Jinn

• 1. Introduction

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  The jinn, supernatural beings of ancient Arabian religion and Islam, are named about 29 times in the Quran, and every one of those mentions sits in a Meccan surah. The text never pauses to explain them. It assumes its first listeners already knew exactly who they were. Like human beings, jinn answer for what they do, and they can be believers or unbelievers depending on whether they accept God's guidance. They are neither wicked by nature nor good by nature. That single fact raises a puzzle. Where does the name come from, and why does English give us the word genie? Why did travelers in the Arabian desert once ask these beings for shelter at nightfall? How did a strictly monotheistic faith find room for them? And why do many people still blame them today for some of the most frightening nights of their lives?

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• 2. Concealed Beings

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  The Semitic root jann carries a primary meaning of 'to hide' or 'to adapt', and the word jinn grows from it. Some writers read it literally as beings concealed from the senses.

  The same root gives Arabic majnun, meaning possessed or insane, along with jannah, meaning garden or heaven, and janin, meaning embryo. Jinn is a collective noun, treated as a plural. The singular is jinni, and the English genie descends from that.

  The true origin of the word is unsettled. Some scholars link it to the Latin genius, a guardian spirit of people and places in Roman religion. They point to a shared picture of lesser beings dwelling in sanctuaries, trees, springs, and families. Others dispute the link. The Aramaic ginnaya, meaning a tutelary deity or guardian, is another candidate. A Persian route has also been proposed, through the Avestic Jaini, a wicked female spirit. Wensick argued instead for a purely Arabic source. In his view, spirits cause psychic and bodily afflictions, and since they stay hidden from sight, they would have been called jinn.

  The English form arrived by a roundabout path. Genie is borrowed from French génie, which also comes from Latin genius. It entered English in the 18th century through translations of the Thousand and One Nights, working from the 1706 French edition. Translators chose it for its rough likeness in sound and sense. It also suited benevolent go-between spirits, set apart from malevolent demons and mostly benevolent heavenly angels.

  Critics say the common English word spirit fails because it ignores the physical nature of the jinn, and they prefer genie. In Assyrian art, the same word genie labels creatures ranked between humans and gods.

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• 3. Masters of the Valley

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  Muqatil ibn Sulayman traced the habit of seeking refuge among the jinn to the Banu Hanifa, a people of Yemen. A man crossing barren land as the sun went down would announce, “I seek refuge in the master of this valley from the impudent ones.” He then slept safely under their protection until morning. According to Muqatil, the custom soon spread to the other Arabs.

  Julius Wellhausen observed that jinn were thought to haunt desolate, dark, and dingy places in the desert. They were therefore blamed for disease and mental illness. Yet they were not all menacing. Wellhausen held that some were friendly and helpful. He separated gods from jinn by where they were honored, not by their morals. Gods received public worship, while jinn received private worship. In the regions north of the Hejaz, around Palmyra and Baalbek, the words jinni and ilah, meaning deity, were often used interchangeably. Scholars have compared the jinn to the Palmyrene gennaye, protectors of places and people who behaved much like humans.

  Al-Jahiz credits the pre-Islamic Arabs with imagining jinn society as a set of tribes and groups, much like their own. Jinn could protect people, marry them, kidnap them, possess them, or kill them. Zakariya al-Qazwini counted them among the animals, alongside humans, horses, cattle, wild beasts, birds, and reptiles. Though unseen, they had bodies.

  Shapeshifting was their signature skill, and the favored disguise was a snake. Scorpions and lizards also served. Both scorpions and serpents were venerated in the ancient Near East. When a jinni took human form, it was said to stay partly animal. A man might kill one in single combat, though the real fear was an attack from nowhere. Some accounts describe a slain jinni leaving behind a body like a serpent or a scorpion.

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• 4. Poets and Oracles

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  The poet al-A'sha said his verses came from a friendly jinni named Mishal, whom he called his jinni-brother. Thabit, a poet who later converted to Islam and became known as the poet of the prophet, described his own jinn companion as his sharp-sighted brother from the jinn. According to common belief, pre-Islamic poets, philosophers, and soothsayers drew their inspiration from such beings.

  Friendship could shade into romance. One famous Arabian story tells of a jinni named Manzur who fell in love with a human woman named Habbah and taught her the arts of healing.

