Secular Civilization, Spiritual Civilization

But the story of Iblis, the chief of the jinns, shows that they adopted the attitude of ‘I am better than he is’ (7:12) and failed to realize God’s greatness and glory. In other words, the jinns glorified themselves but failed to discover God’s glory. Subsequently, God created man to succeed the jinns and accomplish the task of realizing God. But the angels could not understand this point at that time. So they raised doubts, saying that just as the jinns had failed to fulfill their creation’s purpose, so would man fail to do so. To remove the doubts of the angels, God gave a demonstration, which is briefly mentioned in the Quran: “He taught Adam all the names” (2:31). In this verse, “names” refer to the knowledge of things. By way of additional blessing, God granted man knowledge of all things. He inculcated the knowledge of all creation in his nature. In this way, at the unconscious level, man became potentially conscious of all things. God temporarily demonstrated this before the angels, and they were satisfied. From these verses of the Quran, we learn that the jinns were given brains but not knowledge of things. They were required to use their brains to discover the marvels hidden in the universe. They had to turn their ignorance into knowledge by pondering over things. But they failed to do so.