The Djinn: Spirits of Smokeless Fire, Between Angels and Humans in Islamic Cosmology
Jinn of the Air — Seljuk arts, 12th–13th century CE. The medieval Islamic visual tradition gave jinn the form of winged humanoid beings with fierce faces and complex, swirling bodies: creatures of movement, of air and fire, of a nature halfway between the human and the angelic. In the Islamic conception of creation, the universe contains three distinct orders of rational beings: angels ( malā'ika ), made of light, wholly obedient to God, without free will; humans ( ins ), made of clay, with free will, born into a physical world they must navigate toward or away from the divine; and jinn — made of smokeless fire ( nār al-samūm ), possessing free will, invisible to ordinary human perception, inhabiting the world alongside humans but not quite of the human world. The jinn (singular: jinnī , often transliterated as djinn or genie in English) are neither angels nor demons, though they can be aligned with either divine service or with opposition to it. They are the third ord...