Shayṭān and the Manipulators

The Hajj itself lasts only about four days — actually three, and then the last, where the stoning takes place. There is a point where, according to the tradition, Ibrāhīm was tempted by Satan, or Shayṭān, and he cast stones. The Muslims believe in an entity called Iblīs — which is where the words Diablo and Diablos come from — or Shayṭān; and Shayṭān in Arabic is first from shaṭana, which means to take people away from, or to distance people. The idea is that there is an entity whose role and function is to attempt to distance people from God, to separate them from God. And there are two types of shayṭān: there are human ones, and there are ones that are in the unseen realm. The human ones, according to the Prophet (peace be upon him), are worse — human ones like warmongers, people like that: people who thrive off creating wars. There are actually people who want to create wars between other people. It is kind of hard to imagine, but there are people who make a lot of money doing things like that and derive a lot of benefit from it.

And in a lot of ways, really, there are a lot of people with… There is a magazine called Adweek, which is really worth recommending to anyone teaching any social studies or sociology type of course, to get students to read, because it really wakes them up to the idea of manipulation within their culture: the fact that there are people manipulating them at very serious psychological levels. Adweek is a magazine that is very hard to find in the average store; one can get it at very good places where they carry almost all the magazines. It is a magazine designed for people who are advertisers. It is not a consumer magazine; it is designed for advertisers. And the interesting thing about the magazine is that the commodity being sold is human beings. That is what is so fascinating: when they put the advertisements out, what they are trying to sell is an audience, and they will guarantee a certain percentage of sales from that audience. They bring really interesting things. There was one in a recent issue — of interest to anyone interested in media and in education, since the media has been very effective at educating people in a certain way — reporting a recent study in which psychologists showed that American men's number one sexual fantasy was with nurses. And what they said was that this was very useful for advertisers, because they could have a beer commercial where a nurse comes in with a beer and the man is in the bed, and they do not have to do anything overt; but for that group out there who happen to think that this would be an interesting thing to explore, there would be a type of what they call anchoring in the subconscious, and so a sexual stimulation related to that type of beer. This is the type of thing they really do. The point is just to empower young people: to let them know that there really are forces out there that do try to manipulate them for their own good, and to become aware of that, so that they are not such victims — so that they get a type of critical analysis. Another really useful book was a PhD dissertation called Decoding Advertisements, by an author whose name is not readily recalled. It is a lot about this. There is some real crazy writing about a lot of the subliminal type of things that goes a little too far — people start reading things in that just are not there — but this is more of a serious academic study, by academics, trying to understand what is really behind the whole ideology of advertisement.