What Is Jinn In India

[Jarrell Campbell]

Ourlast three blogs looked at jinn veneration at Firoz Shah Kotla. Here we explore beliefs about jinns around the world and introduce you to a place where the jinn worship reflects what happens at Firoz Shah Kotla.

Scholars tell us jinns were supernatural creatures in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology who were incorporated into Islam by Prophet Muhammad. The Quran states that Allah created three types of beings from three substances: humans (made of earth); angels (made of light); and jinn (made of smokeless fire).

Jinns are invisible to humans in their pure form (smokeless fire) but can take any shape. Like people, jinns have free will and can be good or evil. They are born, grow up, marry, raise families, and die, but their life span is much longer than ours. Some jinns are said to live for thousands of years. Unlike us, they can fly through the air and travel wherever they please

In Arabia, jinns were said to be like air. In Egypt, they were described as having flaming eyes and could disappear by turning into fire. Another common belief was that their eyes were perpendicular not horizontal like humans.

Jinn figure heavily in Moroccan folklore and seem to be closely linked to pre-Islamic beliefs in nature spirits. It is not unusual for a jinni in Moroccan folklore to be able to assume the form of a young, beautiful woman, or even a terrible crone.

A book by Nagi B.A. Jinnat, Sex Aur Insaan (The Jinn, Sex And Humans), published in 2002, tells us that Lahore, in Pakistan, is home to many thriving jinn communities. Apparently, the three earliest jinn tribes came to Lahore from Arabia and made their homes in the mausoleums and Islamic monuments.

As at Firoz Shah Kotla, people come in large numbers, especially on Thursdays, to light candles and lamps, and petition the jinns. Two cloisters inside the mosque are brightly carpeted, and plastic pegs for hanging rosaries dot the walls. The lady in blue in the photo above claimed her prayers were answered within three days.

DMW: Thank you for your kind comments Avril. I do hope that things will return to normal before too long and we can meet up in Delhi. Meanwhile do please send your thoughts and reactions to the Blogs. We are open to ideas for topics too.

AM: You push against an anthropological tendency to pick up on the world as represented in newspapers; our fieldsites are often organized around places and people who suffer disease, hazard, and conflict in a dramatic, crisis-ridden nowtime. So can you tell us a little about how this curious project emerged?

The reasons I ended up writing not that book, but this one instead, were twofold. One, I had to be intellectually honest about both the absences and presences I was encountering during fieldwork. No one inside Firoz Shah Kotla talked about the Emergency at all. However, they did tell stories about jinn that were about deep time (long-lived jinn serving as the links connecting humans who lived millennia apart); about desire and its transformative and transgressive powers; about the reshaping of families and selves. My fieldwork was pointing me toward an entirely different set of concepts than the ones I had brought with me. It was pointing me toward engaging with the duration of time as embodied in the long lives of the jinn, which is a different orientation than the necessarily contemporary nature of much anthropology.

AM: You highlight a tension within the scholarship on Islam between the doctrinaire and the popular. Can you reiterate it briefly here, so readers who be less familiar with this scholarship can have a sense of the stakes of the debate? More broadly, what can anthropological scholarship, which often zooms in on the everyday and the popular, offer to scholars of religious texts?

AM: Jinnealogy also offers an implicit critique, it seems, of anthropology that tries to grasp at the nature of the world through the emergent rather than the residual. Would you agree?

AVT: When we think of cities in Asia, we think of the skyscraper and the slum. One, as the location of an elite workforce connected to globalized networks of capital through startups and call centers; the other, as the informal, chaotic, and often violent world of those left out of global flows of wealth and information, wanting desperately to break in. In either case, the time of the city is oriented toward velocity, toward promises of the future and getting there faster. But there are other temporalities of city life and other aesthetics of city form. In Delhi, it is the ruins of the precolonial past that anchor other relations to temporality and other visions of urban life.

Jinn have long been tied to the difference and danger of socially marginal Muslims, as Emilio Spadola (2014) has noted in Morocco, and also to memories of ethnic and cultural difference that have been submerged in the constitution of normative national selves. In Morocco, Aisha Qandisha is tied to the memory of black Africans and their migrations north; in the Sudan, the jinn who manifest themselves in the Zar trance rituals sometimes speak as colonial officials. To live in a city of jinn is to be acutely aware of subjectivity as it is shaped and undone by histories and affects far wider than the individual and his or her lifetime. Every city is a city of jinn; only some of them are aware of this.

