Solomon's Servants, and the Western Genie

Around this scriptural core grew a large body of tradition and story. Some jinn are pious, others, the shaytan, and the more powerful ifrit and marid, are malevolent; hadith and folk practice offer protections against them, and the theme of jinn possession and its treatment persists in popular Islam. The Quran and later legend make jinn subject to the prophet-king Solomon, who commands them to build and to dive for pearls, a motif that fed directly into the Thousand and One Nights, where a jinni sealed in a brass vessel by Solomon's seal is released after centuries. It was through translations of the Nights, above all Antoine Galland's early-eighteenth-century French version, that the being reached Europe as the "genie", a name that is really the Latin genius pressed into service for the Arabic jinni, and the wish-granting lamp-spirit of Western entertainment is a considerable simplification of a being that Islamic theology treats with entire seriousness.