Familiar spirits in the Qurʾān: retracing the origins of the jinn
The fact that the Qur 'an made no attempt to introduce the jinn suggests that its initial audience was already familiar with them in some way. Yet it remains unclear as to who this audience was, what preconceptions they might have had, and whence they derived them. Scholarship on this problem h...
| Subtitles: | Theme section / Sezione monografica: Angels, watchers, giants reimagined in early Judaism, Christianity and Islam |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Ed. Morcelliana
2019
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| In: |
Henoch
Year: 2019, Volume: 41, Issue: 2, Pages: 243-261 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Jinn
/ Koran
/ Islam
/ Demon
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| IxTheo Classification: | BJ Islam HB Old Testament |
| Summary: | The fact that the Qur 'an made no attempt to introduce the jinn suggests that its initial audience was already familiar with them in some way. Yet it remains unclear as to who this audience was, what preconceptions they might have had, and whence they derived them. Scholarship on this problem has tended to assume that the early audience of the Qur 'an knew about the jinn from pre-existing beliefs held by the polytheistic Arab tribes, as reflected in the so-called pre-Islamic corpus of poetry. Thus, the scholarly debate has focused on the assumed shift from the autochthonous cult of the jinn to the strict monotheistic message of Islam. However, this line of argument is circular. given the fact that the "pre-Islamic" corpus shows signs of subsequent influence and redaction from the Qur 'an itself ff the polytheistic Arab tribes were as familiar with the jinn as claimed by modern scholarship, then this would certainly be reflected in the abundant references to spiritual beings in he epigraphic and apotropaic sources in the Semitic languages that can be reliably dated prior to the Qur 'an. But the opposite is the case: there seems to be no awareness of the jinn as such in these sources. So one must look elsewhere for the pre-Qur 'anic origins of the jinn. By comparing the Qur 'anic profile of the jinn with contemporaneous Jewish and Christian scriptural traditions in the broadest sense, one may recognize a number of thematic continuities with an ambivalent class of spiritual beings presented in certain retellings of the book of Genesis, especially the Book of Jubilees, which was translated into Ethiopic no later than the seventh century CE. Such traditions, whether indirect or direct, were evidently familiar to Ethiopic-speaking Christians around the time the Qur 'an was promulgated, and probably Syriac-speaking Christians as well, although this is less certain. Therefore, it is likely that the Qur 'an was invoking related traditions that must have been familiar to "the People of the Book" and their milieux. |
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| ISSN: | 0393-6805 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Henoch
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