While the term fairy goes back only to the Middle Ages in Europe, analogues to these beings in varying forms appear in both written and oral literature, from the Sanskrit gandharva (semidivine celestial musicians) to the nymphs of Greek mythology and Homer, the jinni of Arabic mythology, and similar folk characters of the Samoans, of the Arctic peoples, and of other indigenous Americans.
Oral tradition, however, which is still very much alive, makes Mamar (Muḥammad's popular name) out to be Sonni ʿAlī's nephew, his sister Kasey's son by a jinni, a supernatural being.
Even today, according to oral tradition, Muḥammad appears as a jinni, who either took after his father or after those with whom, by a special gift, he was able to consult during his pilgrimage to Mecca.
In Islāmic theology, Iblīs is described as an angel, a jinn (spiritual creature capable of good or evil), or an angel who was the leader of the jinni.
And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the great-grandchildren of Dunia's great-grandchildren climbed onto ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were.
Why is a jinni drawn to a man whose fundamental beliefs should deny her existence?
People also said that Ibn Rushd brought her a lamp with a jinni in it, and the jinni was the father of the children born after he left her — so we see how easily rumor turns things upside down!
Your story in this week's issue, "The Duniazát," tells the story of a love affair between Ibn Rushd and Dunia, a jinni posing as a young woman.
She undertakes a quest to recover a witch's spoon stolen by an evil marquess and picks up a band of oddball friends along the way: a wyvern (like a dragon, but not), a marid (a sea jinni from Arabic folklore), a lantern that communicates by burning letters into its own panels.
The sometimes slow pace picks up considerably as the disparate characters decipher the past and try to save the souls variously threatened by the golem and the jinni, as well as by the Jewish conjurer and (surprise) a Syrian wizard.
Both are sleepless; both quickly find lodging and employment and receive names from the humans who accept their true natures — the golem is known as Chava, or "life"; the jinni is Ahmad.