Like human beings, jinn are subject to the temptations of Iblis. There are some jinn, therefore, who are good, pious and faithful, and some others who are bad, sinful and infidel. Bad jinn may be malevolent to human, whereas good jinn may be benevolent by helping people do some hard work, or produce magical acts. Jinn can also assume many forms including that of human beings; but most usually they assume the form of an animal, for example, a snake, a lion, a donkey, a cat, or a dog. A jinn who assumes the form of a cat may either have only one color (totally white, brown or black) or have a combination of three colors. Killing or beating such a pseudo-animal, (that is a transformed jinn) is risky because the jinn, its friends or its kin may take deadly revenge. The risk is more serious than when merely disturbing or destroying their places.

The original shape of a jinn however, is unknown. Some people suggest the possibility of co-operation between humans and jinn for special purposes such as making friends, even marrying jinn and taking jinn as servants, in the case of benevolent jinn. This is possible for anyone who masters the mystery of jinn and learns knowledge of the mysterious world. Some kyai are certainly known to have that mastery. There are a number of ways to acquire this mastery, one of which is by doing an exercise, aiming to gain the marvel and secret merits of the Verse of Throne (Ayat Kursi) of the Holy Qur'an in Surat Al-Baqarah [verse 255].

One aspect of this is the fact that when air catches fire and heats up, it burns like a lamp; this is the combustion of fire. The flame [i.e. the flame from the combustion of fire], which is ignited air (or the result of the ignition of air), is what is known as mārij (المارج). Jinn are called mārij because they are fire mixed with air, burning air. Marj means mixture, and this is why meadows are also known as marj because of the mixture of plants found there.

The jinni did not know that the power of water, from which Adam had been created, was stronger than it, as it could make fire disappear. Neither did it know that clay was more resistant than it was to cold and dryness. Adam thus had strength and resistance, as he was filled with the two basic elements with which Allah had created him. Although it is true that the other elements, fire and air, were also present in Adam, these lacked the power [of earth and water]. The other elements can also be found in jinn, and that is why they are called mārij, but in origin they do not have the power [of earth and water].

Adam was given humility due to his clayey nature, but he behaved haughtily and was punished. He acted like that due to the fiery side within him. Likewise, he had the power to change form in his imagination and in his states, due to the airy side of his nature. The jinn, on the other hand, were given haughtiness due to their fiery nature. Their humility, when they bowed down and were punished, came from their clayey side. Those that were shayatin were established in acts of seduction, while those that were not were established in acts of obedience.

To the Persians Jann (جان) is the father of the jinn; he is called Tarnush (طارنوش) in the Book of Adam (اسفار آدم). When his descendants had grown numerous upon the earth God granted them a religious law, to which he made them subject; they remained obedient to it until the end of one revolution of the fixed stars, the duration of which is thirty-six thousand, or, according to others, eighty thousand two hundred years; but after this time they rebelled through pride; for punishment God caused them all to perish save the poor and humble who had remained in the way of obedience; for governor he gave these one of themselves named Hilyaish (حليايش).

After the expiration of another revolution of the fixed stars these also in turn rebelled; God destroyed them all save a small number that remained faithful, over whom he set a chief named Maliqa (مليقا). At the end of the third revolution once more the children of Jann left the straight path and fell victims to the wrath of the Most High; the few that remained steadfast became in sequence of time an immense people ruled over by Hamus (هاموس), celebrated for his merits, his learning, and his uprightness; he spent his life in upholding the reign of justice and good. After his death the wicked disobeyed, and God sent them prophets to give them good counsel, but they would not hearken. At the end of the fourth revolution God sent a legion of angels to war upon them; they descended from heaven and fought against the children of Jann, and slew the greater part of them; the remnant scattered through the islands and ruined places; some that had not reached years of discernment were made prisoners by the angels. Among these were Iblis (the Devil, Satan), who accompanied the angels on their return to heaven, and was brought up among them; his education progressed so far that he was in turn appointed to teach them. The place where he engaged in preaching was at the foot of the throne of God; he was mounted upon a pulpit of ruby, and over his head flew a banner of light. So numerous were his hearers that only the Deity could count them.

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