Jinn

The jinn (also transliterated djinn, singular jinnī) are, according to the Quran and the wider body of Islamic theology and law, a class of non-human intelligent being created by Allah from "a smokeless flame of fire" — one of three orders of intelligent creation alongside angels (made of light) and humans (made of clay) — possessing free will, moral accountability, and the capacity for belief or unbelief in the same manner as human beings. Distinct from both humans and angels, they are described across the Quran, hadith literature, and pre-Islamic Arabian folk belief as an unseen, largely invisible people who inhabit the world alongside humanity, organize into tribes, marry and reproduce, and can be benevolent, malevolent, or entirely indifferent toward people, according to their own individual moral character rather than a fixed species-wide disposition.

The classical account is not the only one now applied to them. The paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley holds the jinn to be the hostile intelligence behind shadow people, the fairy abductions of folklore and many modern alien abduction reports, and cites the 1983 call of the Flying Saucer Review editor Gordon Creighton to look to "notably Islam" for the true nature of the UFO entities; the earlier writer John Keel had argued that demonological and contactee accounts describe the same manifestations, "only the frame of reference is different." Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda write that gods, angels, demons and jinn may all be expressions of contact with the same "Visitors," and Jacques Vallée finds the saucer myth coinciding "to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries" and with beliefs among all peoples in entities of the same category. Steven Greer and Michael Salla treat the jinn as continuous with the broader category of interdimensional beings alongside angels and demons;[citation needed] Salla's briefing document places the beings called "gods, angels, Elohim, devas, demons, asuras, planetary spirits or solar beings (with multiple names in different religions)" at the highest of seven levels of the phenomenon, and David Icke identifies the jinn with the loosh-consuming Archon class. A narrower account holds that the tradition arose from direct encounters with one physical extraterrestrial species, the Rak, whose brief presence in the Middle East before their withdrawal in 712 (T) is credited by Elena Danaan and by the anonymously compiled Russian Alien Races Book as the origin of the belief. On Guiley's reading the abductees who name their visitors extraterrestrial are misidentifying them, though she writes that she is "not stating that all ETs are Djinn"; on the Rak reading the Quranic and hadith elaboration rests on a folk memory of a few encounters, and Danaan's agreement with the Russian document may reflect shared material rather than independent corroboration. The classical Islamic account long predates, and stands independently of, each of these.

If real, the jinn are a self-aware, doctrinally documented non-human population that has coexisted with humanity since before recorded history, is invoked in law (jinn possession remains grounds for exorcism ritual, ruqyah, across the contemporary Muslim world) and medicine, and — on the readings above — supplies either an independent line of pre-modern non-human contact testimony or one of the oldest attested cases of an extraterrestrial visitation folded into a culture's own theology.

Etymology and terminology

The Arabic root jnn (Arabic: جنّ, romanized:jnn) carries the sense "to hide" or "to conceal," and the collective jann and the singular jinnī (feminine jinniyya) derive from it. The English "genie" is a translators' borrowing, through French génie from Latin genius, used to render the term in early European versions of The Thousand and One Nights; it fixed the lamp-bound wish-granter of Western popular image, distinct from the doctrinal jinn. Guiley reads the root as a description of method: Western ignorance of the jinn, she writes, "enables them to carry out various agendas related to human beings, all the while disappearing like chameleons into the background, literally hiding in plain sight."

Origins

Islamic tradition holds that the jinn were created before humanity and inhabited the Earth before it. The philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani, retelling the Islamic account of Iblis, describes the jinn as "humanoids made before man," an earlier race "made not of clay, but of fire," and connects them to the figure of Prometheus. Guiley goes further: before human beings arrived, "another race held dominion here: The Djinn," and "their ousting to another dimension" is, on her account, the root of the friction behind hostile entity contact today.

A narrower and separately-sourced claim holds that the tradition specifically originated in direct human contact with one physical extraterrestrial species. Elena Danaan's A Gift from the Stars credits the Rak — who visited Terra only five times, briefly, in the Middle East — with having "created the myth of Jinns," on the account that local populations, observing beings of unfamiliar small stature and blueish coloration who kept their distance, folklorized the encounters into the later Quranic and hadith elaboration of the jinn as beings of "smokeless fire" inhabiting an unseen parallel world. The anonymously compiled Russian Alien Races Book, an alleged KGB document circulated online from around 2013 whose authenticity remains disputed, independently carries the same species under the entry "RAK," crediting it with having "created the myth Jinn or genies" before its "last visit." Danaan has separately acknowledged using the Russian document as a starting template for her own catalogue,[citation needed] so the agreement may reflect shared material rather than independent corroboration. On this reading the Quranic and hadith elaboration of jinn nature, society, and law postdates and rests on a folk memory of a few encounters, a claim in tension with the classical account of the jinn as one of three independently created orders and with the interdimensional-population and predatory-entity readings alike.

Nature and classification

Jinn are held in Islamic tradition to possess subtle, non-corporeal bodies of fire and air (marijin min nar), able to assume visible form — most often a serpent, a dog, or another animal, though also human guise. Guiley calls them "masterful shape-shifters," and the grays, reptilians, insectoids and shadow figures of abduction reports are, on her reading, forms taken by the same beings. The shayatin (devils), led by Iblis — a jinn, or on a minority reading a distinct being, who refused Allah's command to bow before Adam — are held to be inherently evil and to tempt through whispered suggestion rather than possession; the Ifrit are the powerful fire-associated class and the Marid the strongest, associated with water, and a Qareen is a jinn companion assigned to every human from birth.

