The Jinn
As a graduate student, one of the most difficult things was not being an asshole. It’s so easy when you’re studying at one of the best universities in the world to look down your nose at people who don’t speak more than three languages and know how to use the plural of symposium (symposia :).
But as an anthropologist, it was imperative that I allowed people to tell their stories in their own words—especially when I was learning about new cultures. As a budding Islamic scholar, I had to avoid the temptation to explain away people’s deepest held beliefs as mere regurgitations of social structures.
This is a story about some time I spent in Cairo with a young man who was studying Islam at the Institute where I lived with Muslim fundamentalists. He introduced me to a little known aspect of Islamic theology—the Jinn, but most importantly, he taught me to be a compassionate listener. Azam helped me engage with people from their perspective even when I didn’t believe what they were saying.
One morning, when I told Azam that I woke up and found my glasses in a different room, he got a somber look on his face and immediately solved my mystery with a serious tone:
“It was the Jinn!”
I hadn’t had a good laugh in a long time, so I sat down on the curb in front of the Institute and stretched my feet out while I leaned back and threw my gaze to the setting sun.
He just stared at me.
“Azam” I bellowed, “I wasn’t drinking gin last night, that’s haram.”
I went back to laughing, thinking this young kid intentionally made an off-color joke to make fun of my situation.
Bilingual homophones really got me that time.
It took me a long time to understand what Muslims meant by the Jinn, but from what I could piece together from various teachers, there were three types of creatures created by God: Human beings, Angels, and Jinn. Although there was a lot of disagreement on a theological level about predestination and free will, human beings were generally considered the visible beings who had some control over their lives. Angels were usually invisible and had no control over their lives—they were the messengers from God to human beings and did God’s work. Jinn were some sort of angel-human hybrid: they were all invisible and some of them were Muslim while some were not.
Azam told me about a successful Jinn back in his hometown in Bangladesh who had powerful influence over other Jinn in the area. The only problem for the community was that the Jinn was a non-Muslim and corrupted the other Jinn to do his bidding. Bilal, the Jinn, spent his days flitting around the area consolidating power and trying to run out any Jinn who might challenge his authority.
As I sat there on the curb, I struggled to understand how Azam could be seriously telling me about an invisible creature that had political power in his hometown. In that moment, though, I was more curious than incredulous, so I let him continue.
Bilal didn’t just have influence over the Jinn, he also had a special connection with a local business man—an actual human being—who also happened to be very powerful. That man, let’s call him Ahmed, was busy moving through their neighborhood gobbling up smaller businesses. He was exceptionally good at figuring out where the next opportunities would emerge and capitalized on them ruthlessly.
As a young graduate student, I puffed up my chest, put on my anthropologist’s hat, and saw straight through the story. Azam, a child, had listened to stories from his elders who did not want to directly disparage Ahmed and so created this Jinn, Bilal, about whom they could say nasty things without offending Ahmed. The people in the community couldn’t figure out why Ahmed was so successful and why his business deals always worked and theirs failed. I didn’t want to challenge Azam on this, but I asked him a simple question that evoked a vivd response that still sticks in my mind:
“If the Jinn are invisible, how do you know about Bilal?”
“Well, I didn’t know what to think until I saw the mark of the Jinn.”
“What mark is that?”
I sat up on the curb and turned towards Azam—he believed what he was about to say as much as he believed the sun would rise in the morning. The look on his face forced me to engage not just my mind, but my heart and my ego. By the time he started to describe the mark of the Jinn, I wanted to know what it was—a curious human being, not a professionally skeptical graduate student.
“Well, some mornings, if I was walking by Ahmed’s, I would look closely at the ground and see backwards footprints. His Jinn had feet that were twisted backwards so you could tell that something had been walking into Ahmad’s place, but the feet were pointed in the wrong direction.”
Azam and I stared at each other as we struggled to know what to say next.