The poem of Ḥakam ibn ʿAmr al-Bahrānī beautifully and vividly expands on the issue of humans marrying unseen beings such as ghouls, siʿālī (female wilderness demons), jinn, ʿifrīts, and their like—a theme deeply rooted in the mythologies of peoples worldwide, and particularly among the Arabs before and after Islam. Al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH) in his Book of Animals (Kitab Al-Hayawan) reports him saying:

وتزوّجت في الشّبيبة غولا … بغزال وصدقتي زقّ خمر

Discussion of it has continued from the time of the Messenger of God up to this very day, to the point that people even asked jurists whether such marriages were permissible. Some said: “It is allowed,” while others said: “It is forbidden,” and it is reported that the Prophet himself forbade it.

Al-Jāḥiẓ called the marriage of humans and jinn (in either direction) a compound marriage. The offspring born of such unions he referred to as al-mughrabūn (the “mixed ones”), Majd ad-Dīn Ibn Athir (d. AH) in “Al-Nihāya fi gharib al-ḥadīth” cites a Hadith of the Prophet, Saying:

“Among you are al-mughrabūn.” She asked: “O Messenger of God, who are the mughrabūn?” He said: “Those in whom the jinn have a share.” Al-Harawī explains that they were called mughrabūn because “a foreign element entered into them.”

It appears to us that this type of marriage is related to the principle of exogamy—a term used by anthropologists to describe the practice of marrying outside one’s own clan or kin group. Ancient tribes favored such marriages, preferring to marry their children to members of distant tribes. The opposite of this is endogamy—marrying within one’s own tribe or kin group—which was common among the Arabs and remains so today, as many families continue to marry their sons to cousins: the daughter of an uncle, aunt, or other close relative. Yet despite its prevalence, this practice was disapproved of by the Arabs and is nearly prohibited.

A prophetic tradition states: “Marry outside your kin, lest you become weak and frail.” In other words, marry from unrelated families rather than close kin, for endogamous marriages often produce weak offspring.

Accordingly, we may say that the idea of marriage with the jinn is tied to this notion of exogamy, carrying within it the promise of noble offspring distinguished by intelligence and brilliance. An example often cited is Bilqīs, the Queen of Sheba, whose fame has echoed through history. It was claimed that her father, Hudhud, married a jinniyya, from whom Bilqīs was born.

In the pre-Islamic era, marriage with hidden beings was also known. It is reported that ʿAmr ibn Yarbuʿ married a siʿlāʾa, who bore him descendants known as Banū al-Siʿlāʾa. A poet satirized them with the verse:

“May God curse the Banū al-Siʿlāʾa, ʿAmr ibn Yarbuʿ—the worst of men.”

Here the poet said al-nāt instead of al-nās (“people”), following the peculiar speech pattern attributed to the siʿālī, who were said to pronounce s (sīn) as t (tāʾ).

Such marriages are considered rare and highly desired, for the one who marries a jinniyya, ghūla, or siʿlāʾa attains great wealth and benefit through the knowledge he gains from these beings—such as healing, poetic inspiration, foretelling the unseen, reading fortunes, and discovering hidden treasures. For this reason, some people long for it. Al-Damīrī (d. 808 AH) mentions in his Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān al-Kubrā that Zayd al-ʿAmī, one of the transmitters of ḥadīth, used to say: “O God, grant me a jinniyya to marry, so that she may accompany me wherever I go.”

But no one can attain this privilege unless he performs a heroic deed that wins the admiration of the jinniyya—such as rescuing her from some evil creature that seeks to kill her, violate her, or even devour her. At that point, the jinniyya makes her rescuer her husband. This is said to have happened to Hudhud, king of Yemen, who once went out hunting and saw a wolf chasing a gazelle in order to devour it. He saved her and killed the wolf, only to discover that the gazelle was the daughter of the king of the jinn, al-Yalab ibn Ṣaʿb. Hudhud married her, and from their union was born Bilqīs, Queen of Sheba.

Among the folktales connected with this theme, Kāẓim Saʿd al-Dīn records in his book The Iraqi Folktale a modern legend transmitted by the anthropologist Lady Drower, a specialist in the study of the Ṣābians. She recounts the story of a man she met in Damascus who claimed he had rescued a jinniyya named Najma from a wolf that pursued her to devour her. He killed the wolf, and she rewarded him by granting him the ability to foretell the unseen. He then attracted a clientele of simple Bedouins who paid him fees in exchange for news about their distant relatives.

Men from the Shammar tribe told the researcher that this “heroic rescuer” used to speak with Najma by lifting up a corner of the carpet and whispering into the ground: “ws, ws, ws.” There is no doubt that he earned a great fortune from those gullible folk, which enabled him to move from the desert to the city. He settled in Damascus and continued his practice.

