Islam for Muslims
- THE FAITH OF MUSLIMS
- GOOD DEEDS IN PERSONAL LIFE
- GOOD DEEDS IN SOCIAL LIFE
Fighting Satan (Devil) to Avoid Sins
34: FIGHTING SATAN (DEVIL) TO AVOID SINS
Introduction: There have always been numerous questions surrounding the nature, roles and various other aspects of Satan. Now we try to focus on this in the light of Quran.
(A) Definition & Background: Satan is an evil entity belonging to the devils or evil members of God’s celestial creation named Jinn. They are usually invisible as they can “watch you from a position where you cannot see them” (7:27). Satan and its forces inspire people to do bad things through its innate power to influence or “assail your (mind)” (7:200). As a deliberate creation of God, Satan fits well in His plan to “test people” about their firmness of faith through fighting its evil instigation in order to stay unmoved on His right path (34:21). If you accordingly can show strong determination to beat Satanic influence with a sense of loyalty to God, then you will succeed in gaining His love and salvation.
Satan was originally Iblis who was “one of the Jinns” (18:50). He arrogantly defied God’s order to “prostrate to Adam (His newly created human)” (17:61) and also instigated Adam and Eve to sin by eating the prohibited fruit. Kicked out of Paradise for disloyalty, it vowed to misguide people on earth, “lying in wait” to trick or “assault them from their front, back, right and left” (7:16; 7:17). God responded by affirming that his good people will stay untouched from his harms (17:65). Today, the Satan has “tribe” of numerous followers who are in active duty for misguiding people, and “bringing all but a few descendants (of Adam) under (his) influence” (7:27; 17:62). Nowadays, we see people in general are “prone to evil”; particularly the people “without Faith” are “friends of the Evil Ones” (12:53; 7:27). Even if the Satan “descends on every lying, wicked person,” it does not have any “authority on those who believe and put trust in Lord” (26:222; 16:99)
(B) How Satan Influences: Satan along with its descendants has the power to “throw in suggestions” or influence your mind toward bad actions (22:53). It can manage these things by operating in such a delicate or “feeble cunning” way (4:76) that you may not always realize. It has the power to “deface the (fair) nature created by God” at birth (4:119). Got therefore warned you from taking such degraded or malignant “passion (or impulse) for god” as you will go “astray” by following your “own desires” “devoid of divine guidance” (25:43; 28:50). At this point we need to distinguish between your innocent inborn instinct (e.g. human weakness like controlled sexual feeling that you can meet through legal marriage) and your vicious instinct (degraded by Satan) that leans toward adultery for feeding sexual hunger. Now we discuss about how Satanic influences can give you a tendency to do bad things by turning on your negative sides of personality or activating your latent evil instincts.
(1) Laziness/Negligence: If you allow your laziness or negligence to “withdraw from remembrance” of God, then He appoints for you “an evil one to be an intimate companion” (43:36). Then Satanic influence reinforces itself unless you use will power to counter that. In this manner, if you give up a single prayer without any valid reason, then Satan may build up tough laziness in your mind as an obstacle to your next prayer. It keeps you cheerful in a movie theatre while makes you sleepy during prayer or makes your late night sleep so pleasant that you find it hard to wake up for your morning prayer.
(2) Forgetfulness: Satan can “make you forget” (18:63) your prayer or divert your mind from “God’s remembrance” particularly if you are too busy in worldly affairs (58:19). Even in prayer, it can slip your mind away without letting you know.
(3) Changing the Pace of Good Deeds: Satan can whisper you to hasten your prayer once you started it, for degrading its quality. However, before you start it, it can also try to delay or abandon your prayer by advising you to talk, walk or doing other things etc.
(4) Unwanted Thoughts: Satan can “whisper into your mind” (114:5) the whole bunch of thoughts to cross your mind during your prayer which barely happen at other times. For example, in a distractive move, it reminds you about your lost key only in your prayer even if you were mindless about it for hours since you had lost it.
(5) Evil Imaginations: Satan also “bids you to conduct unseemly” (2:268) or sometimes diverts your mind to lustful imaginations which otherwise you would never think of. The same agent also can help you fabricate a world of imaginary gods and related rituals and make them attractive to you even if nothing can be more deviating than that.
