The Jinn

Long before Islam, the Arabs of the peninsula believed in jinn. The word comes from an Arabic root meaning “to hide” or “to be concealed”, the same root as words for a garden screened by trees and a child hidden in the womb. Jinn were thought to haunt deserts, ruins and lonely places, and travellers who camped for the night might ask the lord of the valley’s jinn for protection. Poets were sometimes said to receive their verses from a jinn companion, and soothsayers spoke with the help of spirits.

Some pre-Islamic Arabs, the Quran reports, treated the jinn as partners of God or made offerings to them. When the Prophet Muhammad began to preach in the early seventh century, his opponents called him a poet or a man possessed by a jinn, a majnun, the word that still means “mad” in Arabic. The Quran rejected these charges and gave the jinn a new place in its picture of the world: not gods or rivals of God, but creatures who, like humans, must answer to him.

Islamic teaching holds that the Prophet’s message was addressed to jinn as well as to humans. Sura 55, al-Rahman, speaks to both together, calling them the “two weighty ones”, and asks again and again, “Which, then, of your Lord’s blessings do you both deny?” Sura 46 tells how a company of jinn listened to the Quran and returned to their people as warners. Commentators describe the Prophet meeting the jinn at night outside Mecca to recite to them.

In the Quran, God created humans from clay and the jinn earlier from fire, described as “smokeless fire” and as “the fire of scorching wind”. A widely cited hadith completes the picture: angels were created from light, jinn from fire and Adam from clay. The Quran declares that God created jinn and humans for one purpose, to worship him. Jinn therefore share with humans what angels in Islamic teaching do not have: free will, moral responsibility and a judgement to face.

Sura 72, named al-Jinn, opens with the account of a band of jinn who overheard the Quran being recited and said, “We have heard a wondrous recitation that guides to the right path, so we have believed in it.” They go on to describe how the jinn used to listen at the edges of heaven for news of the future, until the heavens were guarded by shooting stars. Islamic tradition therefore speaks of Muslim jinn as well as unbelieving ones, and the Quran says that Iblis, who refused to bow to Adam, was one of the jinn.

Scholars of hadith and law developed this teaching further. Jinn were said to eat, drink, marry, have children and die, to live in communities with their own faiths, and to be able to take different shapes. Tradition holds that each person is accompanied by a qarin, a companion jinn who urges towards evil. Medieval scholars even asked whether a marriage between a human and a jinn could be valid, questions gathered by the fourteenth-century Damascus scholar Badr al-Din al-Shibli in a treatise on the subject.

The Quran tells how the jinn served King Solomon, building for him and diving for pearls, and how an ifrit of the jinn offered to bring him the throne of the Queen of Sheba before he could rise from his seat. In later folklore, the ifrit became a powerful and often dangerous kind of jinn, and the marid, a word the Quran uses for a rebellious devil, became the strongest and most defiant of all. Folklore across the Muslim world added many local figures, such as the ghul, a shape-changing desert creature from which the English word “ghoul” comes.

The jinn are everywhere in the One Thousand and One Nights, the great collection of stories assembled in Arabic over many centuries. In the tale of the fisherman and the jinni, a fisherman pulls up a brass bottle sealed with the seal of Solomon, and the giant jinni who emerges, imprisoned for centuries, vows to kill his rescuer until the fisherman tricks him back into the bottle. Such stories drew on the belief that Solomon had bound rebellious jinn. The frame of the collection also opens with jinn. In the tale of the merchant and the jinni, a traveller who carelessly throws away date stones discovers that he has killed the invisible son of a jinni, who demands his life; three old men save him by telling stories, just as Shahrazad saves herself night after night.

The Nights reached Europe through the French scholar Antoine Galland, whose translation appeared between 1704 and 1717. Galland called the jinn génies, borrowing a Latin word for a guardian spirit because it sounded similar, and English took up “genie”. Some of the most famous tales, including Aladdin and his magic lamp, appear in no known Arabic manuscript before Galland. His diary records that he heard them in 1709 from Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite Christian from Aleppo who was visiting Paris.

Belief in jinn remains part of mainstream Islamic teaching. Surveys by the Pew Research Center around 2012 found that large majorities of Muslims in many countries of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia said they believed in jinn. In daily life this belief shows itself mostly in small acts of piety: saying “in the name of God” before entering a dark room or pouring hot water, or reciting the Throne Verse and the last two suras of the Quran at night. Some people turn to ruqya, healing by recitation of the Quran, while many Muslim scholars and doctors warn against exploitation by fraudulent healers and urge medical care.

In the West the jinn are best known through the genie of the lamp, from Victorian pantomime to Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Contemporary writers from Muslim backgrounds, as well as horror films and fantasy novels, have turned again to the jinn of Arab tradition: unseen neighbours who share the world with humans, as capable of faith and good as of mischief.