11وَلَقَد خَلَقناكُم ثُمَّ صَوَّرناكُم ثُمَّ قُلنا لِلمَلائِكَةِ اسجُدوا لِآدَمَ فَسَجَدوا إِلّا إِبليسَ لَم يَكُن مِنَ السّاجِدينَMuhammad AsadYea, indeed, We have created you, and then formed you;1 and then We said unto the angels, "Prostrate yourselves before Adam!" - whereupon they [all] prostrated themselves, save Iblis: he was not among those who prostrated themselves.2The sequence of these two statements - "We have created you [i.e., "brought you into being as living organisms"] and then formed you" [or "given you your shape", i.e., as human beings]- is meant to bring out the fact of man's gradual development, in the individual sense, from the embryonic stage to full-fledged existence, as well as of the evolution of the human race as such.As regards God's allegorical command to the angels to "prostrate themselves" before Adam, see 2:30-34, and the corresponding notes. The reference to all mankind which precedes the story of Adam in this surah makes it clear that his name symbolizes, in this context, the whole human race. Western scholars usually take it for granted that the name "Iblis" is a corruption of the Greek word diabolos, from which the English "devil" is derived. There is, however, not the slightest evidence that the pre-Islamic Arabs borrowed this or any other mythological term from the Greeks - while on the other hand, it is established that the Greeks derived a good deal of their mythological concepts (including various deities and their functions) from the much earlier South-Arabian civilization (cf. Encyclopaedia of Islam I, 379 f.). One may, therefore, assume with something approaching certainty that the Greek diabolos is a Hellenized form of the Arabic name for the Fallen Angel, which, in turn, is derived from the root-verb ablasa, "he despaired" or "gave up hope" or "became broken in spirit" (see Lane I, 248). The fact that the noun diabolos ("slanderer" - derived from the verb diaballein, "to throw [something] across") is of genuinely Greek origin does not, by itself, detract anything from this hypothesis: for it is conceivable that the Greeks, with their well-known tendency to Hellenize foreign names, identified the name "Iblis" with the, to them, much more familiar term diabolos. - As regards Iblis' statement, in the next verse, that he had been created "out of fire", see surah 38. note 60.