On a moonlit night, its walled Persian quarter has a fairy-tale charm but to anyone with a vivid imagination, it often seems that a jinn or fallen angel lurks in the shadows.If Baku's atmosphere seems charged, that is mainly because of the liquid that oozes from the earth and lends its odour to the blustery wind.
All these misfortunes are made clear when a sheikh explains that a malignant jinn is making love to her at night.
King Solomon, a great magician, cast a spell on the jinn and set them to work building temples and pools.
She believes him and, to evict the jinn, she lies flat on the floor for hours with the Koran playing into her ears.
The insults fly: "You are even ugly in the dark," a jinn tells Um Khammas.
Much of the religious life of the tribal Arabs had the characteristics of small-group, or "primitive," religion, including the sacralization of group-specific natural objects and phenomena and the multifarious presence of spirit beings, known among the Arabs as jinn.
Considered female by the ancients, the ghūl was often confused with the sílā, also female; the sílā, however, was a witchlike species of jinn, immutable in shape.
The rare appearance of the term ifrit in the Qurʾān (the sacred scripture of Islam) and in Hadith (narratives recounting Muhammad's words, actions, or approbations) is always in the phrase "the ifrit of the jinn" and probably means "rebellious".
The chronicler Mahmud Kati, who accompanied Muḥammad, wrote in Taʾrīkh al-fattāsh that the jinn of Mecca had had Muḥammad named caliph and had told him what his rights were over the former vassal groups of the Sonnis.
The activities of the supernatural beings known as jinn, however, are acknowledged even by official Islam, besides being prominent in popular belief (as in The Thousand and One Nights); and other mythological themes, for example motifs relating to the end of time (eschatology), also figure in Islamic religion, above all in its Shīʾite form.
Somali mythology dates to pre-Islamic times and includes belief in jinn, supernatural spirits, and ghouls (ghūls), treacherous shape-changing spirits, who are said to inhabit significant features of the landscape, including wells, crossroads, and burial grounds.