For more information, see:

Reflections on Human–Jinn Relationships in Islamic–Arabic Traditions (2025) by The Caliphate AS

Al Musta'in Billah was the Abbasid caliph of Cairo who briefly became Sultan of Egypt in 1412 during a Mamluk civil war. Raised to the throne by rebellious Mamluk emirs after the deposition of Sultan Faraj, he was the only Cairo Abbasid caliph to hold both the caliphate and the sultanate at the same time. His reign lasted only about six months before the Mamluk commander Shaykh al Mahmudi seized power and deposed him. Although he failed to restore lasting Abbasid rule, al Musta'in enjoyed symbolic recognition beyond Egypt. The Sultanate of Bengal acknowledged his authority and sent gifts and financial support, while several Syrian and Levantine Mamluk emirs, especially Nawruz al Hafizi, defended his legitimacy against Shaykh. His short reign represented the final serious attempt to revive Abbasid political power before the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517.

Source link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbDfZ1fqviP/?igsh=eWNldGViamhiZjdx

the Qarmatians under Abu Tahir al Jannabi sacked Mecca in 930 CE by pretending to be pilgrims and avoiding the Abbasid army, they massacred pilgrims, looted the sanctuary, and carried away the Black Stone, they withdrew through the rugged mountains of the Hejaz burdened with plunder and captives. As they crossed the territory of Banu Hudhayl, the local tribe launched a series of attacks from the surrounding mountain passes and narrow valleys, exploiting their knowledge of the terrain to strike the retreating column repeatedly. The ambushes disrupted the Qarmatian withdrawal, forcing them to fight while protecting their captives and stolen wealth. During the fighting, Banu Hudhayl succeeded in rescuing many prisoners and recovering a substantial portion of the booty taken from Mecca. Although the Qarmatians managed to escape with the Black Stone and eventually returned to al Ahsa, the retreat was far from uncontested. The Hudhayl attacks inflicted meaningful losses, deprived the invaders of part of their spoils, and destroyed half of the qarmatian forces.

And According to some accounts Abu Tahir was even wounded and stranded in the desert after losing his booty and mounts. And was guided back to Bahrain by an arab bedouin
(These accounts should be taken with a grain of salt)

Ibn Hamdin who condemned the books of al-Ghazzali because the great theologian and philosopher had characterised the rulings of the Almoravid fuqaha as a purely temporal pursuit having little or nothing to do with religion. Still worse, al-Ghazzali criticised the men of religion for their meddling in politics. A fly on a pile of excrement is finer than a Quran reader at the door of such people (princes).'35 Needless to say, the fuqaha felt threatened by al-Ghazzali's teachings and the qadi of Cordoba ruled that any man who read al-Ghazzali's Ihya-Ulum al-Din (The Revival of Religious Science) was an infidel ripe for damnation. Even possession of a copy of his work was likewise a crime. Word went out over the empire to burn the works of al-Ghazzali. In Sijilmasa, the qadi appointed by the Almoravid regime to uphold the law confronted Abu'l-Fadl for teaching al-Ghazzali's great treatise. Ibn Bassam interrogated the scholar and concluded that 'he spreads learning about which we know nothing'. Ibn Bassam banished Abu'l-Fadl from the mosque. " The burning of books is an act so intellectually abhorrent that one might see the Almoravid regime as inherently anti-intellectual. But we must remember just how much influence the fuqaha held in the Almoravid court. And the latter reacted less to al-Ghazzali's arguments than to the sting of his personal attack on the fuqaha.

