What Are Jinn: The Arab Spirits Who Can Eat, Sleep, Have flower, and Die
From Disney's Aladdin to the subject of exorcisms, jinn spirits have influenced culture and religion for centuries in our realm and theirs.
Arab poet Kuthayyir ‘Azzah of the Umayyad period (661–750)—known for depicting his romantic obsession with a married woman—once described how he became a poet:
One day [...] a man on horseback came toward me until he was next to me. I looked at him. He was bizarre, a man made out of brass […]. He said to me, “Recite some poetry!” Then he recited poetry to me. I said: “Who are you?” He said, “I am your double from the jinn!”
Jinn (often al-jinn or djinn) are shape-shifting spirits made of fire and air with origins in pre-Islamic Arabia. They are the inspiration for Aladdin’s genie, and have held space in Arab culture for almost as long as Arab culture itself. And yet, having transcended both religion and the physical world, so little is understood about the spirits. “People in the West currently are more interested to learn about jihad, the veil, the status of women in Islam, and the various fundamentalist movements,” writes Amira El-Zein in her book Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn. “They assume the jinn is a topic better left to Disney and popular culture, or at best to anthropologists.” But jinn, who are part of Islam but not worshipped in it, with their free will and obscurity, have too much to teach us about a culture, a people, and their multiple religions to be forgotten.
Neither inherently good nor bad, Jinn are amorphous entities, able to take the shape of humans and animals alike. Their role in society, too, has been malleable: Jinn have served as a source of inspiration for both the most esteemed classical Arab poets in the first millenium and Disney in 1992 (jinni—aka genie—is the singular of jinn). Both before and after Islam’s introduction—which included mentions of jinn in the Qur’an—jinn have remained an inexplicable entity. “The orthodox scholars say you can’t understand jinn,” Arabic literature researcher Suneela Mubayi tells Broadly. Still, despite their mysterious nature, there are some things historians, Islamic scholars, and believers of jinn have come to discern about the spirits.
According to El-Zein, pagan Arabs (big believers in the occult) worshipped jinn long before Islam was introduced in the seventh century, believing that the spirits were masters of certain crafts and elements of nature who had the power to turn plots of land fertile. Jinn are believed to both interact with humans in our reality and lead their own lives in a separate realm. “As spiritual entities, the jinn are considered dual dimensional, with the ability to live and operate in both manifest and invisible domains,” El-Zein writes.
"The jinn are considered dual dimensional, with the ability to live and operate in both manifest and invisible domains."
Jinn’s influence has been widespread both religiously and culturally in pre- and post-Islamic Arabia. They can talk or otherwise communicate with people, though some, like poets, are more likely than others to be hit up by a jinni. Ancient Arabs, known for their affinity for poetry, even coined the term sha’ir, meaning an Arabic literature poet who was “supernaturally inspired” by jinn, to designate poets like Kuthayyir ‘Azzah. “Poets in pre-Islamic Arabia often said they had a special jinni that was their companion,” says Mubayi. “Sometimes they would attribute their verses to the jinn."
In the early seventh century, when the Islamic Prophet Muhammed (SAWS) began spreading the word of the Qur’an, he shared multiple surahs, or verses, that mentioned jinn, including one named entirely after the spirits. Belief in jinn has been a part of the world’s second largest religion ever since. El-Zein argues that “one can’t be Muslim if he/she doesn’t have faith in [jinn’s] existence because they are mentioned in the Qur’an and the prophetic tradition.” And while, of course, not all who identify as Muslim subscribe to every word of the Qur’an literally, if El-Zein is right, it means that around 1.6 billion people in the world believe in jinn.
Jinn are considered part of al-ghaib, or the unseen. As invisible entities with abstract definitions, belief in them manifests differently between communities and individuals. For instance, while some Islamic scholars agree that jinn are capable of possession, others do not. Still, in both the past and present, stories of those possessed by jinn are not hard to find. Exorcisms, which can involve reciting the Qur’an over a person or, more rarely, physically beating the jinn out of them, are performed in some circles on those thought to be possessed by jinn (despite being condemned by mainstream Muslims). People who partake in the latter believe that the pain is not felt by the person who the jinni occupies, but the jinni themself. And while reading the Qur’an is a popular exorcism method, Jinn’s links to possession predate Islam. “The Arabs of pre-Islam invented a whole set of exorcism procedures to protect themselves from the evil actions of the jinn on their bodies and minds, such as the use of beads, incense, bones, salt, and charms written in Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac, or the hanging around their necks of a dead animal’s teeth such as a fox or a cat to frighten the jinn, and keep them away,” writes El-Zein. In Arabic, the word majnun—meaning possessed, mad, or insane—literally means “to be possessed by a jinni.”
