Forget the singing blue cartoon, the three wishes, and the brass lamp. In the tradition this episode explores, humans were molded from clay while the jinn were forged from smokeless fire. We begin with the Semitic root J-N-N, meaning to hide or conceal, and the web of Arabic words it produces: majnun for the possessed, janin for the embryo, and janna for the hidden garden of paradise. In pre-Islamic Arabia these chthonic powers were worshipped privately, and nomadic tribes like the Banu Hanifa called out at dusk to seek refuge with the master jinn of a valley before sleeping.

We then trace the theological earthquake of Islam, which neither eradicated nor demonized the jinn but integrated them as a parallel civilization with free will, mentioned 29 times in the Quran including a chapter named for them. Islamic jurists debated whether a human ...