Your Devil or Your Creative Daimon? The Jinni Double

As I continue my investigation of intermediary beings - angels, daimons, jinn and others - I find Dunja Rasić's recent scholarly study Bedeviled a fascinating read. Its focus is on the qarīn, a jinni double whose nature and location are debated by rival schools of Islam. Is it your devil or your ally? Is it inside you or outside you, or forever back-and-forthing? How might it explained, if not contained, by modern psychology? How does it relate to the ancient Egyptian ka, the personal gods and goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia and the spiritual twins of the Mandaeans and Manichees, the multiple souls of indigenous cultures?

“Among all the superstitions in Islam, there is none more curious in its origin and character than the belief in the Qarin or Qarina,”, Samuel Zwemer, a Michigan-born early scholar of Islam and Protestant missionary who hoped to convert Egypt. The qarīn is “the double of the individual, his companion, his mate, his familiar demon. The missionary had no doubt about the moral standing of this double: “this evil spirit, which is born with every man, is determined to ruin him, but that the favor of God saves the believer, and that one of the special mercies of heaven for the believer is to behold his companion devil forever in torment.” [1]

The root of the word qarīn is qarn (“horn”) and for each person in the human world there is a counterpart jinni in the realm of jinn. [2] This double was thought to be conceived at the same time as its human. According to al-Ghazali, when a child is born, a qarīn enters its heart, “the way air fills an empty bowl.” In The Niche of Lanterns, a twelfth century collection of hadith, the first cry of an infant is the result of it receiving a jab from its double, invisible to others. From birth on, the double will whisper to the growing child, goading it to follow its whims and indulge its appetites. [3]

Hasan sl-Shamy links Islamic depictions of a qarīn being born at the same time as its human to ancient Egyptian reliefs that show the god Khnum modeling a royal child and its ka simultaneously on his potter’s wheel, so that the two are born together. [4]

Ibn ‘Arabi, the great visionary philosopher, thought the qarīn willl draw the lower self (nafs) into trouble and temptation unless you can tame it and elevate it in what he called the necessary "jihad of the soul". He described the qarin as the veil between a seeker and the divine. Ignorance, denial, and fear of the unknown are the greatest weapons at its disposal. So a qarīn must be subdued with knowledge. Each seeker must convert their doppelganger to Islam, learning the ways of jinn well enough to avoid a qarīn’s traps. Ibn ʿArabī provided instructions on how to summon a qarīn and confront it directly, but his preferred approach was subtler, tempering the soul through study, ritual and correct living. He still set banners flying when he called this life plan the Jihad of the Soul (jihād al-nafs) and the Conquest of the City (fatḥ al-madīna) [5]

The lives of Muslim poets suggest another way of understanding the jinni double: as a muse or creative daimon. Take the case of Kuthayyir 'Azzah. He was born in Medina and died there in 723 after many years in Egypt. He had the ear of caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, was favored by courtiers for his flattering verses, and was no stranger to the charms of women. He became famous for his ghazals, songs of love and longing, often spiked with the absence of the lady he thirsted for, graceful as an antelope, fleeting as a raincloud over the desert - and unfortunately, wed to another man. His poems survive in palaces including the Escorial in Spain.

He was asked, "When did you start reciting poetry?" He replied, "I did not start reciting poetry until it was recited to me." Then he was asked, "And how was that?" He replied, "One day, I was in a place called Ghamin, near Medina. It was noon. 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 seemed to be dragging himself along. 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!' That is how I started reciting poetry." [6]

As for those songs of longing: poets and dreamers know that yearning for a lover who is far away may loosen the soul from the body and launch astral flights. They could easily carry you to the barzakh, the isthmus of imagination “neither of east nor west’”, between known and unknown and between time and eternity, that Ibn ‘Arabi says is a main concourse for the jinn.

In an excellent provocative essay, Lana Nasser suggests possible analogues for the qarin in the bestiaries of consulting rooms - the shadow, the animus or anima. She pulls the stopper from the bottle when she asks, “Where do we go when we sleep? How do we get there? What as the nature of our ‘dreaming body’? Could it be the qarin who - in sleep - travels to imaginal realms, illuminating the psyche’s functioning?” [7]

These are questions that have old age answers from indigenous dreaming traditions, including those of the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula. In sleep dreams (and others) we travel to other worlds, no less real than the ordinary one. We get there by leaving the body or entertaining visitors who are also travelers. Our dreaming body is a subtle vehicle for a part of soul or conscousness that leaves the house of the body in dreams. The qarin may be the member of the house of the self called the “free soul” by anthropologists, though it could be a drop-in.

