As Surah 2:30 says:
When your Lord said to the angels,
‘Indeed I am going to set a Khalif on the earth,’
they said, ‘Will You set in it
someone who will cause corruption in it,
and shed blood,
while we celebrate Your praise
and proclaim Your sanctity?’
He said, ‘Indeed I know what you do not know.’
Well maybe it not only refers to the concept of Prophets, Messengers and the Imams, but also of humanity itself's purpose.
Now Iblis refused to acknowledge the authority of Adam.
Adam however is not only the first Prophet but also the first man and the symbol of all of mankind itself.
So Iblis refused to acknowledge mankind's rightful bestowed Mercy from God to rule the universe.
In the Bible (though it's alluded to in the Qur'an) we have the idea of Zion, of Jerusalem of the Promised Land. However Jews seem to have committed the same sin that Adam did, which is a kind of exclusive segregation and a form of racism (Iblis despised Adam for being made of clay/dust) and of course Jews have gotten racially exclusive in the past.
Whereas with Christians they have become idolaters and exclusivist in the supremacy they think they have in the person of Jesus.
In the New Testament, Jesus often talks in fractal imagery such as tree imagery (which like with the Qur'an, goes back to the idea of Eden itself, which is the lost paradise to which we've fallen from), whereas Paul speaks of "The Church" in similar fractal imagery. Both indicative of a divine hierarchy in relation to God itself (keep Surah 3:59 in mind there as well), even indirectly too seeing that it all goes back to Adam in these traditions anyway.
Jerusalem itself, referred to as the 'Whore of Babylon" in the Book of Revelation is like a Klipoth (shells, meaning degraded, shallow, pale, decaying) of the original Eden, as the concept of Zion is like an attempt to go back to the pure state of Eden - of which the Jews failed at massively multiple times, and to which Jesus calls them out about multiple times and to which the Qur'an calls them out multiple times.
Through the way these symbols relate to each other I do see the Great Work as Hermeticism terms it, or the Magnum Opus, starting to pop up. Not on a microcosmic level (to which is an initiates personal spiritual journey within themselves) but within all of creation, across all of time and space.
This is what Freemasonry is trying to get at, and I have to mention it because I see it directly in my recent above observation. Maybe I've just realized something already obvious, I don't know, but I love the thought of it.
Through humanity constantly failing, as indicative of the Jews in terms of their special share as prime examples of it, we therefore see how we ourselves become and embody Iblis or Shaytan/Satan, how we repeat Iblis's sin and alienate ourselves both from nature and spirit (Ruh/Ruach).
And as a significant Hadith of Imam Ali states:
"Surely, Allah put the 'Aql in the angels but not desire, and he put desire in the beasts but not the 'Aql, and he put both of them in the children of Adam (mankind). So whoever's 'Aql overcomes his desire, then he is better than the angels, and whoever's desire overcomes his 'Aql, then he is worse than the beasts"
