Deceiving a Hollow Creature

A crowd of angels, together with Ebleece (Lucifer), was passing by the place where the clay model was found, and just as they hit upon it, they were so astonished–– a creature like this had never been seen before. Ebleece seemed also a little afraid. He did recognize that this creature was created for that great mission Allah was planning. From time to time Ebleece would go and hover around the clay model in attempts to examine it. When he discovered, in one of his investigations, that the model of the new creature to come was hollow, Ebleece felt some confidence within himself. "It will never be difficult for me to deceive a hollow creature," he thought.

Someday Allah summoned the angels to tell them that He was to give life to a new creature, which He had resolved to make His Successor in the earth. The angels asked, with no little wonder, about the wisdom lying behind "launching" a new creature onto the earth: "Are You going to make in it a creature that will blight and shed blood?" they said. "We are already exalting Your Praise and venerating You."

"I know what you know not," replied Allah, and ordered that they should bow down on their knees before the new creature, as an expression of reverence, just as He brought it into life by blowing a breath of His soul into it. Just as Allah did that and the clay model turned into flesh and blood and sprang into life, the angels submitted meekly and bowed as they were ordered, but Ebleece, who attended the event, disobeyed his Lord's Command and refused to bow down before the new creature–– Adam, the first man.

"What prevented you from bowing down to what I created by my own hands? Do you feel proud, or are you supercilious?" Allah asked.

"I am better than he is: You created me from fire, while created him from clay", rationalized Ebleece proudly the reason for his disobedience. He became very much surer than before that Allah chose Adam and his progeny of humankind, not him and his progeny of the Jinn, to be His Successors in the earth. And so, he went on, making a clean breast of his spite toward the human beings: "If You let me live till the Day of Resurrection, I would deceive all his progeny but a few."

"Then get out from Paradise," snubbed Allah. "I will fill the Hellfire with you and with all those human beings who would follow you."

Allah entered Adam into Paradise, together with his wife Eve, who had been created in later time out from one of Adam's curved ribs. There, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and his wife spent an imaginable life of ease, where there was no need for work or any other kind of struggle. They were allowed to enjoy the fruits of all trees, except that of a certain one; they were also promised that they would not feel hungry nor be naked, never feel thirsty nor will they suffer harsh weather conditions; and, before all, they were warned by their Lord God of the delusion of their enemy, Ebleece, who was envying them and that he would never stop trying to have them expelled from Paradise.

But Ebleece could deceive Adam and Eve, however. "Adam," whispered Ebleece to our progenitor, "would not I guide you to the tree of eternal life and everlasting realm?" Of course, that was the forbidden tree, and so he had to swear to Adam and Eve to make them consider that he was their advisor. He indeed found Adam pricking up his ears, and so Ebleece went on confidently: "Your Lord has prevented you from this tree either for not becoming angels or for not becoming perpetual."

Adam, in turn, forgot his Lord's warning, and Allah found not him to have determination. Just as he and his wife ate from that tree, they both became naked, and so that they both hesitantly began, in a condition of perturbation, to cover their sexual organs with some of the Paradise's leaves.

"Have not I forbidden you that tree," called out Allah to Adam and Eve, "and told you that Satan was your obvious enemy?"

"Our Lord," implored the couple. "We have done wrong to ourselves. And if You will not forgive us, we would surely be of the sufferers."

By those words, which were indeed a prayer that Allah inspired Adam to recite to obtain His Forgiveness and His Mercy, the appeal was answered: Allah forgave that sin, but He decided that Adam and Eve and Ebleece should be descended to the earth, where they would be enemies to each other. He reminded Adam, and his wife too, that whenever He would send His Prophets and Messengers to them, or later to their progeny, they should follow His Guidance –– if they wished a return to Paradise in the hereafter.

It was on one Friday when Adam and Eve and Ebleece were descended to the earth. No one exactly knows where their "landing" was; some say it was in India, others say that Adam and Eve were descended in Mecca while Ebleece was descended in a land called Dostoman .

