Iblis

Iblis is the adversary Gibreel Farishta tries to identify and defeat as his visions of himself as an archangel intensify. The novel does not establish him as an independently encountered being in these episodes: his face and identity emerge through Gibreel’s unstable perceptions, arguments with apparitions, and attempts to explain his own doubts. The name becomes a focus for a larger struggle over whether evil is a separate force, part of divine power, or something Gibreel is projecting onto an inseparable other.

Identity and Uncertain Presence

Gibreel first approaches the adversary through a mixture of remembered religious knowledge and conjecture. After an apparition of Rekha Merchant challenges his confidence in a clean division between good and evil, he considers whether she is his own accomplice-adversary, an inner demon. Yet even the apparent learning in her speech unsettles him: he cannot tell whether its theological ideas come from knowledge he once possessed and lost, or from some other source. His recollections of the period when he stopped believing in his angelhood remain obscured. Iblis is therefore introduced not through a stable biography or confirmed appearance, but through Gibreel’s difficulty in deciding what his own mind contains.

That uncertainty persists when Gibreel imagines the adversary waiting somewhere in London. He pictures a horned, malevolent face, but cannot bring it into focus or retrieve the name he feels is almost within reach. He tries out sounds and fragments rather than arriving at a secure identification. The hesitation matters: Gibreel is confident that his powers are returning and that he will eventually cast his opponent down, yet he cannot say with certainty who that opponent is. His sense of a destined confrontation outruns his knowledge of its target.

The Adversary in Gibreel’s London

Gibreel’s urban mission gives Iblis a practical role in his imagined account of the world. Determined to do good and reclaim the city from the adversary’s dominion, he plans to work methodically across London using an atlas. The map promises a stable route and measurable progress, but the city changes shape around him, frustrating his preferred system. Against this shifting landscape, the adversary becomes the expected source of corruption and the eventual opponent who will make Gibreel’s campaign meaningful. Yet the name remains elusive even as Gibreel treats the coming battle as certain.

The idea of Iblis also returns when Gibreel confronts doubts about the deity he believes has restored him. He reasons that the angels’ fall was an exercise of power and punishment for rebellion, then finds himself questioning a divine order that appears to forbid dissent. He checks these thoughts as satanic ones placed in his mind by Iblis, and resolves to continue until he is purified and his full potency returns. This explanation turns doubt into evidence of an adversary’s influence, allowing Gibreel to preserve his mission. At the same time, the doubt concerns the justice and authority of the very power he serves, so assigning it to Iblis does not make the underlying conflict disappear.

A Joined Opponent, Then a Rejected Kinship

As the adversary’s face grows clearer, Gibreel recognizes a disturbing intimacy between them. He recalls that they fell to earth together, and imagines them locked to one another, mouth to mouth, head to tail. The adversary is not simply a distant enemy in this vision: he is Gibreel’s other, bound to him by the same fall. Gibreel’s momentary recognition complicates his project of separating good from evil, because the relationship he perceives suggests connection where his mission demands opposition.

He then recoils from that ambiguity. Drawing on the Qur’an, Gibreel decides that Iblis was not a fallen angel but a djinn who transgressed. This account seems to him more straightforward than the story of an angelic dissenter: Iblis can stand for darkness, while Gibreel stands for light. He discards the idea of their joining and frames the task as the destruction of an utterly separate evil. The apparent clarity is fragile, however. Gibreel himself has just imagined their bodies and fates as joined, and his effort to settle the question depends on choosing one account over another rather than resolving the contradictions between them.

Eden, Moral Choice, and Narrative Significance

Gibreel’s revised account of Iblis reshapes his reading of the Eden story. He uses it to set aside his earlier suspicion that the deity might have suppressed dissent among the angels or denied moral choice to other creations. In his new interpretation, the forbidden tree is not the biblical tree of knowledge of good and evil but a tree of immortality; because Shaitan is a liar, Gibreel infers that its fruit belongs to a tree of death. This reading supplies a coherent opposition between the deity’s order and the adversary’s deception, but it is presented as part of Gibreel’s effort to regain certainty, not as an independent confirmation of what Iblis is.

Iblis consequently functions both as Gibreel’s imagined opponent and as the name to which he assigns thoughts that threaten his angelic self-conception. The adversary’s indistinct face, almost-recalled name, and shifting relation to Gibreel keep that role unsettled. Gibreel longs for a world divided cleanly into light and darkness, yet his visions repeatedly bring the two figures into contact and make their separation difficult to sustain. By the time he decides that the deity is to be found in English hearts and that he must transform them, Iblis has helped organize his mission without becoming a reliably distinct presence outside it.