The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Jinn Lore

  THE OCCIDENT HAS NEVER FOUND it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.

  Although descended from an Oriental family with its roots in the mountain fortress of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, I had been born and brought up in the West. I thought I knew the East. After all, I was well accustomed from childhood to understand the finer points of Arab etiquette, and I had been taught its tales, gleaned from Alf Layla wa Layla, A Thousand and One Nights.

  That fabulous treasury of stories had introduced me early on to the extraordinary possibilities of a world peopled by invisible legions of Jinn. So when we came to live at Dar Khalifa, the Caliph’s House, I felt as if nothing could surprise me.

  How wrong I was.

  From the first moment that we crossed the threshold, I realized that I was way out of my depth. The house had been empty for almost a decade. Whereas in the West an empty home might appeal to squatters, in the East there is a danger of quite a different kind. The unlawful occupants of our new home were not human, but superhuman.

  The guardians who came with the property, as if through some mediaeval right sale, warned us from the outset that there was extreme danger all around. When I declared that we would be moving into the house right away to supervise the renovations, they laughed nervously – until that is they realized I was serious. Terrified, contorted expressions then swept across their faces, and they begged us to leave post haste.

  The Jinn would not take kindly to intruders, they told me. For in the years that the house had been empty, it had become their home. Dare to trespass and they might kill us, the leader of the guardians declared. Irritated, yet willing to go along with them for the sake of respecting local sensitivities, I asked what to do. The chief guardian, whose name was Osman, swept his out arms wide, and yelled: ‘You must hold an exorcism!’

  Back in London I would have had no idea where to find an exorcist, let alone a troop of them. But Morocco is very different. It may be perched in Africa’s North West’s corner, just eight miles from the gates of Europe, but in many ways it is the deepest, darkest Orient.

  And that is what is so appealing about it.

  I asked around and, very soon, found myself in the old imperial city of Mèknes. According to all my informants it was the centre of exorcists. And they were right. A few minutes after my arrival I was offered dozens of exorcists from the Aissawa brotherhood. I negotiated a price for twenty, and the exorcist dealer threw in a further four of them for free. The only catch was that I was obliged to pay in advance.

  A day or so later I arrived home and was greeted by the guardians’ long looks. The Jinn were already exacting their revenge, they told me. A dead cat had been found in the garden with its head cut off. A tree had fallen in the wind and broken a window. And the maid, hired to look after our baby son, had run off screaming for no reason at all. I held out a hand at arms length and whispered confidently, ‘Have no fear, the exorcists are coming.’

  The guardians perked up.

  They asked when exactly the visitors would arrive.

  I shrugged.

  ‘They’ll come when they are ready,’ I said.

  My wife insisted I was mad to have handed over wads of money to exorcists I didn’t know. She said she could hear them all the way in Mèknes, howling with laughter.

  A day passed, then another.

  I kicked myself to having been so ingenuous as to pay in advance. But then at that moment I heard the wild, whooping sound of men in high spirits, against a backdrop of grinding noise. A huge cement truck was inching its way down our lane. On the back were riding the exorcists, as if on some infernal chariot. I pointed at them and grinned, and the guardians grinned too.

  Through days and nights the Aissawa wreaked their terrible work.

  They slaughtered and skinned a goat at what they said was the heart of the house. As the person obliged to purchase the animal, I found myself naturally interested in how its execution would feature in the cleansing of my home of supernatural elements. When stripped of its skin, the carcass was beheaded, and its gallbladder swallowed by one of the group. The others slit open its belly and rifled through the organs, which gleamed like jewels in the candlelight.

  One of the Aissawa then poured milk in all corners of the house, and another did the same with blood. Drums beat, and high-pitched homemade oboes wailed. The drumming grew faster and faster as the night wore on. And as it did so, the exorcists stepped into another plane, a kind of twilight zone of their own imagination.

  They cut their wrists with knives and drank their own blood, then collapsed on the ground in trance. Yet more massed in a dark, damp room at the far end of the house. They barricaded themselves inside, killed chickens and drank more blood.