Wherever their first settlement was, they must have faced the many burdens of their new life, and they must have suffered a lot at the beginning, though the earth was already furnished to support its predestined new settlers.

Adam's new life on the earth went on, and by the course of the years, he and Eve got many children. It is said that Eve gave birth to a boy and a girl each pregnancy. It is not unnatural, when the earth's population was counting just one family, that their sons had to marry their daughters; it was forbidden, however, that one would get married to his sister who was born with him in the same parturition.

But this heavenly law did not please Quabeel, Adam's elder son. He seems to have admired his twin sister and, therefore, tried to stand against her marriage to Haabeel, his younger brother. As the controversy between the two brothers became more and more acute, they sought a decision from Adam, who judged that each one of the two brothers should make an offering to God: the one whose offering would be accepted his desire would be considered.

Quabeel was a farmer, and so he introduced some of his harvests; it is said that he collected some bad land-products to be his offering. Being a shepherd, the good Haabeel offered a good healthy animal, and this was the one accepted by Allah.

"I will kill you," said Quabeel angrily to his brother.

"Allah accepts but from the pious," replied Haabeel with calmness. "If you stretch your hands out to kill me, I will never stretch my hands out to kill you; I fear Allah, the Lord of existence."

But piety and calmness were not characteristics of the fiery Quabeel, who did kill his pious brother. For a while, Quabeel stood silent, astonished, and in deep thought and grief. He did not know how to do with his brother's body that lay dead before him. A woeful spectacle though it was, it brought into his mind the moments of merry joy he had spent with his younger brother in their infancy.

Time passed heavily during that killing stillness before it was broken by the croaks of a crow that was flapping its wings in the air–– for Allah sent a bird to teach humankind an important lesson. Hovering above the crime scene, the crow landed not so far away from Quabeel. It was holding a dead fellow bird in its beak. Just as it could catch the fratricide's eyes, it began to dig a pit in the ground by its feet, pushed the dead bird into it, and then began covering the pit with dust.

"Oh!" murmured the murderer. "Am I unable to do like this crow to hide my brother's corpse?"

It was a dramatically sad moment. No one knows where that event took place, or how the fratricide executed his crime. A deep sadness cast over the earth during the moments that followed. It was the second great victory Ebleece won in his hideous war with humankind. Adam and his wife and their children were very sad for that reason and the loss of a dear one.

But life continued in the planet, and before long the time of Adam's death came. Adam lived for a complete thousand years, and he had known that he would reach this age somehow while he was living in the heavens. But the Angel of Death came to him forty years earlier!

"Are not there forty years remaining in my lifetime?" asked Adam the Angel of Death.

"I do know that your predestined age was a thousand years," replied the Angel of Death, "but did not you give up forty years from your lifetime for one of your forthcoming sons while you were living in Paradise?" the angel refuted, but Adam disowned.

The Angel of Death was right indeed. It came to pass that Allah showed Adam, while he was living in Paradise, all his progeny from the first one he would get to the last one yet to be borne by Doomsday. In that "show", every one of Adam's offspring appeared with his determined age written between his or her eyes; the amount of everyone's "light of faith" also appeared on everyone's forehead. Only one of those countless billions of descendants had admired Adam, as his light of faith was particularly glowing.

"Who is this one, my Lord God?" Adam asked about the man of the admired light of faith.

"This is a prophet of your forthcoming descendants."

"How many years have You determined to his age?" Adam went on, and as the answer was 'sixty years', Adam requested an extension to his admired descendant's age to be a full hundred years. Allah refused except if Adam would give up forty years of his lifetime for his favorite one, and Adam agreed.

The Angel of Death, after consulting with Allah on the affair of Adam's disownment, returned, leaving Adam alive: for Allah did accept to consummate Adam's lifetime to a complete thousand years, and did not break His previous promise to Adam regarding the extension to a full hundred years the lifetime of Prophet-King David, whose light of faith had so admired Adam. But since the time of Adam's disownment, Allah commanded that all the human beings' agreements and contracts should be written and witnessed–– to obviate the human beings' retraction of what they would agree on in the future.