Jinni

I always loved the big blue guy in Disney’s Aladdin, and reading the 1001 Nights has just made me want to look into the lore more thoroughly. Since I found about 5 pages of info, I'm just going to put the bare bones of what I found on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica (concise). The rest of this blog is directly quoted from these sites.

The jinn are said to be creatures with free will, made from 'smokeless fire' by God (the literal translation being “subtle fire”, i.e., a fire which does not give itself away through smoke), much in the same way humans were made of earth. According to the Recitation, jinn have free choice, and Iblis used this freedom in front of God by refusing to bow to Adam when God told Iblis to do so. By refusing to obey God’s order he was thrown out of the Paradise and called “Shaitan” (See Shaitan). In the Qur'an, jinn are frequently mentioned and Sura 72 of the Qur'an named Al-Jinn is entirely about them. Another Sura (Al-Naas) mentions the Jinn in the last verse. In fact, it is mentioned in the Qur'an that Muhammad was sent as a prophet to both “humanity and the jinn”.

The jinn have communities much like human societies: they eat, marry, die, etc. They live in tribes and have boundaries. They follow religions as humans do, and follow the same ranks in armies as humans do. Jinns can settle in a vast area to a tiny hole, as they are massless and can be fit into any space they find sufficient for them. They are invisible to humans, but they can see humans. Sometimes they accidentally or deliberately come into view or into contact with humans. Jinn are believed to live much longer than humans: some of whom are said to be still alive having seen Muhammad (who lived during the 7th century), which would affirm their long life. Much like humans, jinn have learned to assimilate into the human world when they desire to do so. In many cases they live unnoticed among people marked only by the rather unusual or somewhat secretive practices they keep. They cannot breed with humans. Jinn can transform themselves into humans and can be summoned by humans.

Types of jinn include the ghul (“night shade”, which can change shape), the si'la (which cannot change shape), the Ifrit, and “marid”. From information in The Arabian Nights, marid seem to be the strongest form of jinn, followed by Ifrit, and then the rest of the jinn. Arabs believed that the jinn were spirits of fire, although sometimes they associated them with succubi (demons in the forms of beautiful women). The feminine form of jinn is “jinniyah” or “jinneyeh”.

Ifrits in contemporary popular mythology are jinn spirits that embody fire. A Marid in common mythology is a djinn related to the element of water. Evil Ifrit in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights are called “the seed of Iblis”. The Spirit of the Lamp in the story of Aladdin, a familiar djinn to the Western world (see next section), was such a jinni, bound to an oil lamp. Ways of summoning jinn were told in The Thousand and One Nights: by writing the name of God in Hebrew characters on a knife (whether the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh, or the Arabic Allah is used is not specified), and drawing a diagram, with strange symbols and incantations around it. The jinn’s power of possession was also addressed in the fictional Nights. It is said that by taking seven hairs out of the tail of a cat that was all black except for a white spot on the end of its tail, and then burning the hairs in a small closed room with the possessed, filling their nose with the scent, this would release them from the spell of the jinn inside them.