legion

I also caught the movie Legion at a midnight opening last week. The film had its interesting moments but overall it wasn't very well made and I definitely could have waited for it to appear in the bargain DVD bin at Blockbuster.

Legion is a dark and twisted Christmas card on film. The premise: God has lost faith in humanity so He orders the angelic hosts to bring on the apocalypse. We see darkness, swarms of insects and other phenomena, but mostly we see angels possess other human beings (e.g. the foul-mouthed, wall-crawling old lady prominently featured in the commercials).

God has created a special child who will possibly be born to a pregnant waitress in a diner and could somehow oppose and counter-act the apocalypse. But then in a spectacular example of logic, He also orders the archangel Michael to kill this self-same child before it is born.

The interesting thing is that Michael ends up being almost a perfect inversion of the Islamic concept of the devil by refusing this command. At one point he even announces that when God made mankind he was the first angel to bow down to the the crowning glory of God's creation (as opposed to Iblis in the Quran who refuses to bow down to Adam). And to add another level to the inversion, just as al-Hallaj suggested that the commandment to bow was more a test of the purity of the devil's monotheism than a straightforward order, in Legion, the commandment to bring on the apocalypse was really a test of compassion (which Michael passes) by holding on to his faith in humanity.

see also:
the devil and al-hallaj

Unfortunately, this one interesting aspect is outweighed by the film's various flaws including: 1) There is way too much violence given that the film is ultimately a fable on compassion. 2) Unlike the film The Prophecy which was able to portray angels with a dark side with the right amount of tension, most of the "angels" in Legion just appear creepy and demonic. 3) More specifically, the angel-possessed crowds basically made Legion reminiscent of a zombie movie. But then the massive crowds clearly could have overwhelmed the heroes in the dinner and it isn't plausible that our heroes would last as long as they do.

the devil and al-hallaj

So I recently finished reading Philp Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It is a kind of an anti-Narnia series where the heroes gather a multiverse-wide army to fight against the Judeo-Christian God, typically referred to as the Authority. Given the theme, I would have expected that that film The Golden Compass (based on the first book) would have caused more of a scandal than it did. In any case, the books got me thinking of other examples (both historical and fictional) of how perspectives on God or the Devil are sometimes dramatically inverted.

One example of such an inversion in an Islamic framework can be connected to a question I've reflected on from even before the time I became Muslim: If Islam is such a radical monotheism, then why would Iblis (the Devil) get in trouble for refusing to bow down to something other than God? (For those that don't know, in the Quran the Devil "falls" when he refused to bow down to Adam)

The Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj must have had a similar question, and in a chapter of his metaphysical treatise The Tawasin entitled Before Endless Time and Equivocation he gives a rather bold answer in the form of an imaginary dialogue between Moses and the Devil:

Musa met Iblis on the slope of Sinai and said to him: ‘Oh Iblis, what prevented you from prostrating?’

He said: ‘That which prevented me was my declaration of a Unique Beloved, and if I had prostrated I would have become like you, because you were only called upon once to ‘look at the mountain’ and you looked. As for me, I was called upon a thousand times to prostrate myself to Adam and I did not prostrate myself because I stood by the Intention of my Declaration.

Sayedina Musa said: ‘You abandoned a Command?’

Iblis said: ‘It was a test. Not a command.’

Sayedina Musa said: ‘Without sin? But your face was deformed.’

Iblis replied: ‘Oh Musa, that is but the ambiguity of appearances, while the spiritual state does not rely on it and does not change. Gnosis remains true even as it was at the beginning and does not change even if the individual changes.’

[...]

If He punishes me with His fire for all of eternity I would not prostrate myself before anyone, and I would not abase myself before any person or body because I do not recognize any opposite with Him! My Declaration is that of the Sincere and I am one of those sincere in love.'

So in Al-Hallaj's mind the Devil almost becomes an almost saintly figure, not unlike the historical Sufi, rabia al-adawiyya who famously expressed her love for God apart from fear of Hell or desire for paradise. To be honest, I find Al-Hallaj's view somewhat compelling. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend some kind of Islamic form of Satanism. But I do think that Islam's radical monotheism does imply that the Devil is "on the payroll" so to speak. The Devil's act of disobedience was only apparent and ultimately he serves some valuable function as a part of the divine plan.