Excerpts from "Holy War"

... By the time of Thomas Aquinas ... the Devil was becoming a new force in the Christian imagination and gaining a power he never had in the Bible. He was becoming a monster of enormous power who was also a distorted human being. Often he had animal characteristics or monstrous genitals, aspects of humanity that the Church was teaching Christians to reject. One could say that one of the great problems of ethical monotheism as expressed by Christianity is that it encourages an unhealthy projection. Because it is axiomatic that there is no evil in God, this makes it difficult for Christians to accept what is either evil or what they are told is evil in themselves. They tend to reject this "evil" and, once they have rejected it, it becomes inhuman and monstrous with threatening power. The Devil is the greatest of these projections and is unique in its horror to Christianity... (p. 230-231)

... We in the west were particularly horrified to hear America called the "Great Satan". Not surprisingly we thought of the Christian Satan, a figure of monstrous evil. But actually in Islam, as in Judaism, Satan is not a terrifying and omnipotent monster; he is the tempter, who tries to lure Adam away from true belief. In rather the same way America was seen to have encouraged the Shah to try and tempt the Iranians away from Islam into secular, Western modes of thought. In popular Shiism, Shaitan is a poor trivial creature who asks Allah for gifts man has and is easily fobbed off with frivolous, secular trumpery. It was a triviality that was similar to the casinos, bars and boutiques of the Shah's Westernized Teheran. In other words, when they called America "The Great Satan", Iranians were not saying that America was monstrously evil but, using the Islamic figure of Satan, they were saying something less threatening and more precise. Indeed the depictions of America as the Great Satan showed a politician like Carter or Reagan as an outsize rabbit dressed in an Uncle Sam costume. It was funny rather than terrifying. Later, of course, under Khomeini, the hatred of the United States became exaggerated and frightening but it would be wrong to think that this fanatical loathing was inherent in the ideology of the revolution... (p. 332-333)