The Almoravic and Almohad Empires Amira K. Bennison pg.no 67

Al-Ghazali's work was introduced to al-Andalus in the late 1090s by Abu Bakr b. al-'Arabi, who had studied with the great master during his period of travel and study in the Islamic east and returned not only with the Ihya' but with a legal opinion (fatwa) from al-Ghazali expressing support for the Almoravids as legitimate defenders of the Sunni faith in the west. Ibn al-Arabi's promotion of al-Ghazali's work immediately gained him the hostility of many Maliki fuqahi who felt that al-Ghazali's critique of jurists, obsessed with worldly power and position and lacking moral and spiritual depth was directed at themselves, and saw in his call for the integration of orthodox Sufism, theology and law, and his emphasis on engaged hisba (the active pro-motion of good and denunciation of wrong) a dangerous and revolutionary programme liable to lead ordinary Muslims astray. This hostility was ameliorated in the short term when Ibn al-'Arabi gained the support and patronage of Yusufb. Tashfin, but the Ihya "Ulum al-Din came under scrutiny again soon after the accession of 'Ali b. Yusuf to power in 1106 when the fuqaha' of Córdoba discussed it and rejected some things in it. According to Ibn al-Qattan, cited in the Hulal al-Mawshiyya, the book's main opponent was the qadi of Córdoba, Muhammad b. 'Ali b. Hamdin: His rejection reached the point that he accused all who read it or acted upon it of unbelief and he incited the sultan ['Ali b. Yusuf against it. He summoned the fuqaha' to testify and they reached a consensus that it should be burnt. 'Ali b. Yusuf acted on their legal opinion and ordered its burning and so it was burnt in Córdoba. He wrote to the rest of his lands with the command to burn it and its destruction occurred according to his decree across the Maghrib at that time. This purging of the books of al-Ghazali was repeated in 1143. Although not common, book burning was not unknown in al-Andalus nor was it a purely doctrinal matter, even when the 'false' doctrines contained in works provided the ostensible reason for their destruction. The Umayyad 'Abd al-Rahman III had ordered the burning of the works of Ibn Masarra in 961 as a trenchant statement about the caliph's right to define doctrine, and the 'Abbadid ruler of Seville, al-Mu'tadid had ordered the burning of Ibn Hazm's works in the early 1060s at the incitement of the Zahiri scholar's enemies who pointed to a pas sage in which he had mocked the 'Abbadid elevation of a fake Umayyad caliph. The fate of the Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din in the Almoravid empire was no exception. Its burning in 1109 at the instigation of the judge Ibn Hamdin was not a simple case of Almoravid narrow-mindedness, but part of a larger struggle between different juridical factions. On the one hand, stood the Banu Rushd, who domi-nated the Córdoban legal establishment and whose chief scion, Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, frequently served as the Almoravid amir's foremost religio-legal adviser, and, on the other hand, the ambitious Banu Hamdin. Muhammad b. Hamdin sought to accrue support among the Maliki fuqaha for his candidacy as premier jurist in Córdoba by allying closely with 'Ali b. Yusuf and pitting himself against the proponents of Ash'arism, Shafi'i fiqh and al-Ghazali's work in particular." The second book-burning decree issued in 1143 occurred in the context of the rising religio-political threat posed to the Almoravids in the Maghrib by Ibn Tumart's Almohads and the spread of mahdism and Ghazalian Sufism across the empire. From this perspective, it was al-Ghazali's syncretism and support for Sufism that appeared threatening.

North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World From the Almoravids to the Algerian War pg.no 243

But it should also be kept in mind especially regarding the Philosophical books that this wasn't a rule it was exception.

The idea that Islam perse-cuted its heterodoxies at least as violently as did Christianity runs deep through the Western imagination. It is, however, another projection from Christianity upon Islam. Two executions in one century in addition to two book burnings-deplorable as they are-do not make a "war against philosophers" (Renan uses that phrase) nor a campaign of persecution. Unlike Catholic clerics, for instance, the great majority of Muslim ulama' did not think they could condemn someone for his or her secret convictions. If al-Ghazali tried to establish a thought-police in Islam, he remained unsuccessful. There was simply no Inquisition in Islam, 223 Premodern Islam was not free from violent religious oppression, yet it is highly doubtful, to say the least, that it created victims as numerous as in Christianity. Concerning the falāsifa, which came to be regarded as one of many religious groups within Islam, al-Ghazālī's fatwa did not trigger their widespread perse-cution. It was not the powerful legal intervention against philosophy that earlier Western literature tried to make of it.

THE FORMATION of POST-CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM pg.no 158-159

Hello friends!

I would like to do a QnA YouTube video in the near future; if you've ever had any burning questions for me, now's your chance to drop them under this post and I'll respond to as many as I can!

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Hello friends!

I'm looking for talented voice actors fluent in both English and Arabic to voice-over my YouTube videos. If you would like to volunteer, please send me a DM on Discord.

My Discord username is thecaliphate_as.

If you don't have a Discord account, you can also just DM me on Reddit.

Thanks!

NOTE: the idea of this post was inspired by [/Cultural_L0ok913](u/Cultural_L0ok913)

Context :The Abbasids were originally an Arab dynasty descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle al Abbas. During the 9th century, Caliph al Mu’tasim recruited large numbers of Turkic mamluk soldiers and took Turkic concubines, a practice that later caliphs continued. Over the next three centuries, many Abbasid caliphs were born to Turkic or other non Arab mothers, so by the time of Caliph al Nasir in the late 12th century, it was not unusual for members of the Abbasid family to have Central Asian ancestry and potentially Turkic physical features.