Ifrit

The court is in session, the throne of the queen of Sheba is a very long way south in Yemen, and Solomon wants it in front of him. A voice comes out of the ranks of the jinn. I will bring it to you before you rise from your place, it says, and I am strong enough for the work and can be trusted with it. The speaker is an ifrit. He does not get the job. It goes instead to one who had knowledge of the Book, and the throne is standing in the hall before the king can blink.

That is the whole of the ifrit’s career in the Qur’an. One boast in the twenty-seventh sura, and it ends with him being outrun.

Everything else grew afterwards. The word does not appear in pre-Islamic poetry. Arab philologists traced it to the root ʿ-f-r, which carries the sense of rolling something in the dust, and drew out of it the meanings strong and rebellious; some Western scholars have preferred a Persian origin and been argued with ever since. In scripture and hadith the word never stands alone. It is always an ifrit among the jinn, an adjective pressed into service as a noun, a way of saying that this particular spirit is bigger and worse than the rest. In the earliest sources the ifrit is not a species. It is an insult with muscles.

Folklore built a body around the insult. By the time popular compilers such as al-Ibshihi were writing it up, the ifrit had become an enormous winged creature of smoke, male or female, living underground and haunting ruins, organised into a society along old Arab tribal lines with its own kings and clans, marrying its own kind and occasionally marrying a human. The afarit as a class were given the layers of the seven earths for a country and Jahannam for a homeland, and they were said to be formed of smoke and fire, which is a pointed distinction: the jinn of the Qur’an are made from smokeless fire, and the devils from smoke. The ifrit sits in the sooty half of that division.

Picture the ruin at noon. A mudbrick wall still standing at the edge of the cultivation, the stones too hot to sit on, the smell of dust and old bat droppings, goats that will not go in through the gap in the wall no matter how the boy shouts at them. Nothing happens. Nothing has to. The thing that lives there is holding the place and waiting for someone to be careless enough to come in out of the sun.

Egypt gave the ifrit its most intimate and most frightening job. There, an ifrit is not only an independent monster but a piece of a person, the part that leaves the body at the moment of death, and the belief runs that a natural death produces no malevolent ifrit at all. Only the murdered do. The thing rises out of the blood on the ground, and it lingers where the killing happened or where the dead used to walk, and it stays until the Day of Judgment, and it can frighten the living, kill them, or hunt down the murderer. The counter-measure is an unused iron nail hammered into the bloodstain, which stops the ifrit forming. Martyrs, saints and prophets leave no ghost, and so leave no ifrit behind them.

The best story of what an ifrit does when it has you comes from Nizami. In the Haft Peykar, the Egyptian traveller Mahan is carried into a demon-haunted waste by a horse that turns into a seven-headed monster under him, and takes refuge in an oasis with an old man who promises him a garden, a legacy and a bride, and tells him only that he must not come down from his perch before morning. A girl comes into the room with the face of a pari. Mahan’s appetite gets the better of him, and while she is in his arms the fairy becomes an ifrit, made, Nizami says, out of God’s wrath. It tells him plainly that it has to tear him apart, because a demon that spared him would not be much of a demon, and that it is ashamed of having worn a fairy’s face at all. Then the cock crows, the dawn comes up, and every demonic thing in the place is gone.

The Nights kept the ifrit and made it famous. In one tale a prince finds an underground chamber in a wood with a stolen woman in it, sleeps with her, and is caught by the ifrit who took her; the ifrit turns him into an ape, and a princess later fights the creature through a whole menagerie of shapes, animal and fruit and fire, until it is burned down to cinders. In another an ifrit is corked into a jar under Solomon’s seal, thrown into the sea for centuries, released by a fisherman, and then flattered straight back into the jar by the same fisherman, who has worked out that a spirit that cannot be stabbed can still be embarrassed. That jar, and the bargain that came out of it, is where the West got its idea of what a genie is.

Its powers follow from what it was called in the first place. It is strong: strong enough to shift a queen’s throne across a kingdom before a king can stand up, strong enough to be set to hauling stones by anyone who has bound it. It commands fire and weather, and when Iblis is given permission to torment Job the devils and ifrits he summons come as storms and whirlwinds of fire and take the man’s property apart. It can enter a person and stay there, and the possessed grow stronger and braver and then go mad. It can change shape, though never as fluently as a jinni can. Ordinary weapons do nothing to it.

Its limits are just as consistent. Magic works. A sorcerer can call one up and compel it, a ring can put it to work, a seal can shut it in a jar, and a man with no weapon at all can trick one back into its bottle by appealing to its vanity. Daybreak dissolves the illusions it has built. A nail driven into the blood keeps one from ever forming. And the leash goes all the way up: Nizami’s ifrit is made of God’s wrath and functions as a moral instrument, the afarit are held to obligations they cannot refuse, and when an ifrit came at Muhammad in the night with a torch of fire, the tradition holds that God had sent it on purpose, so that Gabriel could teach a prayer against it and the community could learn not to be afraid of the dark.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ifrit?

An ifrit is a powerful demon in Islamic culture, usually understood as the strongest and most rebellious kind of jinn. In the Qur’an the term appears only once, as an epithet in the phrase “an ifrit among the jinn,” but in later folklore it became the name of an entire class of underworld spirits formed from smoke and fire.

Where does the ifrit appear in the Qur’an?

In Surah an-Naml (27:38 to 40), an ifrit among the jinn offers King Solomon to fetch the throne of the queen of Sheba before Solomon can rise from his seat, calling himself strong and trustworthy for the task. Solomon gives the work to someone else, “one who had knowledge of the Book,” who produces the throne almost instantly. It is the only occurrence of the word in the Qur’an.

Are ifrits evil?

Not necessarily. The afarit are usually depicted as ruthless and wicked, but Islamic tradition does not treat them as evil by nature: like the jinn, an ifrit can be a believer or an unbeliever, and it can even carry out God’s purposes, including grim ones such as avenging a murder.

How do you defeat or control an ifrit?

Ordinary weapons and force are useless against an ifrit, but magic is not. A sorcerer can summon and compel one, a magical ring can force it to labour, Solomon’s seal can shut one inside a jar, and in the Thousand and One Nights a fisherman talks a released ifrit back into its bottle by playing on its pride.

What is the Egyptian belief about ifrits and the dead?

In Egyptian folk belief the ifrit is identified with the spirit of a dead person, but only a violent death produces one: the ifrit is said to rise from the victim’s blood, haunt the place of the killing, and take revenge on the murderer. Driving an unused nail into the blood is believed to prevent it forming, and martyrs, saints and prophets are held to leave no ifrit at all.

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