Thread by @afzaque

So, on the question of 🧞‍♂️ sex with jinn! I swear, NOT a topic I particularly care for or know much about, but here's a few quick references from memory since it has come up:

As noted here in this tweet today, believe it or not, this was indeed a matter of some concern and even learned debate in medieval thought:

Back in the day, I happened to post something about this once that became the most-read thing on a blog. Partly because—I kid you not—people were searching on Google about getting it on with them genies, landing on my page, and posting absurd comments like this:

In any case, though I haven't bothered checking citations, apparently the majority of medieval Muslim scholars who considered this question (including Ibn al-Jawzī, Ibn Taymiyya, Suyūṭī et al), thought that sexual encounter between jinns and humans was possible.

On the other hand, al-Māwardī was apparently of the minority opinion that jinn mating with human beings is a logical impossibility, because the ‘corporeal’ and ‘incorporeal’ cannot mix.

I first encountered the topic entirely randomly, through this brief mention in Robert Irwin's companion volume on the Arabian Nights

Perhaps the most interesting bit here is the point of fiqh, given the question of ritual washing (ghusl) that technically arises from the prospect of such intercourse.

Unfortunately, Irwin doesn't consult the primary sources directly but relies on other secondary litearture, in this case Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s classic but problematic book, Sexuality in Islam (French original 1975, English translation 1985).

In this case, however, it turns out that Irwin simplifies and thereby misrepresents the quotation that Bouhdiba cites from Fatawa-e-Alamgiri (the landmark 17th century compendium of Ḥanafī law named after its Mughal patron, the emperor Aurangzeb).

Here's how Bouhdiba paraphrases the source text (in the English translation): “If a woman recognizes that she has a djinn [as lover] who visits her and makes her feel what she feels when her husband lies with her, this woman does not have to wash.”

As you can see, the language here is rather interesting, and deserves looking at in the original. To translate more literally, the text says: "if a woman says: I have a jinn who comes to me and I find myself as I do when my husband has intercourse with me..."

Hopefully I don't need to spell out the intriguing nuances here, and the kinds of plausible situations being imagined! But note also how this discussion is overtly gendered, and I'm not sure if the fiqh literature entertains similar questions for human men with female jinns 🧞‍♀️

It seem that at least in popular mythology, seductive female jinns entrapping men is a fairly common trope. More on that by @aaolomi here:

N.B. the classical authority being cited above for the ruling (that ghusl is not required in such a scenario) is Raḍī al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī (d. 571/1175), a leading Ḥanafī jurist who taught in Aleppo and died in Damascus—not to be confused with the other more famous Sarakhsī.

Lastly, as I've realized thanks to the expertise of @aaolomi (see his epic typology of spirits!), my knowledge of jinn amounts to practically nothing—so please go ask him all your questions! But in this case, maybe NOT ask @MENALibAHS for pics on above? 😬