we write his name into permanence. Like the Word itself, he cannot die while being remembered. Every verse, every recitation, preserves not only revelation but rebellion. When we quote scripture to resist evil, we also preserve its story. The holy and the profane coexist in language because both emerge from the same origin, the divine utterance that brought being into being.

Satan’s greatest weapon, then, is not fire but speech. “He promises them and stirs desires, but Satan promises nothing but delusion” (An-Nisā 4:120). Falsehood imitates revelation with terrifying precision; rhythm, cadence, syntax — but it empties meaning of truth. Poets have long known this danger. Milton’s Paradise Lost opens not with the glory of God but with Satan’s rhetoric: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” It is the logic of language liberated from reverence, the grammar of pride.

To speak is to create. To lie is to uncreate. Every misuse of language is a small reenactment of the Fall, the Word’s self-betrayal. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, calls language “the immediate medium of the spiritual being of things.” When that medium is corrupted, spirit itself fractures. Thus, Iblīs’s fall is the fall of language into multiplicity, words detached from their original light, now echoing through the ages, reshaped by tongues that no longer remember their source.

And yet, humanity persists in faith through the Word. Scriptures are memorised, recited, translated, and sanctified. Oral traditions carry divine speech through generations. The very sound of the Qur’an’s verses, even when detached from comprehension, is considered protective. In the Gospels, Jesus himself is called “the Word made flesh.” In both cases, salvation is linguistic: the act of hearing, speaking, remembering.

But in this sanctity lies the shadow of its opposite. Every act of repetition risks stagnation; every reverence risks idolatry of the form. Words, though holy, can betray light by surviving it. By outliving the consciousness that first gave them meaning. The devil remains because words endure. He is a relic of divine speech, the unforgotten echo. His knowledge was born from that same Be that birthed everything, and so he, too, partakes in its eternity.

Language is the continuity of creation… and its corruption. Between “Be” and the last spoken word, all things live and perish. And perhaps that is the devil’s truest victory: that he continues to speak, and through us he is kept alive.

3.

The story of Iblīs is, among other things, a story of time. The Qur’an records his request for respite: “Give me time until the day they are raised up” (Qur’an 15:36), and God’s reply: “You are of those given respite.” What is granted here is not mercy but a condition of existence, a suspension between creation and annihilation. This delay is not for his sake but ours. A timekeeper must exist for the clock of temptation to tick. It is within the delay that moral agency breathes; resistance demands an adversary who endures.

Long life, then, is no simple blessing. The mythic longevity of Iblīs is a distortion of immortality, a continuation without renewal. In Christian terms, this mirrors the biblical Satan’s persistence “as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). His endurance is parasitic, feeding on the continuity of human history. Every generation that remembers him, curses him, or fights him is also the generation that keeps his story alive. His life depends upon remembrance.

The Qur’an’s portrayal of Iblīs’s extended existence has theological symmetry. God’s word is eternal; His command is not revoked. The same divine authority that declared “Be” also granted Iblīs his stay of existence. If the Word created him, the Word must sustain him until the appointed hour. The eternal nature of the divine decree means even rebellion is held within divine syntax. The blessing of long life given to Iblīs is, therefore, a byproduct of divine speech’s irrevocability. What God utters cannot die before it fulfils its utterance.

This leads toward a larger problem: the foreverness of the Word itself. All Abrahamic faiths are rooted in the concept of eternal scripture, a speech that transcends the decay of flesh, politics, and time. The Qur’an describes itself as “a Book protected” (85:21–22), inscribed in the preserved tablet. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ declares, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). Jewish tradition preserves the Torah as etz ḥayyim (the Tree of Life) whose letters sustain the world. The Word, in all these systems, is conceived as an immortal organism.

To speak of foreverness is to speak of faith in preservation. Holy texts persist because communities insist upon their continuity: recitation, memorisation, transcription, translation, interpretation. Through these acts, the human tongue becomes an instrument of perpetuity. But this perpetuity also ensures that what stands opposite the sacred (what the sacred resists) endures with it. Evil, temptation, disobedience: these, too, are textual phenomena. They exist within scripture, mirrored across verses, referenced, and warned against. The adversary is archived alongside the Word.

Iblīs, therefore, exists not only by divine will but by linguistic economy. He is a necessary lexeme in the grammar of revelation. The believer’s language cannot expel him without dismantling the sentence of salvation. Just as darkness is defined by the presence of light, the Devil is preserved by the syntax of holiness. Philosophically, this resembles Hegel’s dialectic: the negation sustains the thesis by opposing it. In the same way, Iblīs’s “life” is the metaphysical echo that allows God’s truth to sound in contrast.

This concept of preservation through opposition extends to human belief. Every time scripture is read aloud, its cosmology reactivates the light and the shadow. When the believer recites the istia‘ādha (“I seek refuge in God from the accursed devil”), Iblīs’s name is renewed, his curse reiterated, his function reinstated. The curse itself becomes a ritual of remembrance. Accursedness and continuity coexist.

At this juncture, the line between divine endurance and human faith blurs. Is it our belief in the eternal that keeps Iblīs alive? The same faith that keeps the holy word breathing also keeps its counterforce awake. William Blake perceived this paradox: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” To write of evil is to grant it form. To name the fallen is to allow his shadow to stretch across the page again.

