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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork among Salafi men in Saudi Arabia, I show how state reforms promoting social liberalisation are seen as new interstices for Iblīs by retuning the city’s “moral air”. Satan-talk recalibrates responsibility for “negative change” and may reveal some limits of the post-secular.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Salafi men in Saudi Arabia, this paper examines how recent state reforms promoting social liberalisation, pursued as part of an economic diversification away from oil, are experienced as opening new interstices for Iblīs (Satan) and his whispers (waswasa). While Iblīs is understood to be always present in the lower world, interlocutors insist that specific social and political dispositions can constrain or enable how Satanic influence moves.

I trace how reforms retune the urban sensorium, what these men call the city’s “moral air”, through sound, spacing, and movement. Shifting soundscapes, altered gendered proximities, and reconfigured rhythms of public sociability are apprehended as atmospheric conditions in which temptation travels differently, intensifying the labour of vigilance and the everyday management of attention.

Analytically, “Satan-talk” provides a calibrated idiom for distributing moral responsibility for “negative change” without collapsing into open denunciation. It redirects blame away from rulers (to maintain loyalty), away from other humans (to avoid fitna and social division), and away from God (to avoid impugning divine wisdom), while sustaining a doctrine of individual accountability under divine sovereignty.

Finally, the paper probes some limits of post-secularism. If the anthropology of Islam has increasingly accommodated divine presence ethnographically, what epistemological and ethical costs follow when the presence in question is antagonistic, and when interlocutors warn that sustained attention to Iblīs may itself be perilous?