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📌Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Shi'a Appendix Iv a Note On the Jinn Seyyed Hossein Nasr One of the least understood aspects of Islamic teachings in the modern world concerns that class of beings called the jinn and referred to several times in the Quran. The reason for misunder standing comes from the post-Cartesian materialistic conception of the Universe, which excludes the subtle and psychic world, where in fact the beings called jinn belong in the traditional schemes of cosmology.

To understand the meaning of jinn one must therefore go beyond a conception of reality which includes only the world of matter and the mind (this paralyzing dualism which makes an understanding of traditional doctrines impossi ble) to an awareness of a hierarchic reality made up of the three worlds of spirit, psyche, and matter. The jinn can then be identified as beings that belong to the psychic or intermediary world, the barzakh, situated between this world and the world of pure Spirit.

In Quranic terminology and the hadith literature the jinn are usually coupled with ins or mankind and often the phrase al-jinn wa'l-ins (the jinn and men) is used as referring to that class of creatures to which God's commands and prohibitions address themselves. Man was made of clay into which God breathed (nafakha) His Spirit. The jinn in Islamic doctrines are that group of creatures which was made of fire rather than earth, and into which God also breathed His Spirit.

Hence like man they possess a spirit and consciousness and have Divine commands revealed to them. on their own level of existence they are central creatures just as men are central creatures in this world. But in contrast to men they possess a volatile and "unfixed" outer form and so can take on many shapes. This means that they are essentially crea tures of the psychic rather than the physical world and that they can appear to man in different forms and shapes.

Having been endowed with a spirit, the jinn, like men, possess responsibility before God. Some are "religious" and "Muslim. These are intermediate angels, the psychic forces that can lead man from the physical to the spiritual world through the labyrinth of thc intermediate world or barzakh. others are malefic forces that have rebelled against God. in the same way that some men rebel against the Divinity.

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