  And all the while the drums beat and the oboes shrieked. I wondered if the walls would tumble down as they had done in Jericho.

  I whispered sternly to the Aissawa leader that they could leave. He laughed, a wild hearty laugh, and I swear his eyes flashed red with fire. He would only quit our home, he said, when the Jinn had been sucked out of the walls and swallowed. I explained that my wife was growing impatient, and was uncomfortable at having the walls and floor strewn with freshly purged blood. The leader of the exorcists caught my glance in his. Widening his eyes in the most terrifying manner, he told me that he had never been in a house so consumed with evil spirits.

  Then he asked for more money, and for another goat.

  The next day, after brokering a deal which involved a handful of crisp hundred-dirham notes, the exorcists clambered aboard the cement truck. They rolled back down the lane and through the shanty-town to the open road. My wife gave me one of those looks that instilled pure fear. I bragged out loud that the house was now squeaky clean, that the last thing we ever needed to worry about again were Jinn.

  In the years since, I have found myself living in a country where the belief in these normally invisible spirits is complete and unshakable. Jinn are described in the Qur’an, and they are a part of life for all God-fearing Muslims in Morocco and across the Islamic world. The Qur’an tells us that when God created Man from clay, he created a second race of beings – Jinn – from ‘smokeless fire’. Jinn are not ghosts, that is they are not spirits of the dead. Far from it. They are living entities just like us. They are born, get married, and die just like humans. Some are good and others bad, some ugly, while others are radiantly beautiful.

  Indeed, there are many tales of mortal men being wooed by the charms of voluptuous women, only to realize later that they are not human, but Jinn. The difference between us and them is that they have magical powers, and can decide when to be visible and when not. They can fly through the air, change their form, and are capable of magical feats of the most extraordinary kind.

  The nineteenth century’s fascination with The Arabian Nights saw the deeds and misdeeds of Jinn enter Victorian drawing-rooms. The creatures slipped into Western communal folklore through the tales of Aladdin, Sindbad and others, mixed in with epic quests, treasure, flying carpets and enchanted lands. And through the endless adaptations for children, and all the Hollywood renditions, Jinn became known to us all.

  But gone was the Oriental imagery – the sly, ferocious race that lives among us, replaced by a comic jumble of towering, yet quite loveable creatures, who go by the name of ‘genies’.

  Anyone who’s spent any time in the Arab world, knows the difference between Hollywood’s depiction and that which is found embedded deep in local culture.

  Living in a country like Morocco, where belief in Jinn is all-pervasive, provides situations such as the ones we faced at the Caliph’s House. It brings an extraordinary level of cultural possibility that simply doesn’t exist in the Occidental world. Imagine it: that all around you there may be invisible spirits, sitting, standing, laughing, chatting, cackling, crouching on the floor. Some of them are minute, while others tower hundreds of feet
into the air. The more you think about it, and live with it, the more appealing the idea of Jinn becomes. And the longer you live in a place where everyone believes, the more you find yourself believing, too.

  Long before I moved to Morocco, I had searched for a readable book about Jinn and their world. But there wasn’t one. When I asked friends who were scholars in Islamic culture and tradition, they recommended barely readable texts written by academics for academics. Years passed. Then, through a kind of magic that was from the realm of Jinn themselves, Robert Lebling contacted me out of the blue. He spoke of a work, a great labour of love, which would reveal to the West all it needed to know about Jinn.

  My prayers had been answered.

  The boundaries of Lebling’s work surpassed by wildest dreams. The books’ scope exceeds simply listing stories of Jinn taken from Islamic texts and Arab folklore.

  Lebling has left no stone unturned in his enquiry, roaming through traditional Eastern literature as well as the modern media, in search of anything which gives us a better understanding of Jinn and their world. The result is a truly extraordinary masterwork, a treasury within itself that can be consulted at random, dipped into as a bedside book, or read from cover to cover in a fabulous feast for the imagination and the enquiring mind.

