Devils

Devils enter the story as part of the uncertain boundary between divine revelation and its counterfeit. In Mahound’s crisis over Abu Simbel’s proposal, they are accepted as beings between God and humanity, but the later repudiation of the disputed verses turns the Devil into an explanation for how a false revelation could have sounded like the voice of an archangel. Gibreel Farishta’s account makes that distinction unstable: he says he delivered both the verses and their reversal.

Place in the Revelation Crisis

As Mahound weighs Abu Simbel’s offer, he considers whether Lat, Manat, and Uzza might be admitted as angelic beings. The proposal promises that Jahilia’s people could be won over, but Mahound is unsure whether accepting it would save souls or betray his purpose. His questions about the three goddesses are bound up with doubts about his own judgment and the source of what he might recite. Devils matter here not simply as enemies of angels but as a possibility within a crisis of discernment: Mahound cannot be certain whether a tempting accommodation is wise, self-serving, or spiritually false.

After wrestling with Gibreel, Mahound wakes in the wilderness and declares that the Devil had visited him in the archangel’s guise. He concludes that the verses he had memorized and recited were not genuine revelation but their satanic opposite. He hurries back to Jahilia intending to expunge them from the record. In this account, the Devil explains the apparent contradiction between Mahound’s earlier recitation and his later rejection of it.

Shaitan and the Problem of Recognition

Mahound identifies the earlier deception with Shaitan, while insisting that the being in the later encounter was the angel who wrestled him. The distinction gives him a way to separate the disputed verses from the revelation he accepts: one voice was satanic, the other angelic. Yet the episodes are presented through Gibreel’s perception as well as Mahound’s conviction, and those perspectives do not settle into a single account.

Gibreel’s disclosure is the crucial complication. From his vantage, it was he both times: the voice that supplied the verses and the voice that repudiated them. The narration thus refuses to make the Devil’s disguise a secure explanation. Mahound makes his interpretation real by speaking it aloud, but Gibreel’s knowledge exposes a gap between that decisive public account and the uncertain origin of the words.

Narrative Significance

The devils’ role turns on the difficulty of distinguishing revelation from its imitation. Mahound’s repudiation is an act of correction with lasting consequences: he seeks to remove the verses, leaving them, as Gibreel foresees, in only a few unreliable collections while orthodox interpreters try to erase their history. The Devil therefore figures both as a proposed source of false speech and as part of a larger uncertainty about who speaks through a voice—and whether a declaration of certainty can resolve that uncertainty.