Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn

Amira El-Zein is a scholar of Islamic studies, and this academic book, published by Syracuse University Press, examines the jinn, the class of beings recognized in Islamic cosmology alongside humans and angels, tracing their treatment across the Quran, hadith and later Islamic intellectual and popular tradition. Its strength is bringing together theological, philosophical and folkloric sources on the jinn that are often treated separately, showing how a genuinely canonical concept also generated a rich popular tradition around it. Its limit is that popular belief about jinn varies considerably across different Muslim majority regions and cultures, and the book's synthesis, while grounded in textual sources, cannot fully capture every regional variant of jinn belief and practice.