Shayṭān's Army

I need many servants, Shayṭān said, and I have many — I am not alone: I have seventy thousand children, each with his own assigned duties, and each of my seventy thousand children has seventy thousand devils serving under him in turn — four thousand, nine hundred million of them, assigned to different posts. Many work among the young, many among older women, and many among the theologians, the preachers and the shaykhs; there is almost no disagreement between the youth and my own devils — we get along very well, and their children play happily with mine. If Shayṭān cannot prevent concentration, khushūʿ, in prayer by any other means, the Messenger of Allah says, he will go and make an infant cry for no reason, because that too is a way in for him.

Some of the devout and the pious get along with his people too well: his devils lead the imagination of such people from one height to another until they become arrogant, abandon their sincerity, and end up quarrelling with one another without even realising what has befallen them — at which point he whispers to them to disbelieve. But when they do disbelieve, he says: I disown you, I am free of you, O Lord of the worlds — because kufr is a bad thing, and he distances himself from it.