An Early Modern Arabic Treatise on Jinns

How a newly discovered tale from the Caucasus reveals the diversity of premodern Islam

The black king of the jinns (known as al-Malik al-Aswad), from the early 15th-century Kitāb al-Bulhān (Book of Wonders) (Oxford University).

From the early medieval period until well into the 20th century, literary production across the northern Caucasus — a region comprising Daghestan, as well as Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Circassia to the west — took place overwhelmingly in Arabic-script literatures. The same was true throughout the Muslim world, from Spain to the Balkans to Africa, where Arabic-script literatures that were written in vernacular languages were known as ajami.

In the domain of prose, most short analytical writing fell under the heading of risala, an Arabic term that can be translated as “treatise,” “essay,” or “epistle” depending on the context and content. Narrative literature pertained to historical writing (tarikh) in one way or another. The writing of risalas flourished throughout the post-classical and early modern literatures of the Islamic world.

Manuscript pages from the 17th century Risala al-jinn (Epistle on jinns), discovered in Daghestan.

One particularly compelling work of Arabic prose from the Caucasus is the recently-discovered seventeenth-century Treatise on Jinns (Risala al-jinn) by Muhammad b. Umar al-Daghestani…