Iblis is the Islamic devil, and his story is a meditation on pride. A being of the jinn, created from smokeless fire, he dwelt among the angels in worship until God, having formed Adam from clay, commanded all to prostrate before the new creature. Iblis alone refused, and the Quran preserves his reasoning: "I am better than he; You created me from fire and created him from clay" (7:12). The sin is not disbelief in God, Iblis never doubts God's existence, and even speaks with him, but arrogance, the refusal to accept God's command over his own judgement of worth.
Cursed and expelled, he asks for and is granted respite until the Day of Judgement, and vows to lead humankind astray, becoming al-Shaytan, the whisperer who tempts from within. Islamic theology has long debated the puzzle his story poses: whether he was angel or jinn, and how a being who knew God so intimately could fall. Sufi writers such as al-Hallaj even read his refusal, provocatively, as a perverse form of devotion, so jealous of God's uniqueness that he would bow to no one else. He remains the tradition's image of the self set above obedience.