Historicizing Ontologies: Qur'ānic Preternatural Creatures between Ancient Topoi and Emerging Traditions

Abstract

This article investigates the ontology and taxonomy of the Qur'ānic jinn and their relationship with liminal creatures of ancient and late antique times. Echoes of pagan and scriptural traditions are traceable in the merging of jinn and shayṭān (plural: shayāṭīn) in the Qur'ān, as exemplified by the Qur'ānic version of the Solomonic Cycle. While the jinn were Arabian preternatural beings largely corresponding to the demons of pre-Islamic pagan and Jewish literature, the shayāṭīn gained popularity in Eurasian Late Antiquity after the spread of New Testament literature and plausibly reached Arabia via Ge'ez sources. Influenced by Jewish-Christian debates, the Islamic profession of faith based on the tawḥīd (oneness of God) perfected the pre-Islamic system of belief of the "associators" who believed in a henotheistic God as well as in lesser divine creatures. Therefore, I argue that preternatural creatures were very much a feature of the pre-Islamic Arabian milieu, but that they gradually lost ground to external scriptural influences at the dawn of Islam. Although the liminal jinn were at first shrewdly remodeled to serve the strictly hierarchical Qur'ānic cosmology, they were later expunged from Muḥammad's prophecy, being replaced by the scriptural shayṭān.