The story goes that, when God commanded the angels to bow to Adam, Iblis refused. Did he know we could go astray?
Iblis proved it by leading us astray. But now that we're there, he leads us astray again--back to the Garden.
Iblis is that part of Allah that best knows our hearts. When we ate the fruit (or grain of wheat), we gained not the knowledge of good & evil, but the pretense of that knowledge, appointing ourselves emperors of the world. We decide which species should live, and which should die. If the Truth is actually otherwise, then the one who flouts authority & encourages us to undermine and abandon it is, paradoxically, our saviour. Leading us away from living in the hands of the pharaohs, toward living in the hands of the god(s). The Empire itself, of course, exists only within the hands of the god(s), if only it would realize that!
The dervish, continually stepping out of the comfortable garments of ritual, routine, rut, continually turns the eye of hir heart toward hir Lord, allowing hirself to be led toward ex-stasis. We, then, are trying to grow the Garden within the walls of Empire. We live in both worlds at once, liminally--again, the poor sap in the doorway straddling the threshold.
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