  Through its pages, we learn that the belief in Jinn is certainly Pre-Islamic, and that there are various distinct forms of these creatures. The Qur’an devotes an entire Sura to them, a form of life that is inextricably linked to the cultural and religious tapestry of Arab and Islamic lands.

  Lebling details clearly how followers of Islam perceive the realm of Jinn, what the Prophet Mohammed said about them, and how regional and geographic divide has shaped them within local culture. An entire section is devoted to the study and appreciation of Jinn by geographic location – through Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, to Arabia and Palestine, Turkey, Iraq and Iran; as well as through Nigeria, Malaysia, Zanzibar and beyond.

  We learn that the Arabic word for ‘crazy’ – Majnun – comes from the same root as the word ‘Jinn’, suggesting that a deranged person is possessed in some way. And that Jinn are believed to lurk in wells and lavatories, in addition to their haunting empty buildings, such as our home. Space is given to King Solomon, the one human who could control Jinn through the magical ring he wore.

  And Lebling describes the extraordinary encounters between those of us created from clay and the others, shaped from smokeless fire. These include examples of humans whom have married Jinn unwittingly, and others such as the fourteenth century Moroccan magician, Muhammad ibn al-Hajj al-Tilimsani, whose work Suns of Lights and Treasures of Secrets, provides a spell for anyone wishing to seduce the daughter of the White King of the Jinn.

  Legends of the Fire Spirits provides a transparent window into Arab and Islamic society that is more usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam. The subject is one known to Muslims, embracing a belief that stands at the heart of the Islamic faith: but one that until now has been largely misrepresented and misunderstood in the West.

  As for life at the Caliph’s House, all is not well.

  One of the guardians recently almost severed his hand while sharpening an axe in the garden. Then, last week, the maid tripped and cut her foot badly, and on the same day the swimming pool turned an eerie shade of yellowy-green.

  The guardians have been imploring me to hold another exorcism. The very thought of it fills me with anxiety. Most of all, I don’t know how I’ll break it to my wife. But, as all my friends assure me, everyone knows that even the best exorcism has to be renewed once in a while.

  N.B. Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar, by Robert Leibling, I.B. Tauris 2010.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jma el Fna

  PLAYED OUT AGAINST a backdrop of vibrant cultural colour, the late Marrakech afternoon is like nothing else on Earth.

  The souqs are packed with bargains, bustle, and with people cloaked in hooded jelaba robes. Stacked up are bundles of wool carpets from the High Atlas, dazzling brass trays inscribed with the names of God, baskets of dried damask roses, mounds of pungent incense and sulphur, and endless shops, each one crammed with treasure from the remotest reaches of the desert.

  For all the wonders of the medina though, it’s the great square of Jma el Fna that I find the most tantalizing spot of all. It lies at the heart of real Marrakech, the city of snake charmers, the crème de la crème of the Exotic East.

  Most people hurry across it fast. Pause too long and you’re sure to be sucked in deep. But to me that’s the true magic… being pulled down through the layers like a man floundering on the ocean waves. Allow yourself to be free, and you glimpse the many facets of this mesmerizing stew of humanity.

  The Halka: A circle of people stands in the darkness, shoulders pressed together tight, necks craning forward for a view… a great green parasol looming over them, and me as I push in closer. The outside world gradually fades away and then…is shut out. The sense of anticipation growing, palpable and electric.

  I’m being sucked in… through the rows of onlookers to the source of this frenzied, primal rhythm. I’m descending back through time… to when this place, Jma el Fna, was no more than an oasis in the desert. Suddenly, I break into the centre of the circle, walled by shadows and men’s faces, illuminated by the jolting, jarring flame of a gas-lamp. It’s like the meeting of a secret fraternity.

  In the middle of the halka – the circle of souls – leaps the riotous silhouette of a man, a violin grasped tight in his hand, the crowd gripped by the wild strains of his instrument. As he turns into the light, I catch his features… bearded, tight curly hair, smiling eyes upturned to the stars. Raw, energetic, hypnotic… a Moroccan Jimi Hendrix, a Berber master musician.

