Shaitan

The shayatín (singular shaitan) are, in Islamic cosmology, the rebellious jinn who after the fall of Iblís joined his disobedience and received the mission to tempt human beings until the end of the world. Unlike Christian demonology, hierarchized in princes with proper names, the shayatín form a broad and horizontal legion of anonymous soldiers. Their condition is more ontological than mythological: according to the Quran (2:34 and 7:11-18), every jinn (and even, in a figurative sense, every being) that refuses to prostrate before the divine order and gives itself to evil enters this category. Iblís himself is called Shaytan par excellence, and from him the others derive. The term thus designates both concrete entities and the very principle of temptation and deviation.

The characteristic power of the shaitan is the waswasa, the insidious whisper that introduces into the human mind thoughts that this one perceives as its own, gradually pushing it toward doubt, vice and disobedience. Invisible by nature, the shaitan can adopt a seductive human form to deceive, and it uses lies, the false promise of pleasure, wealth or power, and the incitement to discord. Tradition teaches that each person has assigned a personal shaitan, the qarín, that accompanies it from birth whispering evil to it, against which the believer protects himself with prayer, the remembrance of God (dikr) and the search for refuge (istiʿada). The shayatín cannot force the will: they only suggest, and their power ends where the human being decides to resist.

The Quran does not describe the physical appearance of the shayatín, since their own form is invisible; popular imagery and later Sufi descriptions represent them as tall and lean humanoid figures, with reddish and dry skin, short and twisted horns, completely black eyes and dark garments. The black serpent is the animal usually associated with them. Tradition records that they retreat before certain acts of devotion: the recitation of the Quran, especially the «Throne» (Ayat al-Kursi) and the protective suras (al-Falaq and an-Nas), the call to prayer and dawn. As the principle of evil rather than as an individualized demon, the shaitan embodies in Islam the permanent temptation that tests faith, and its defeat is not a cosmic battle, but the inner victory of whoever resists the whisper.