Despite stories of possession, Jinn are remarkable in their propensity towards neither good or evil. In Christianity, demons and evil spirits appear as entities carrying out Satan’s maleficent wishes, but neutral spirits like the jinn have no place. El-Zain believes that jinn have been robbed of the scholarly devotion they deserve, in part because they complicate the narrative of monotheism, what it means to believe in “the existence of intelligent spiritual entities without necessarily demonizing them.” Jinn—different than both angels and the devil—oscillate between good and evil, making them all the more relatable. They can fuck up, they can be pious, they can help us, or they can hurt us, as shown in folktales from One Thousand and One Nights (commonly known in English as Arabian Nights). In one of these tales, “The Fisherman and the Jinni”—the inspiration for Disney’s Aladdin—a fisherman pulls a bottle out of the sea. When he opens it, a jinni appears. Angry to have been trapped in the bottle for centuries, the jinni tells the fisherman their plan to kill him. But after the two exchange stories, the jinni changes their mind, instead bestowing the fisherman with a life of good fortune.
Fluid in form and interpretation, jinn not only possess and converse with us, but they can also fall in love (or in bed) with humans. Pre-Islamic poet Ta’abbata Sharran once wrote about sleeping with a jinniyah (feminine form of jinn) in a poem called “How I Met the Ghul”:
I lay upon her through the night
that in the morning I might see what had come to me
Behold! Two eyes in a hideous head
like the head of a cat, split-tongued
Legs like a deformed fetus, the back of a dog,
clothes of haircloth or worn-out skins!
According to El-Zein, the ability or desire to have flower isn’t all jinn have in common with humans. Like us, “jinn eat, drink, sleep, procreate and die,” she says, though their mortal lives can extend for thousands of years. And yet, while we can relate to the spirits on many levels, the consensus remains that we cannot fully comprehend jinn—though we can try
'Jinn' Is a Remarkably Honest Portrait of Black Muslim Girlhood
Director Nijla Mu'min opens up about the complexities she encountered coming of age as a Black Muslim girl in America, and how she translated them into her award-winning debut.
Director and screenwriter Nijla Mu'min’s anticipated debut feature film, Jinn, which opens on November 15, takes the universally relatable coming-of-age narrative and frames it within the specific Black-American Muslim experience of girlhood.
Aptly, that framing starts with a titular metaphor. Jinn are supernatural beings mentioned throughout the Quran. Unlike humans, who are made out of fixed clay, Jinn are unbound, extra-dimensional beings made of smokeless fire. They are unreliable; they shapeshift and have no loyalty to form—and in that sense, truth.
As the movie Jinn reminds us, such is also often the case with teenagers. Amid the setting of Oakland, California—where Mu’min partially grew up—we meet Summer (played by Zoe Renee), a 17-year-old figuring out what form she wants to take; negotiating the tension between who she wants to be and who her community expects her to be.
Summer's mother, Jade (Simone Missick), is a news anchor who decides to revert to Islam, all while the public is watching (and judging). Summer, being a teenage girl insecure about how she's seen in the world, is apprehensive at first. Through the lens of this tense mother-daughter relationship, Mu'min exhumes the often overlooked intricacies of Black Muslim girlhood, as we see Summer grappling with her sexuality, faith, and sense of self. And throughout, Mu'min refuses to present tropes typically attached to Muslims and Black girl or make preachy declarations about Black American Muslim identity. Rather, Summer is rich, complicated, and, as she says herself, "full of fire."
Jinn debuted at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for writing. The film also won awards at the American Black Film Festival, the Blackstar Film Festival, and the Roxbury Film Festival. Mu'min's work focuses on telling stories about Black women, and she recently joined the all-female directorial team of Ava Duvernay's television show Queen Sugar. We recently spoke to the up-and-coming filmmaker about her upbringing in the East Bay, and her inspirations for the film.
NAJMA SHARIF: I feel like the underlying theme of Jinn is the gaze; the idea that jinn are these shapeshifting, unseen spirits adds to that. And there’s several scenes in the film that really speak to how being both Black and Muslim makes one hyper-visible. As a Black, Muslim woman yourself, how have you’ve grappled with people’s perception of you—this gaze—and how you've been expected to perform?
NIJLA MU’MIN: Early on in my life, I learned or observed how people around me were kind of navigating the layers of their identity or kind of negotiating their identity to get through life. I remember my father, who has worked in retail a lot of his life, selling clothes; I remember he was salah at work. I think he worked at some clothing store, and he almost got fired for making prayer at the job and, you know, a lot of people would get scared and maybe they would stop prayer or just get another job, but he continued to do it. He was not going to allow that stigma around Islam—that type of Islamophobia—to stop him from being a Muslim. He would go through the airport wearing a kufi—and this was post 9/11. He was always very proudly a Muslim, and that is the example I had early on from my father. For myself, though, when I was a really young girl, that was my whole world.
I went to the masjid. I thought everyone should be a Muslim like my father. I asked my father if Janet Jackson was a Muslim, cause that was my world. When I was in junior high, I learned that being a Muslim was not normal. To be a Muslim, and as an African American, there’s a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about what a Muslim was. I found myself in situations where I would clarify for teenagers what was a Muslim.
