Whothejinnare—creation,meaningoftheword,andwhattheybelieve

Before anything can be said about possession, ruqyah or protection, it helps to know who the jinn are, because the Quran and Sunnah speak about them plainly, and because so much folklore has grown around them that the sober, scriptural picture often gets lost.

Allah created the jinn and mankind for the same purpose: to worship Him alone. Because the two worlds touch each other in so many areas of life, the scholars held that a Muslim should know something about the world of the jinn, just as he knows something about the world of people.

What the word “jinn” means

In Arabic, the root j-n-n means to cover or to hide. A whole family of words grows from it, and every one of them carries the idea of something concealed:

The jinn are named on the same pattern: they are hidden from our sight. The singular is jinnī, and the Quran also calls them jinnah and jānn.

A working definition

The jinn are hidden beings with the ability to take many different forms. They are a separate world from the world of human beings, but they share with us intellect, and the free choice between the path of good and the path of evil. The jinn are not a force of nature or a metaphor. They are accountable creatures, like us.

Some orientalist scholars have argued about the origin of the word itself (whether it is originally Arabic, borrowed, or an ancient Semitic word), because belief in the jinn is older than Islam and was known among the ancient Semitic peoples and others. Islam did not invent the jinn; it corrected what people believed about them.

What the jinn are created from

The Quran states their origin directly:

Ibn ‘Abbas explained the mārij as the tip of the flame, its purest and most intense part. Ibn Mas‘ud is reported to have said that the scorching heat of this world is one seventieth of the samūm from which the jinn were created, and ‘Amr ibn Dinar said: from the fire of the sun (both cited in Tafsir Ibn Kathir). The Prophet ﷺ set out the three origins side by side:

The jinn are accountable, like us

Allah relates that a group of jinn were turned towards the Prophet ﷺ to listen to the Quran, and when it was finished, “they went back to their people as warners”, saying: “O our people, respond to the Caller of Allah and believe in him; He will forgive you your sins and protect you from a painful punishment” (Sūrat al-Aḥqāf 46:29–31). The scholars take this as proof that the jinn are commanded to believe in the message of Muhammad ﷺ just as human beings are. They will be rewarded and punished; a whole chapter heading in Sahih al-Bukhari is devoted to “the mention of the jinn, their reward and their punishment”.

What the jinn believe

The jinn are as religiously varied as human beings. The source states it plainly: among them are Muslims, and among them are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Shiites, atheists, disbelievers and sinners. The Quran reports the jinn describing themselves:

Ibn ‘Abbas explained the verse: among us is the believer and among us is the disbeliever. Ibn Taymiyyah said: they follow all sorts of ways — Muslims and disbelievers, people of the Sunnah and people of innovation.

This strips the subject of its horror-film colouring. The jinn are not all devils. Most have nothing to do with us. Some are righteous believers. The ones who harass and harm people are the wicked among them (the shayāṭīn), and everything on this site about protection and ruqyah is aimed at those, not at a whole hidden species.