Scholars of religion read the category as one of several that traditions already hold for non-human intelligences. Diana Walsh Pasulka argues that religions "already have in place metaphysical categories for nonhuman intelligences of many types (God, djinn, angels, beings from other planets, etc.)," and the historian Jörg Matthias Determann, writing on Islam and extraterrestrial life, notes that among Muslim thinkers "there is an appreciation that they are rational creatures" able to choose between good and evil. Steven Greer and Salla have suggested that interdimensional beings overlap with the entities variously called angels, demons, and jinn.[citation needed] Salla's briefing document names "gods, angels, Elohim, devas, demons, asuras, planetary spirits or solar beings" as level seven beings, "with multiple names in different religions," whose "advanced psychic abilities allow them to influence the consciousness of surface humans"; its list names gods and the Elohim but not the jinn.

Society and abode

Medieval Islamic sources describe the jinn as living alongside people in an unseen, parallel world organized into tribes broadly analogous to pre-Islamic Arabian society. They marry and reproduce, and a substantial jurisprudential literature debates unions and offspring with humans; the great majority of Muslim jurists hold such unions religiously discouraged (makruh) rather than forbidden outright, and the children are traditionally described as unusually gifted. Sulayman commanded them by divine authority to labor in his court and, in some tellings, married the jinn-descended Bilqis.

Guiley reports that "it is not unusual in the Middle East for people of both sexes to claim that they have sexual unions and marriages with Djinn," and records the account of Mahmoud, a Moroccan informant who once studied to be a sahir (sorcerer), of a dream-state seduction by a female jinn whose face changed to "a scaly hideous creature with a tail."

Possession and exorcism

The majority of Muslim scholars accept jinn possession as doctrinally sound, distinguishing it from the whispering of the shayatin as a genuine physical intrusion into the body, on the theory that the jinn's fire-and-air composition allows what a devil's temptation cannot, and treat it through ruqyah, Quranic recitation combined with ritual prayer. John Keel drew the parallel from the other side: "Victims of demonomania (possession) suffer the very same medical and emotional symptoms as the UFO contactees," and Guiley holds that the jinn enter the body and "circulate through the blood." Asked about jinn and UFOs, the mufti Muhammad ibn Adam of Daruliftaa.com affirmed that jinn exist and can be good or evil, answered that an unnatural sighting "is not beyond the power of Allah," and did not identify the two.

Pre-Islamic Arabian poets and soothsayers (kāhin) claimed direct jinn inspiration for their verse and divinations — the poet al-A'sha is recorded referring to his own jinn muse as his "jinni-brother" — a practice requiring, on the classical Arab understanding, neither possession nor obedience but a mutual, cooperative relationship between poet and jinn.

Bedside visitors and abduction accounts

A 2014 study of sleep-paralysis sufferers in Egypt found that 48% of a general-population sample attributed their episodes to jinn attack and that 41% used ruqyah to prevent recurrence, with belief in a supernatural cause associated with greater subjective fear and a longer felt duration of the episode. Jinn is one of several cross-cultural names — alongside the Old Hag and the incubus/succubus — for the assailant in a structurally similar paralysis-plus-presence experience examined at Sleep paralysis.

Guiley ties the same bedside figure to the abduction literature: shadow people "preceded the onset of abductions, sometimes by years" among her survey respondents, and the ufologist Ann Druffel, who investigated the Tujunga Canyon abductions, told her that treating shadow people, grays and reptilians as shape-shifted forms of one entity matched Druffel's own hypothesis about "so-called alien abductors." Guiley adds the fairy accounts as the earlier form of the same kidnapping. Keel's route to the continuity runs through the fairy faith, including the seventeenth-century minister Robert Kirk, who concluded that fairies were invisible creatures composed of "congealed air"; Vallée's is the coincidence of archetypes between saucer reports, the Celtic fairy faith and religious miracles. DeLonge and Levenda write that Islamic and Christian beliefs about demons share "some common ground with alien abduction scenarios in which the aliens are perceived much the same way that Muslims perceive the evil jinn."

Deception and predation

Creighton described the jinn as "inveterate liars and deceivers" who "delight in bamboozling and misleading mankind with all manner of nonsense," and held the usual communications of UFO entities in close-encounter cases to be of a piece with them. Keel wrote in 1970 that the whole contactee mystery "has been designed to keep us confused and skeptical. Somebody somewhere is having a good laugh at our expense," and Guiley holds that the jinn "masquerade, cloak and deceive so that in many cases, we do not realize what we are really encountering." Mahmoud describes the jinn's view of humans as that of the eater to the chicken: "All we are to them are talking chickens." David Icke and, separately, researchers drawing on Robert Monroe's astral-projection fieldwork have identified the jinn with a predatory, energy-consuming entity class — describing the Archons of Gnostic cosmology, the jinn of Islamic metaphysics, and Monroe's "Loosh collectors" as different cultural names for the same loosh-consuming population, corresponding structurally to a mature, high-mass egregore.

Open questions

See also

References

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Bibliography

• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen (2013). The Djinn Connection: The Hidden Links Between Djinn, Shadow People, ETs, Nephilim, Archons, Reptilians and Other Entities. Visionary Living. ＋ {{cite book}}:Invalid |ref=harv (help)