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143 11 The Jinn Companion in the Realm of Dreams and Imagination LANA NASSER Popularized as the wish-granting genie in the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, the jinn are shape-shifting spirits belonging to the oldest strands in the religious tradition of the Arab world. The jinn were worshiped by some of the Arabs,1 but unlike the pagan gods and goddesses that were eliminated with the coming of Islam, the jinn were incorporated in the Qur’an, with a whole sura (chapter) named after them.2 No longer deified, the jinn were established as spirits made from fire, belonging to God’s creation. As a society’s formal structure changes, gods can take on the form of spirits that reflect the changing qualities of human experience.3 Thus, understanding jinn beliefs could bring insight into the changes in the symbolic structure of the Arabs’ worldview as they adopted Islam after the period known as alJahiliyah (the age of ignorance.) Viewed by the majority of Muslims as autonomous, the jinn today serve as commentators on the cultural, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of the self. Associated with possession and healing, the jinn interact with people mostly through visions and dreams. There is a kinship between the realm of dreams and that of the jinn. This makes the jinn a valuable source in further understanding Arabic Islamic dreaming and imagination. They also have multiple—and possibly universal—dimensions. The Jinn in Language, Myth, and Religion Tales describe the jinn as demigods, half animal–half human, that frequent water wells, dirty or desolate places, ruins, and graves; they can also be assigned to a treasure to protect it. Made from a smokeless fire these shape-  144 L A NA NA SSER shifters are believed to fly and traverse time; they are associated with menstrual blood and the color red. As with the Greek healing god Asclepius, the jinn’s most common manifestation is the snake or dog. It is believed that for each person in the human realm there exists a qareen in the parallel jinn realm. The word “qareen” comes from the root word qarn (horn), meaning counterpart, companion, or double. In a hadith (a saying), the Prophet said: “To each of you is assigned a qareen from the jinn, and a qareen from the angels,” and when asked whether the Prophet also had a qareen, he answered that indeed he did, but that God aided him in making his qareen a Muslim.5 It is believed that the qareen of the Muslim is a nonbeliever. However, in this hadith, the Prophet mentions a qareen from the angels and from the jinn, which indicates that the qareen is not exclusive to the jinn. The main difference between angels and jinn is that while angels are made from light and have no will of their own, the jinn are composed of fire and have volition. In the Quran, Ibliss (Lucifer, or the devil) is in one instance described as belonging to the jinn, while in another he is described as a defiant “angel.”6 One of the ranks of the jinn is called marid, which means the one who disobeys or defies. Ibn Al-Arabi tells us the jinn and the shaytan (Satan) have an affinity with Alam-al-mithal (the imaginal realm), which is inherently ambiguous, containing elements of both the spiritual and corporeal worlds and including opposite qualities. It is the place where the unseen takes on visible form, which is also the soul, the intermediary between body and spirit; it is woven of imagination.7 The imaginal realm is said in turn to affect our reality through dreams and psychological functions.8 The jinn plane has been compared to Plato’s ideal forms in the world of becoming in contrast to the world of being.9 This nonconcrete reality, where emotions predominate, provides “an underpinning or template for both physical objects and concepts, and provides the mechanism for what we consider supernatural, paranormal.”10 Most of the Arabic literature agrees that the jinn are thus named because of their quality of ijtinan: being invisible to the eye.11 The words “jinn” and “ijtinan” share the root Jànn, which is the root for a plethora of words including jannah and janeen—a garden with trees and a fetus—both of which are shadowy, hidden, and mysterious. Jànn is also the of the word junun, madness, which, in pre-Islamic...

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