Legends of the Fire Spirits

I am intrigued by the idea that cats might be jinn.

Here is a review I wrote of a book about jinn. It is by Robert Lebling with a foreword by Tahir Shah and is called Legends of the Fire Spirits.

How do you write for sceptical westerners about things, beings or forces so subtle they are undetectable by ordinary human senses and, until now, by scientific instruments? Robert Lebling has done just that, undeterred by the risk of incurring ridicule from those of us unwilling to concede that there is much we still do not understand; but who saw Osama bin Laden as the embodiment of evil clashing with good in the form of Barack Obama; and the marriage of Kate Middleton to Prince William as the union of a mortal with a supernatural being.

‘Jinn’ is a word derived from an Arabic root which means to ‘conceal’ or ‘cover with darkness’; but the darkness is not total. The spirits created by God from smokeless fire can take on the features of any living being they desire apart from those of a prophet or imam, but when they interact with humans, who are more dense and made from clay, there is an energy change. Robert Lebling has searched for these energy bursts in pre-Islamic writing, the Koran, the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed), folktales, history, European literature, the Internet and the writing of maverick scientists. With time and space compressed a picture emerges, fashioned from metaphor and legend.

Although Jinn are physically fundamentally different from familiar living creatures, we see a race similar to us in many ways, sharing our emotions of envy, love, hatred, fear resentment, anger. Some Jinn are helpful to mankind. Others are powerful and malicious. From them humans have found it necessary to devise forms of protection, and not just in Muslim countries. Here in the West people wear blessed medals, bless themselves with holy water and put sprigs of conifer, blessed on Palm Sunday, behind pictures as protection against evil spirits.

It wasn’t until after I started to read this book for the second time that I really appreciated how extraordinary it is. It deserves to be read for several reasons. Besides being entertaining it provides, as Tahir Shah writes in his introduction, ‘a window into Arab and Islamic society that is usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam.’ By gazing through this window with an open mind we may discover something useful. Spiritual forces, whether we call them Jinn or not, whether they are material entities, a form of electromagnetic radiation, thoughts, or none of these, are complex and inescapable. Robert Lebling concludes that we may never really understand them, but ‘we can understand how they affect us, and how we respond to them and how we interact with each other as we try to deal with them.’