Did you ever feel embarrassed doing that? As a kid I remember thinking my mom or my dad were doing the most by praying in public.
Yes! Sometimes I felt kind of embarrassed, especially we would go out to dinner and the waiter or the waitress would come and start to read us the specials and my dad would make a point to tell him, “No, we’re Muslim, we don’t eat pork.” He would go on this whole thing about us being Muslim, he was always so proud. Sometimes I was like “No, dad, please chill out.”
I’m sure it’s way different now. Do you see what they were trying to instill in us, what truth they were living at the time? How have your ideas surrounding this changed?
I mean, now I look back at it as an adult and I see it as legacy. My father was trying to build his legacy for his children. Even if I’m not a practicing Muslim, I have a legacy that is rooted in a history of African-American Muslims in the Bay Area. He was just really trying to build that for us, and I’m really grateful because I have a sense of self that is so much stronger. I can look back and know why I’m the person I am based on the early example of my parents, who really encouraged a love for Islam. I look back and I’m grateful for it, but as a teenager, you just want to assimilate into something else and not even understand why.
Some of my best memories are at the masjid, as a kid. I really loved studying Islam and the Quran. Sometimes it was torturous, because you had to memorize a lot and behave a certain way because you’re in the house of Allah. Now looking back, I see what discipline it instilled in me and the value in having seen the many ways people practiced Islam. I want to know more about your relationship to the masjid, being that the masjid is a centerpiece in Jinn. How did that shape you and what kinds of memories do you have?
My relationship growing up with the masjid was really beautiful. My earliest memories were there. It seems like we were there so much of the time. When we’d go visit my father, he would always take us. It was just something to look forward to. We had a really beautiful masjid in an architectural sense ––a large Victorian building. There was the Clara Muhammad school on the side of it, and that is where my brother and sister went their first years of elementary school. They also had a preschool that I went to. It was an educational space; it was a community space; a family space; a place for prayer and laughter. After the service, people would go out and buy stuff. My dad would sell scarves outside the masjid, so I was in love with this market.
Like the ecosystem of the mosque...
It was just this whole world: You can get your scarves and your Quran, you can get anything you needed in this little market. That was my world as a young girl and my mother was not really observing at that time—I was going more with my father. ... Definitely, as I got older—especially as I got to be a teenager and I had a lot of friends who were not Muslim—I was just confused learning about my sexuality, not really having anybody to talk to about what I was doing within my community. I was really looking for a way to fit in and understand who I was.
There's also the limitations to what the masjid can offer you as a kid versus as you're becoming a young woman. The masjid isn't the place to be talking about sexuality and boys.
Definitely, there's really no space for that. I'm really glad you brought that up because I couldn't really talk to my dad at all about something like that. Even my mom, I couldn't talk about those things. I'd be at school and getting these Lil’ Kim tapes and Lil’ Kim is talking about flower on the tape and things that were so obscene––this was in junior high. There was no thing called “slut shaming,” people called you a “hoe.” There was so much that was going on with public school girls that was outside of anything that I felt could be handled in the masjid. It was really two different worlds.
I also loved the khutbah scene, because it shows this sermon in the middle of the day and then there's a cut to Summer getting ready to go to a party and smoking weed, and it feels like there are so many contradictions there. I could relate, because that's been me—where I'm ready to go to a party after going to jummah that afternoon. Let's segue into discussing those contradictions and the perceptions––it's not about dispelling them per say, but it's toying with them for people who don't get the many intricacies of our existence; how we live with and justify those contradictions, this haraam-halal spectrum that exists and where we draw the line.
The contradictions are very important. I didn't want to stray away from that because humanity is full of contradictions and to not portray that would be false. I think sometimes we portray Muslims [either] as extremists or like a perfect person who never does anything wrong.
Right, a lot of depictions are of very goody-two-shoes Muslims who pray five times a day and are the perfect student and the perfect daughter and the one mistake they make is, like, not even scandalous. So it was really refreshing to see a character like Summer.
At that time you want to have fun. I went to my first party when I was in junior high school and there would be these girls doing these lap dances on these boys, I've never seen anything like that.
It was a culture shock.
A guy pulled my hand to do a lap dance, and I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what this is, it looks fun? But I was thinking, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm not that type of girl, I'm Muslim. There's just all these things; but you want to have fun and you want to be in the in-crowd and be flirtatious. I wanted to channel all of that into Summer. She's definitely cognizant that she's straddling these worlds, and she's really trying to make them fit, and I think when it went too far for her is in the scene where you see her take a picture that's not appropriate. That's when she really feels the repercussions of that kind of shapeshifting of your identity and how that could be dangerous to you or your community. I wanted to show the contradictions because I've seen the contradictions in my own life, in my own family, in people in my community. I don't think that makes them bad people, it just makes them people. My father used to go to this club and go dancing; I never thought there was anything wrong with him going to dance at the club growing up. He didn't drink, he wasn't bringing a woman home; he just went and liked the dance. We have to make space for different types of expression.