is the outward moral consequence of an inner spiritual malaise which arises out of that pride which is tantamount to ‘hidden polytheism’, and which brings in its wake disgraceful humiliation. Iblīs is disgraced because he disobeyed God and he disobeyed God on account of pride. To be proud is, therefore, in and of itself a disgrace, a state of ‘dis-grace’, a perversion of the human state that carries within itself the seed of its own inexorable inversion. ‘Do you not see how God humiliated him through his pride?’55 the Imam asks. Being proud is in reality already a form of humiliation, for
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