The Qur'an creates a real interpretive puzzle about what kind of being Iblis is. The account of his refusal to bow to Adam is told among the angels, who are commanded as a group to bow and who, apart from Iblis, comply, which reads naturally as counting him among the angels. Yet a separate verse, Surah al-Kahf 18:50, states plainly that Iblis was one of the jinn, a distinct category of being in Islamic cosmology made of smokeless fire rather than the light angels are made from, and traditionally capable of disobedience in a way angels are usually held not to be.
Classical Qur'anic exegetes, the mufassirun, worked to reconcile these two statements rather than treating one as simply wrong: some proposed that Iblis was a jinn who had risen to live and worship among the angels through great piety before his fall, explaining his presence in the bowing scene without overturning the explicit statement of his jinn nature. Others held that jinn is being used here as a subcategory or class within the angels rather than a wholly separate kind of creature. The disagreement has never fully closed, and it matters theologically because it bears directly on the separate, related debate over whether Iblis's refusal was a genuine free choice, expected of jinn, or a fall from among beings usually described as incapable of disobedience.