  Al-Kalbi's Book of Idols preserves a different kind of tie. It records a jinni named Abu Thumama who worked as an oracle, advising a man called Amr ibn Luhay.

  The soothsayer, called a kahin, stood in a different relationship altogether. Where a poet might be a friend, a soothsayer was seen as fully commanded by the jinni who entered him. People consulted such a figure to uncover hidden information or to settle disputes, believing the jinn spoke through him.

  That belief became dangerous for the new faith. Muhammad's opponents claimed that a jinni had inspired the Quran too. The Quran answered by criticizing them for failing to tell jinn and God apart.

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• 5. Smokeless Fire

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  Two verses, Quran 15:27 and 55:15, say that humans were shaped from clay or dirt while jinn were made from smokeless fire. This may explain their unusual abilities, such as invisibility, transformation, and rising into the air. Even so, the Quran gives them no fundamentally higher rank. Like people, they cannot know the future, they depend on God's messengers, and they face judgement.

  Quran 51:56 says both jinn and humans were created to worship God. Because that worship is meant to be freely given, both can do good or evil. Quran 7:38 even describes jinn as rational beings who form nations. The Quran often pairs al-ins wa-l-jinn, humans and jinn. The word ins comes from a root meaning to be familiar, while jinn names the foreign, unseen, and unknown.

  Surah al-Jinn is devoted to the subject, and it mentions righteous jinn and malicious ones. It says they can neither harm nor benefit people, because they are busy looking after their own place in the cosmos. That sets them apart from the demons and devils of Judeo-Christian tradition. What the Quran condemns is the habit of treating them as beings worthy of cult veneration, as in Quran 72:6. Some jinn were Jewish, according to Quran 46:29-32. Others were pagans who aided fortune tellers, according to Quran 72:2-7.

  Commentators note that the word jinn is polysemic. It can mean genuine jinn, angels, or devils. Al-Ghazali's Alchemy of Bliss even treats jinn as the angelic and demonic qualities inside the human mind. Beyond that figurative sense, tradition recognizes a separate kind of being, born of al-Jann. Angels are made of light, and devils of pure fire or fire of poison.

  Medieval sources add a prehistory. Jinn lived on earth before humankind, rebelled against God's messengers, shed blood, exploited the environment, and were punished by angels. Ibn Kathir held that some survivors remain.

  Belief in jinn is not among the six articles of Islamic faith, unlike belief in angels. Still, the Hanbali scholar ibn Taymiyya and the Zahiri scholar ibn Hazm judged it essential, since the Quran names them. Scholars of comparative religion note a parallel in Buddhism, where the Buddha preaches to the spirits and deities of the earlier religion and tells them they too need salvation.

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• 6. Jinn Under the Law

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  Two Hanbalite scholars, cited by Shibli, saw nothing wrong with praying behind a jinni. The reasoning was simple. Muhammad was sent to jinn and humans alike, so both are mukallaf, bound by the divine law and the command to pray. Believing jinn earned the title Muslim jinn. The Babylonian Talmud's shedim share this legal standing, and jinn often appear as students of Muslim scholars, as shedim do.

  Possession was a harder question. The majority of Muslim scholars hold that jinn can at least possess individuals, and ibn Taymiyya and ibn Qayyim agree. Only some Maturidi theologians doubted it, and al-Rustughfani called it impossible. Abu al-Yusr al-Bazdawi, who lived from about 1030 to about 1100, argued that jinn and devils can whisper to people. Their subtle bodies let them slip in through the pores. He cited a hadith saying the devil flows through human veins like blood.

  The same literature records kindly jinn. In the story of Nasir Khusraw's burial, two jinn mourn him and help his disciple Abu Sa'id prepare a rock as a tomb and wash the body. Al-Suyuti tells of a jinni who challenged a man to a duel. If the man won, the jinni would teach him Ayat al-Kursi, the verse of the Throne, which protects against demons and devils.

  The thorniest issue was intimacy. Since humans and jinn can have children together, jurists had to rule on it. Some hadiths on the subject, such as one predicting that the children of jinn will become many among you, are judged fabricated by some hadith scholars. Most jurists forbade such unions. Even the permissive ones called them undesirable. The children were nonetheless usually seen as gifted. Some scholars pointed to Solomon and Queen Bilqis, said to be part jinn. According to Islamic hagiography, she had to remove the hair on her legs, a mark of her ancestry, because inherited jinn traits drew suspicion.

