Major Topics: Deception in Scholarship, Worship, and Sufi Practice

Talbis Iblis organizes its analysis around the different categories of people whom Satan targets, devoting a chapter to each. The categories include scholars, jurists, theologians, hadith specialists, Sufi practitioners, rulers, the wealthy, and ordinary people in their daily lives. This organization allows the book to be highly specific in its diagnoses, since the forms of Satanic deception most dangerous to a scholar are fundamentally different from those most dangerous to a ruler or a merchant.

The chapters on scholars and jurists are among the most pointed in the book. Ibn al-Jawzi identifies several specifically scholarly forms of Satanic deception. One is the corruption of knowledge by pride and love of intellectual status — the scholar who debates and teaches not for Allah's sake but for the admiration of his peers and students. Another is the habit of providing legal opinions (fatwas) for worldly gain or the approval of powerful people, which corrupts the integrity of the law. A third is the scholar who is so absorbed in theoretical disputes that he neglects the practical transformation of his own character and conduct.

The chapters on Sufi practices are the most extensive in the work and the most historically significant. Ibn al-Jawzi surveys a wide range of practices that had developed in Sufi circles by his era — including certain forms of sama (spiritual audition), the extreme reverence given to spiritual masters, and practices associated with particular Sufi orders — and subjects each to critical scrutiny from the standpoint of Quran and Sunnah. His critique is surgical rather than wholesale: he distinguishes between legitimate spiritual practices that have a basis in the prophetic tradition and innovations that have crept in from non-Islamic sources or from the sincere but misguided enthusiasm of practitioners.

The chapters dealing with rulers and their deceptions show a different application of the book's framework: how Satan leads those with political power into injustice, the corruption of public trust, and the abuse of religious legitimacy. Ibn al-Jawzi's critique of rulers who use religion to justify oppression or who fail to apply Islamic law while claiming to govern in its name is one of the book's contributions to Islamic political ethics.