The Poetics of Ibls

Ibls, the character in the Quran who refuses Gods command to bow to Adam and is punished by eviction from heaven, is commonly depicted as a fiendish character no different from Satan. However, some Sufi stories describe Ibls as the ultimate monotheist, a lover of God, but tragically rejected. This volume seeks the origins of this alternative Ibls within the Quran itself, by looking at each of the seven Quranic versions of the Ibls story as a unique rendering of the basic narrative. Whitney Bodman finds that the likely earliest version of the Ibls story presents him as a tragic figure, an elder sibling of Adam unjustly displaced from Gods favor. Subsequent renderings present an Ibls more hostile to humanity, and in the last two abbreviated versions Ibls becomes an incidental figure in the extended story of Adam. In modern Arab literature the character of Ibls is deployed to reveal tragic dimensions of modern life. Although it is often said that there is no place for tragedy in Islam, Bodmans careful examination of the Ibls story shows that the tragic exists even in the Quran and forms part of the vision of medieval Sufi mystics and modern social critics alike.