Recordings › Discussion on Miracles: A fallacy against God | Mufti Abu Layth · 13 Oct 2020 › Segment 2 of 14
Was Iblis condemned for using his reason?
muftis iman imaan eemaan eeman shaytan shaitan shaytaan iblees shayateen shayatin satan devil koran quraan al-quranWas Iblis condemned for using reason? Angels and the imagination
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This segment3:56 to 7:08 · 3 min 12 sGeneral teaching
What this part covers
machinesummary, machine-writtenNo: Iblis was condemned for arrogance and stubbornness, not reason, and much of what people picture about angels is imagination filling in the Quran's outline.
In more detail
The caller objects that if reason is used everything can be questioned, even Jibril's encounter with the Prophet, and that Iblis is said to have been the first to use reason when he refused to prostrate to Adam. Mufti Abu Layth says Iblis was never problematised for reason; he was condemned for arrogance and stubbornness, and justifying oneself is a normal thing, while reason is never bad. He says he has no problem with people questioning such stories, and that on angels the Quran lays out some dots while human imagination fills in the rest, wings and floating figures of light, which is fine until that figment is concretised and every other view called wrong.
Position stated
Mufti Abu Layth says Iblis was never condemned for using reason; the problem was his arrogance and stubbornness.
“never problematized for reason this is a misrepresentation it was arrogance and it was stubbornness but it was it was not reason was not the problem”
Category: teaching
Kind: general teachingTranscript
machine3:56 to 7:08 · click a time to seek · dotted terms open the glossary
does this make sense i mean one is from a reason perspective but one is does it make sense comprehensively like within itself so the jesus thing is a is a good example because one is the from the reason perspective you know can a human being just be living up there in the cosmos just on his own he's just floating in mid cosmos somewhere this obviously is from a reason perspective that's not a belief that reason would generally accept okay but i'm sorry to cut you but if you start
using our reason then we could reason and question everything we could reason even uh the encounter of jibrael with prophet muhammad right so they say that one of the first persons who used reason was iblis because he was asked to prostrate in front of adam and he used reason by saying that no i'm made of fire he's made of dirt why should i so isn't part of is it wasn't part of belief also that it's fate that's something we don't have to understand everything that we expected that's a very good question uh abdul malik first and firstly the police iblis was
never problematized for reason this is a misrepresentation it was arrogance and it was stubbornness but it was it was not reason was not the problem the problem was his arrogance and his stubbornness it was not the story in the quran is not he's being condemned because he used his reason the point was how he was arrogant and his this is the kind of story that is is drawn the illustration in the quran that he shows himself as being very you know haughty and very kind of like proud and refuses
now he justifies it through some reason of his but that doesn't mean that because he justified it justifications are wrong justifications are normal things in everyday life they're not bad in and of themselves and reason is spectacular it's never a bad thing but the other things were the other qualities but coming to this thing um reason it doesn't in my understanding reason never problematizes faith in my understanding now when you said about jibrael or you could question other things that is true i have no
problem with people uh you know presenting questions to things in saying well how do you understand the story of jibril ali now i've said before when i've been asked about things like angels and stuff like this i've said that what you what is being mentioned in the quran you see a huge part of it what's filling in the blanks is your imagination the quran is it is laying out some dots but then human beings are filling in so when they think angels they think these things they think of you know these things made out of let's say
particular light that float around like a spirit you know they've got a wings and they do this and they they look like humans except they float and but this the quran never really ever said anything like this but we what we do is we just use our imagination and i'm not saying using our imagination is a bad thing it's fine but the problem is when we take that figment and then concretize it and assume anything else is wrong that becomes the problem now coming back to the main question that you see when we see the belief of jesus
Paragraphs overlapping 3:56 to 7:08. Full text on the recording page.
Cite this segment
Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2020-10-13-S02, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/hiu1gjszg1e/s/2/ (accessed 1 November 2026)
- APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2020, October 13). Was Iblis condemned for using his reason? [Video, segment 2020-10-13-S02, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/hiu1gjszg1e/s/2/
- Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2020. "Was Iblis condemned for using his reason?" Video, segment 2020-10-13-S02, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded October 13, 2020. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/hiu1gjszg1e/s/2/
- BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2020-10-13-S02, author = {Mufti Abu Layth}, title = {{Was Iblis condemned for using his reason?}}, year = {2020}, month = {10}, date = {2020-10-13}, howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/hiu1gjszg1e/s/2/}}, url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/hiu1gjszg1e/s/2/}, organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive}, urldate = {2026-11-01}, note = {Segment 2020-10-13-S02, auto-transcribed, may contain errors} }
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