(6) Blinding Conscience: In extreme cases, Satan can temporarily turn on your ‘animal’ self when you will not feel any opposition from conscience for doing the unthinkable acts like rape, murder etc. You will however regret for that soon afterward, but that may be too late for preventing your jail term.
(7) Baseless Fear: Satan can scare you from good deeds. For example, it “threatens you with poverty” when you would want to spend on charity or fund your pilgrimage (2:268). It also can make you worried of bad health when you are willing to fast in Ramadan or plan to rise at late night for ‘tahajjud’ prayer.
(8) Showy prayer: Satan can bring in your mind an intention to show up your prayers to others, by putting up, for example, better prayers in front of people or boastfully parading healthy animal meant for sacrifice (‘qurbani’).
(9) Pleasure in Sins: Satan can give you a sweet flavor in indecent acts like backbiting, sarcasm, insulting jokes, picking a fight between your enemies, women trending to expose more of body parts than men and so on (27:24). Likewise, Satan made the deeds of “worshipping the sun” “seem pleasing in the eyes” of Queen Bilquis and her people during the reign of Solomon. (27:24).
(10) Faulty Vision: Satan can make your sinful actions “look alluring” (16:63). For example, bribery may seem tempting with bundles of brand new dollar bills or other women may look prettier than your wife even if the opposite is true. In another concrete example, Satan gives you an over-estimate while counting the number of times you utter God’s names or other holy words unless you use rosary beads. In pursuit of bad deeds, the Satan can “create false desires” in you like needless but cruel “slitting of the ears of cattle” (4:119). Likewise, it can “enliven (you) with false hopes” like becoming rich by converting to Christianity (47:25). Faulty perception often drives the collectors of donation (e.g. for mosque building) to put some in their pocket unilaterally, misjudging the Quranic approval for a share in the zakat fund for the zakat collectors.
(11) Anger & Hatred: Satan can “incite you to discord” (41:36) when you boil in anger over a small mistake of someone whom you find hard to forgive and as a result you engage in fighting. That is how the evil ones “inspire their (human) friends to fight with you” (6:121). Likewise, Satan “sows enmity” between people as it did in the case “between (Prophet Joseph) and (his) brothers” (17:53; 12:100). In a fit of anger, Moses killed a member of opposition group which God identified as a “work of Evil (Satan)” (28:15). It was also a Satanic act “to sow discord between husband and wife” during Solomon’s time (2:102). The same can also fill you with hatred towards people of poor means or belonging to other races.
(12) Pride and Jealousy: Satan gives you a feeling of pride if you have more than others and in extreme case the sense of pride can develop into arrogance and aggressive behavior. On the other hand, if others have more than yours, then Satan can make your heart burn with jealousy and sometimes provoke you to launch sniping attacks at other’s fortunes. Even in the case of some Prophets, Satan “threw some (vanity) into his desire” which God had to clear off (22:52).
(13) Greed: Satan can intensify your love for money, making you tight-fisted in spending and encourage you to earn illegally.
(C) How to Combat Satan: It is an outsize priority that you take all possible preventives to foil the tricks of Satan. God warned you that Satan is “your (explicit) enemy and therefore treat him as such” (35:6). He also warned you not to “follow the footsteps” of Satan with a grim reminder how it “seduced” and “evicted your parents (Adam and Eve) from the Garden (of Paradise)” (2:168; 7:27). You are also advised to seek “God’s refuge from Satan the Rejected one” when you start reading the Quran or begin doing other good deeds like prayer (16:98). Beyond prayer, you are advised to “seek refuge in God” in the case Satan “incites you to discord” or do other evil things (41:36). You should therefore try your best to “restrain soul from evil desires” instead of allowing “the Evil One to hinder you” from doing good deeds (79:40; 43:62).
Use of Will Force & Tricks: For effective fighting against the Satan, first you need to identify its trick by using your wisdom and then fight it out with counter tricks and strong determination. This struggle against Satan may be likened to a wrestling competition. If you are brought down by Satan in the first round, you will not give up taking it lying down; instead you will try your best to turn it down and get on top of it in the next round.
In a concrete example, if your one time prayer is lost to laziness inspired by Satan, you must not let that happen for the next prayer. If your fasting is missed on the first day of Ramadan due to travelling, you cannot allow laziness to build up on your mind to avoid subsequent fasting.
