The Brilliance of Fire or the Secret of Clay?

When the account of the Prophet Adam is told, the emphasis usually falls on human superiority: the teaching of the Names, the angels’ acknowledgement of their inability and the command to prostrate. Yet another aspect of the same scene is often overlooked: Iblis refuses to prostrate.

Perhaps this is what we need to reconsider in the age of artificial intelligence. The question is not only why the human being was given a superior rank, but also how the gaze that refuses to recognise that distinction operates.

Iblis’s objection appears simple: “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.” Yet a profound error lies within this sentence. Iblis looks at Adam but fails to see Adam. He cannot perceive the mystery of the teaching of the Names within Adam’s nature, his duty as vicegerent, or the meaning God has entrusted to him. He looks only at Adam’s material: clay. Then he turns to himself, sees fire and constructs a false analogy: if fire is superior, then one created from fire must also be superior.

This is precisely where he goes wrong. Human worth lies not in the raw material from which the human being is made, but in the meaning entrusted to him. Clay by itself may seem ordinary. Yet from that clay the human being was created; spirit was breathed into him; the Names were taught to him; and he was appointed vicegerent on the earth. Iblis saw the clay, but he could not see the secret within it.

There is something similar in the modern world’s conception of the human being. A person is often treated as a biological organism, a data-processing brain or a behavioural pattern that can be directed. Artificial intelligence has made this view more visible. Confronted by systems that can write, create images, generate voices and analyse data, the human being now faces the question: “If a machine thinks faster than I do, what makes me different?”

The question itself is not mistaken. But if its answer is sought in the wrong place, it may lead us back to the analogy of Iblis. The same logic can be expressed today in different words: “I am faster; I possess more information; I never tire; I am more efficient.”

It would, of course, be wrong to identify artificial intelligence itself with Iblis. It is not a conscious being; it does not grow arrogant or rebel. Yet some conceptions of the human being constructed through technology may begin to measure people not by the worth God has bestowed upon them, but by standards of their own making.

The attitude of the angels is different. They ask about a matter they do not understand; but when the truth is shown to them, they submit. The angelic attitude is to know one’s limits before the truth. The Iblis-like attitude is to refuse to abandon one’s own analogy even after the truth has become clear.

The issue, then, is not simply, “What can artificial intelligence do?” The real question is which understanding of the human being it will serve. Will we see the human being as one addressed by God—one who prays, who can repent after making a mistake, and who is shaken by mortality? Or will we reduce the human being to a mass of data measured by speed, utility and efficiency?

Artificial intelligence can write a text, but it does not feel ashamed of what it has written. It can summarise news of a death, but it is not shaken by mortality. Something of our humanity lies precisely in that capacity to be shaken.

The fire of Iblis rose upwards, yet he would not prostrate. Adam’s clay was lowly, yet through prostration he rose.

A similar choice stands before the human being today: to be deceived by the brilliance of fire, or to journey from the impotence of clay towards knowledge of God and worshipful servanthood.

Yeni Asya English