  First Impressions: Anyone who’s ever been to Marrakech remembers the first time they stepped onto the frenetic expanse of Jma el Fna. For me it was a searing afternoon back in June ’71. I was four years old. My fingers were pressed tight in my father’s hand, my eyes blinking in the dazzling light.

  Despite the heat, the square was crowded beyond belief. There were snake charmers and tumbling acrobats, medicine men in Toureg robes, blind men and water-sellers, madmen and doped out hippies crouching in the shade.

  Stumbling forward through the waves of people, I was mesmerized. It was as if every man, woman, and child on Earth was right there. A seething stew of humanity set in random motion.

  Watching over it all like a sentinel – the minaret of Jma el Fna itself, the mosque of the annihilation, the mosque of eternity, the mosque at the end of the world.

  Over the years, and especially since I moved to Morocco, I have returned to Marrakech again and again, and always find myself crisscrossing the square, usually heading for shade of the ancient medina, whose twisting lanes stretch out behind it in a great secret labyrinth.

  Soaking it up: My father used to say that the only way to absorb the atmosphere was to close your eyes. ‘Listen to the sounds that go unnoticed,’ he would tell me, ‘and breathe in the smells that the nostrils try to filter out… concentrate, and the reality will reveal itself.’

  It’s a lesson that’s never failed me. And whenever I venture into Jma el Fna, I do as he suggested, and find myself transported to a space on the edge of the imagination, a cross-section of medieval Morocco that’s as real today as it’s ever been… but one whose true form is truly elusive.

  Facts and figures: My father, who was from Afghanistan, would scowl when I would ask for facts and figures… when I begged to be told how big the square was, or when it was laid out.

  ‘You’ve been brainwashed by the West,’ he would say. ‘To understand Jma el Fna you must cut away Occidental thinking, release your mind, and absorb the place from the inside out.’

  Zigzag: For my father, the zigzag approach was the only way to understand something. ‘Throw yourself in at the deep end,’ he would say, ‘run free, bouncing around like a b
illiard ball on the baize, and you’ll build up an accurate picture, a little at a time.’

  Forty years later, and I’m back in the middle of the square, ready to step out, to zigzag. I’m itching to feel the waves of energy, to seek out the invisible, and to hear the sounds that are muffled to even the sharpest ears.

  Day/Night: Just like the halkas, the circles of joy and entertainment, which are born and die through the day and the night, Jma el Fna is a place without a beginning or an end. It’s a circle of life, with its peaks and lulls, enacted from the first rays of dawn to the last strains of night.

  Every day. Every night.

  Fishing for drinks: Every time I visit the square there’s something new, a display of fresh ingenuity. This time it’s the man over there with scarred hands and a limp. For the last half hour he’s been laying out spiraling rows of plastic bottles, warm fizzy drinks. Everyone’s wondering what’s going on. He’s already pulling a crowd and he’s not even begun.

  Jma el Fna is all about picquing the crowd’s curiosity, and one way to do that is to keep them guessing. When they can’t stand it any longer, he unfurls a clutch of homemade fishing rods, long bamboo staves, dangling strings with what look like curtain rings on the ends. The local preoccupation with fizzy drinks, and eagerness for a bargain, has made it an instant success.

  Secret Police: Everyone says that the square’s crawling with secret police. Like a separate group of invisible performers, they’re masters of disguise, watching every hand, purse and pocket. The entertainers, healers, and food sellers all claim to know who’s who. But they’re not telling me. It’s one of many secrets here, I suppose, I’ll have to decipher for myself.

  Tourists: The tourists stick out because of their pasty white skin and their clothing, but most of all because of the way they reel forwards between the halkas, enthralled by it all. Some of them are grinning, others scowling, all clicking photos instead of watching what’s really going on.

  It’s as if they’re desperate to penetrate what is a secret society. Some of them think they’ve actually done it, that they’ve been accepted into the folds. But they never quite manage. They’re oil on the water. And although they can get mixed up for a moment, they separate out as they’re washed forward through the crowds.