Sometimes, you have to take preemptive measure to foil its attempt such as by avoiding short nap before nightly ‘isha’ prayer. Now we cite an example from the Prophet that may enlighten you about how you can apply tricks against Satan. Once he found his lower cloth wet after taking ablution which Satan tried to confuse him with impure urine. He laid to rest this instigation by spraying fresh water on it as he now could convince his mind about the presence of water instead of urine.
(D) Action Plan against Satan: Now we offer possible action plans to combat Satanic instigation. This is however not an easy job as reflected in the Prophet’s saying that “Fighting your instincts is the best of ‘zihad’. You should therefore adopt a planned approach to meeting this challenge.
(i) Prayer, Remembrance & Other Good Deeds: The starting point will be making prayer (salat) as part of your daily routine which will strengthen you spiritually to “keep you from shameful (sinful) deeds” (29:45). Besides, “remembrance of God” can also help when an “evil thought from Satan attacks” you (7:201). In this way, if you enhance your performance of overall good deeds, the Satanic grip on you will be weakened. This will fall in line with the natural law of human psychology that suggests that the more of good deeds you do, the more of the same you would feel like doing, mainly due to loosening of Satanic grip the above way.
(ii) Opposition to Instigation: After diagnosing the tricks of Satan, you must fight it out with determination by doing exactly the opposite of Satanic inspirations. For example, if Satan gives you a feeling of showing up your prayer, then offer your optional prayer in private and keep prayer quality normal while praying in public. If you feel laziness to pray two rakats of optional prayer, then pray four or more in order to overpower your laziness while praying next. If you feel sleepy while reciting the Quran in a sitting position, force yourself up on feet to defeat the Satan. If you feel hatred for a poor, take his baby into your arms or donate him some money in a blow to your hatred.
Satan will feel insulted if you “forgive” even if you are “angry” (42:37). You can control your pride by pondering over a person who had owned much more than you but lost everything to his cancer treatment, as an example of fall of pride through God’s punishment. If you are jealous of other’s fortunes, wish him well through prayer and try to help rather than harm his interests. You can overcome your greed or miserliness by spending more on charity. If you hesitate to spend an amount in charity under fear of poverty, spend twice as much in order to frustrate the Satan. Apply your will force to ignore your health concern on the eve of fasting, and you will probably feel delighted by the end of fasting day which may instead help your health through mental peace.
(iii) Controlling Anger: You can suppress your anger by “seeking refuge in God” (41:36), reciting the last 3 chapters of the Quran, doing ablution, looking down on earth, forcing silence on yourself, walking away from the source of your anger etc. As a historic example of a battlefield, one Muslim warrior got on top of a subdued enemy who spat at him. He then took a pause for isolating his anger from his legitimate intention of striking him in self-defense.
(iv) Other Methods: If you forget your prayer, you should make that up as soon as you remember. Any delay in doing so may build up your lethargy to affect your subsequent prayers as well. If your mind slips out of prayer, force that in and engage that for focusing on correct methods, slower pace and meaning of recitation in salat. Beyond prayer, you can protect your mind from evil thoughts or nasty imaginations by reciting the last 3 chapters of the Quran. Try to cultivate the habit of hating sins so that such actions can never look pleasant to you. If you ever reach the crossroads of your moral life, being minutes away from murder or adultery, for example, then use your will force to rebel against your instinct, siding with God and following the footsteps of prophet Joseph (12:23). You cannot even imagine of what great reward is waiting for such an act of religious heroism.
(E) Consequences of Satanic Loyalty: God clearly names Satan as an “open enemy” for its commitment to “lead (people) astray far away” (2:168; 4:60). If you do not try to beat the Satan and instead you succumb to it in a cooperative fashion, then you will be heading toward a devastating end. It will increasingly tighten its grip on you by “commanding what is shameful and wrong” (24:21) and “plunging (you) deeper into sins” (7:202) from where you can never get out without God’s special help. You will be piling up sins in countless numbers without any regret or even sense about that. But the worst of sins will be the partnership sin rooted in your “friendship with Satan forsaking God” resulting in “sure suffering from manifest loss” (4:119).
All these sins will eventually open a floodgate of your terrible punishments starting here on earth and ever continuing with bottomless devastation in the Hereafter. Adam and Eve had lost Paradise just for one sin. You cannot even imagine the extent of miseries that can be brought on by the enormity of your sins.
Conclusion: It is now quite clear that Satan is your worst enemy ever and you need to overpower it by taking best possible measures in order to be a successful Muslim.