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• 7. Kings and Talismans

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  At the Citadel of Aleppo, the entrance gate called Bab al-Hayyat is carved with stone serpents that refer to jinn. At Ayyubid Harran, the water gate once held two copper sculptures of jinn. They served as talismans against snakes and against evil jinn that took the form of snakes.

  The most common companion of the jinn in art is King Solomon, believed to command many of them. In the Rum Seljuk palace, the tiles of the Seal of Sulayman show a remarkable range of creatures, including jinn from his army. The Seljuk sultan claimed to be the Sulayman of his own age. The idea that a just ruler commands jinn was also applied to Alexander the Great. A 13th-century manuscript of al-Qazwini's Aja'ib al-Makhluqat shows small, animal-like jinn sitting beside Solomon's throne.

  Protective talismans, enclosed in leather and carrying Quranic verses, were often inscribed with separated Arabic letters, since separation was thought to strengthen their power. Some bore astrological signs or religious scenes.

  The 14th-century Book of Wonders, compiled by Abd al-Hasan al-Isfahani, shows the seven Kings of the Jinn with their helpers and talismanic symbols. The Red King of Tuesday sits astride a lion, holding a severed head and a sword, because he was tied to Mars, the god of war. The same book shows Huma, the Fever, with three heads, embracing a room to trap a victim.

  Outside art, people tried to command jinn. Ibn al-Nadim's Kitab al-Fihrist places such practices in a chapter on stories and fables, which suggests he doubted them. He distinguishes lawful control, using God's divine names, from unlawful control through forbidden offerings. Al-Jahiz reports that Abu Nasr Ahmad ibn Hilal, an early practitioner of the lawful kind, claimed to have married a daughter of Satan and fathered a child.

  Al-Tabasi, a trusted hadith scholar and pious ascetic, wrote a long treatise on subduing jinn. Al-Qazwini says al-Tabasi once showed the jinn to the famed scholar Ghazali, who saw them as shadows on a wall. In the Ottoman Empire, the talismanic shirts of Murad III show that this tradition reached the throne.

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• 8. Belief Today

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  A Turkish saying, İn Cin top oynuyor, describes a deserted place where jinn are playing ball. Most jinn are thought to keep to such abandoned spots and leave people alone. They strike back only when disturbed, for example if their children are trodden on or hot water is thrown on them. So Muslims say "destur", meaning permission, before pouring hot water on open ground, giving any jinn present time to leave.

  A person is believed to fall under a jinni's control only in a state of dha'iyfah, or weakness. Insecurity, depression, and unhappy love all count. Exorcism is then required. Many wear amulets engraved with the name of God, and jinn are said to fear iron and wolves.

  In 2013, a Cambridge neuroscience study by Jalal and colleagues found that 48% of sleep paralysis sufferers in Egypt took the experience for a jinn attack. Almost all of them, 95%, recited Quranic verses during an episode, and 9% increased their daily prayers. In West Africa and the Middle East, mental illness is still often put down to possession. European patients of Muslim background do likewise, blaming jinn for hallucinations, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and epilepsy. Belief in jinn-possession can survive even medical graduation.

  A 2012 Pew Research Center survey measured belief across Muslim countries. Among Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, belief in jinn exceeded the European average of 30%. In the same group, 21% believed in sorcery, 13% would wear a protective talisman, and 12% supported offerings and appeals to jinn.

  Official disapproval has grown. After the failure of the rebellion against the East India Company, India's Muslim elite called jinn-veneration a superstition that held ordinary people back. The Deobandi movement accepts that jinn are real but mostly portrays them as malevolent beings to avoid or exorcise. In modern Iran, devils often replace evil jinn. In the diaspora, folk accounts are increasingly dismissed as un-Islamic local belief.

  Popular culture tells a different story. Since 2004, jinn have become a staple of Middle Eastern horror. In one count of 89 films, 59 feature jinn as the antagonist, 12 use other demons, and only 14 rely on apocalypse, hauntings, or ghosts. A 2020 study found jinn still the favorite horror element among teenagers. Latife Tekin gave them a gentler role in 1983, bringing them into Turkish magical realism as a folk belief set against a rationalized society.

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