However, such indigenous answers are lived rather than expressed in categories. We generally have to go to outside observers for language. Thus great Swedish savant and Sanskritist Ernst Arbman (1891-1959), who followed an revised Tylor’s theories of animism, observed that in "primitive" cultures people are not endowed with a single soul but with two and perhaps more. There is a "body soul" that sustains the physical vehicle. It may be divided into vital energy and ego awareness, and associated with blood or breath or specific organs. It dies with the body though some part of its energy may linger, giving rise to the "spook-ghost". Then there is the "free soul" - the "image" or "dream soul" - that leaves the body in dreams and altered states, and survives the death of the physical vehicle. [8]

Arbman cautioned that we can’t really understand the multiple souls of indigenous experience unless we can manage to share that experience: “A correct understanding of the belief in the soul of the ‘primitives’ depends essentially on the extent to which one can live into their way of thinking.” [9] This may apply to any time and any culture. However, we can’t fail to notice rather large doctrinal and reflextive differences between pre-Islamic and Islamic approaches to discerning spirits.

Exorcism of demons - and jinn - is still a well-known recourse in healing in the Muslim world. I. M. Lewis suggests we distinguish between exorcism (expulsion) and adorcism (domestication) of spirits). Where spirit communication follows accepted norms, the spirits - whether called jinn or something else - may avoid being demonized and their friends may escape being accused of witchcraft. [10] Calling in the spirits, in mediumship or possession, was accepted and widely practised in pre-Islamic cultures, so spirits are not demons to be evicted but allies to be cultivated through adorcism, not exorcism. [11]

To know what really goes on in the realms of dreams and jinn, you have to see through the veils.

Lana Nasser tells us that in the world of Islam the realms of jinn and inss [humans] are thought to be separated by “an opaque veil that prevents direct interaction between them”. However, there are those who are said to possess bassar (sight). “Through the grace of God and family lineage the veil is lifted for them.” Not an unmixed blessing. A sheikh in Jordan told Lana this bassar seership is “a gift and a curse at the same time, a gift because it is grace from Allah but a curse because you start carrying around others’ burdens as well as your own.” [12]

What you see or fail to see is conditioned by your level of perception and understanding. The medieval scholastics spoke of adequatio: the need for the perceiver to be adequate to what is before them.

In his masterwork The Meccan Openings, Ibn ‘Arabi wrote about how he saw hidden things and hidden beings including the jinn, in the imaginal bodies they used as travel clothes. In social terms, Ibn ‘Arabi’s encounters with spirits ere of three kinds: only he could see the apparition, or there was a chance others could, or others certainly did. In 1202 Ibn ‘Arabi encountered the spirit of a holy man who had died four centuries before. He now appeared as a beautiful man, who passed through the bodies of other walkers, as a group of the faithful circumambulated the Kaaba in Mecca:

My mind was turned toward him and my eyes were upon him, lest he slip away ... when he had completed his seven turns and wanted to leave, I seized hold of him and greeted him. He returned the greeting and smiled at me. All this time I did not take my gaze off him fearing that he would slip away from me. For I had no doubt that he was an embodied spirit, and I knew that eyesight kept him fixed. [13]

The jinn, however, were slippery. Ibn’Arabi found they would not stay still, would not stay in place:

One embodied himself to me in the earth, another in the air: One embodied himself wherever I was, another embodied himself in heaven. They gave knowledge to me, and I to them, though we were not equal, for I was unchanging in my entity, but they were not able to keep still. They assume the form of every shape, like water taking on the color of the cup.

Shape-shifters and performers, chameleons and tricksters. Is there a part of you, or I, that is anything like that?

References

1. Samuel Zwemer, The Influence of Animism on Islam: An Account of Popular Superstitions. London: Central Board of Missions, 1920.pp. 107, 110

2. Lana Nasser, “The Jinn: Companion in the Realm of Dreams and Imagination” Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity. Eds. Kate Adams, Kelly Bulkeley & Patricia M. Davis. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, p.144.

3.Al-Ghazali, ʾIḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, [The Revival of the Religion of Sciences] vol. 4, 74. Mishkāt al-Maṣābiḥ (Niche of Lanterns) #70.] Cited in Dunja Rašić, Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam and Akbarian Sufism. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2024 p.9.

4.Hasan al-Shamy, “Twins/Zwillinge: A Broader View: A Contribution to Stith Thompson’s Incomplete Motif System—a Case of the Continuation of Pseudoscientific Fallacies.” Humanities 10 (2020) p.17

5. Rašić, Bedeviled p.97

6. Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017) 126-7.

7.Nasser. “The Jinn” p. 151

8.Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185

9.Arbman, Le Monde Oriental, vol 21 (1927) p.81.

10.I.M.Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession.New York: Routledge, 2002 , pp.xiii-xv.

11.See the excellent discussion in Christopher Moreman, “Rehabilitating the Spirituality of Pre-Islamic Arabia: On the Importance of the Kahin, the Jinn, and the Tribal Ancestral Cult” in Journal of Religious History. Vol. 41, no. 2 (June 2017) pp.1-21.

12.Nasser, “The Jinn” p. 146

13.al-Muhyiddin Ibn al‘Arabi, al-Futūhāt al-Makkīya 1V.12.1 trans. in William C. Chittick , Imaginal Worlds: Ibn Al-àrabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994) p. 94]