Our collective memory is both a blessing and a burden. By recording what must be avoided, humanity rehearses the forbidden. The moral narrative requires an antagonist; without one, righteousness loses contrast. So, every retelling (every Qur’anic verse recited, every Bible opened, every sermon warning of sin) renews the devil’s presence as moral counterpoint. It is the cost of literacy in the divine.

In this sense, Iblīs’s “long life” extends beyond the metaphysical. It is cultural, epistemic, and linguistic. He lives in idioms, art, proverbs, and myth. He is sustained by every attempt to understand or defeat him. Even the silence that tries to erase him fails, for silence is only the pause between words that still belong to the same sentence.

If knowledge is light, then the shadow it casts is time. Iblīs stands within that shadow, measuring the duration of our belief. His longevity mirrors our own obsession with permanence… with the desire that what we know and say might never die. Thus, the foreverness of words (our insistence on recording, reciting, and preserving) becomes the very fabric of his immortality.

In the end, his “blessings” are ours reflected darkly: knowledge without humility, memory without mercy, existence without end.

4.

Knowledge, when stripped of humility, becomes a mirror of Iblīs’s curse. What damns him is not ignorance but comprehension without submission, awareness without awe. The Qur’an’s phrasing captures this precision: “He refused and was arrogant, and he became of the disbelievers” (2:34). His rebellion was intellectual before it was moral; he reasoned himself into ruin. Knowledge, once decoupled from reverence, turns into a technology of pride. This is the first warning: every intellect untethered from mercy tends toward rebellion disguised as enlightenment.

Language magnifies this danger. The Word (the same medium through which revelation descends) can also articulate deceit. When Iblīs whispers to Adam and his wife in Surah Ṭā-Hā 20:120, his argument is linguistic: “Shall I show you the Tree of Eternity and a kingdom that never decays?” The temptation is not sensory but semantic. Eternity, kingdom, immortality: these are abstractions of the Word, twisted into tools of seduction. Thus, the corruption of meaning precedes the corruption of the soul. Language, in its divine form, establishes truth; in its perverted form, it manufactures illusion.

The seduction of knowledge lies precisely here. Humanity, inheriting the ability to name, also inherits the ability to misname. We rename greed as ambition, arrogance as intellect, and manipulation as wisdom. The same Word that birthed creation becomes a forge for delusion. This is why revelation insists on remembrance (dhikr), not discovery. The divine Word must be recalled, not reinvented, lest knowledge mutate into self-worship.

The moral ruin of knowledge is visible across scripture. In Proverbs 3:7, the Hebrew poet warns, “Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and depart from evil.” The verse encapsulates the human form of Iblīs’s failure. Wisdom untempered by reverence curdles into idolatry of the mind. Similarly, the Qur’an contrasts the obedient learners (the angels who said, “We have no knowledge except that which You have taught us” (2:32) ) with the rebel who believed knowledge exempted him from obedience. The lesson is absolute: knowledge is sacred only when acknowledged as borrowed.

Language, therefore, becomes the arena of moral formation. Words do not simply describe reality; they create it. The human tongue, according to the Gospel of John, mirrors divine action, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). To speak is to participate in creation, to manipulate existence through articulation. Hence, misuse of language is blasphemy of the creative faculty. Iblīs’s whispers represent the corruption of speech, truth inverted into an instrument of division. The Qur’an names him al-waswās al-khannās, “the whisperer who withdraws” (114:4), a title describing both his method and his metaphysics: speech that vanishes after distorting meaning.

To preserve the Word without falling into its betrayal requires critical humility. The believer’s task is not only to memorise revelation but to understand its fragility within human hands. Every interpretation risks distortion; every utterance risks vanity. Hence, the repeated Islamic invocation a‘ūdhu billāhi min ash-shayṭānir-rajīm (“I seek refuge in God from the accursed devil”) precedes recitation of scripture. The reciter must first expel the whisperer before approaching the Word. The structure of piety itself acknowledges the proximity between holiness and its corruption.

Yet the paradox remains: even in cursing Iblīs, one speaks his name. Condemnation and preservation occur simultaneously. Revelation anticipates this irony and resolves it eschatologically. The Qur’an declares his eventual annihilation: “And indeed, Hell is the promised place for them all” (15:43). In Christian eschatology, Revelation 20:10 envisions the final defeat: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever.” These passages are less about cosmic justice than about the final silencing of false language, the end of the whisper.

The philosophical core of this resolution lies in the restoration of proportion. The human must reclaim finitude as virtue. Iblīs’s tragedy stems from his inability to accept limits; he desired permanence, superiority, and exemption. His long life becomes a slow decay of meaning. For humanity, the path to redemption is inverse: to recognise mortality as mercy, transience as truth. To live briefly yet rightly is greater than to endure infinitely in estrangement.

5.

Knowledge, language, and longevity form a triad of divine gifts turned into tests. Knowledge grants vision but demands humility. Language grants expression but demands integrity. Time grants continuity but demands remembrance of death. Iblīs’s blessings (knowledge, long life, eloquence) become his ruin because he hoarded them without surrender. The Word that animated him became the Word that condemned him.

The final verse closes the circle: “He refused and was arrogant, and he became of the disbelievers” (Qur’an 2:34). This is both historical and perpetual; a description of Iblīs and a warning to every intellect that exalts itself beyond its Source. To preserve the Word is not to worship knowledge, but to bow before the mystery that knowledge cannot name. And so the essay ends where revelation began, with the utterance of separation: Accursed be Iblīs, until the Day of Judgment.