Marid

The fisherman had already hauled up a dead donkey, a pitcher packed with mud, and a net full of broken glass. His vow allowed him four casts a day and no more, and on the fourth the net came in heavy with a jar of yellow copper, its mouth stopped with a cap of lead, and pressed into the lead was the seal ring of Solomon. He worked a knife under the cap, because the metal alone would fetch ten dinars at the brass market and he had children. What came out was smoke. It went up until it brushed the clouds, hung there, then thickened and set: a head like a dome, hands like pitchforks, legs as long as ships’ masts, a mouth as wide as a cave, teeth the size of paving stones, nostrils like water jugs, and two eyes burning in that face like lamps. The fisherman’s spit dried in his mouth. When he found his voice, the word he reached for was marid.

He might as easily have said devil and been just as accurate. Mārid is not a species. It is an adjective, an active participle from the Arabic root m-r-d, and it means recalcitrant, defiant, unbroken. Richard Burton, translating the tale in 1885, glossed it as “contumacious” and traced it to the Hebrew marad, to rebel, the root that also yields the name Nimrod. Before it tells you what the thing looks like, the word tells you that it will not do as it is told.

That is precisely how the Quran uses it. In Surah as-Saffat the stars strung across the lowest heaven are called both an ornament and a guard, set there as protection from every rebellious devil: kulli shaytanin marid. Surah al-Hajj condemns the man who argues about God without knowledge and follows every rebellious devil. Neither verse is doing taxonomy. Both are issuing a warning, and the picture behind them is worth holding still for a moment. The devils drift up through the cold of the night sky toward the assembly of the angels, hoping to catch a scrap of what is being decided there, and the stars come down on them like thrown fire. Something in the dark gets close enough to listen and is burned for it. Every falling star is a failed eavesdrop.

By the medieval period the adjective had hardened into a rank. Muslim scholars sorted the unseen by conduct rather than by anatomy: a jinni that settles quietly in a house is one thing, a jinni that shows itself to children is another, and a jinni turned malicious becomes a shaytan. A classification widely attributed to the Andalusian jurist Ibn Abd al-Barr places the marid a rung above the shaytan, more obstinate and more vicious, and a rung below the ifrit. Other authorities reverse the two, or ignore the ladder altogether. There has never been an agreed hierarchy of the jinn, and the sources cheerfully call the same creature a marid on one line and an ifrit on the next.

The Nights does exactly that, on a single page. The narrator calls the thing from the jar an ifrit. The fisherman, staring up at it, calls it a marid. The creature itself claims neither title and says only that it is one of the heretical Jann, and then it tells him why it was in the jar. It had rebelled against Solomon, alongside the famous Sakhr al-Jinni. Solomon sent his minister Asaf, son of Barkhiya, who took it in bonds and stood it before the throne like a beggar. The prophet offered it the faith and his obedience. It refused. So Solomon sealed it into the copper jar, stamped the lead with the Most Great Name of God, and had it carried out and dropped into the middle of the sea.

Then came the arithmetic of the abandoned. For the first hundred years the marid lay in the salt dark and promised itself that whoever freed it would be made rich forever. Nobody came. Through the second century it swore it would open the buried hoards of the earth to its rescuer. Nobody came. Four hundred years went by and it came down to three wishes, anything at all, and still nobody came. And somewhere in the long silence after that it changed its mind and resolved that whoever freed it would die, though it would be generous and let the man choose the manner of his death. The wish-granting genie beloved of the modern world is only the middle chapter of a prisoner’s despair. The story remembers what came next.

The fisherman survived by flattery of the least flattering kind. He asked, reasonably, how a creature of that size had ever fitted into a jar too small for its foot, and then said plainly that he did not believe it had. Vanity did the rest. The smoke went back in, coil by coil, and the lead cap went on, and the marid went back into the sea. It was beaten by a hungry man with a knife.

One thing in the popular picture of the marid has no Arabic source at all, and it is the first thing most readers now believe: that a marid is a genie of water. There is no sea in the Quranic verses, none in the rankings of the jurists, and none in the Nights beyond the ocean Solomon happened to choose as a dumping ground. The water marid was manufactured in the early 1980s for the American fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons. The reasoning was simple and rather charming: if the djinni was a spirit of air and the efreeti a spirit of fire, then there ought to be genies of water and earth as well, so two more Arabic words were recruited and given elements, and the marid got water while the dao got earth. It surfaced in Dragon magazine in 1982, reached the Monster Manual II in 1983, and from there flowed into novels, video games and a large share of the mythology pages on the internet: sixteen feet tall, blue-skinned, lord of the Elemental Plane of Water. It is a good invention. It is not folklore.

What the record actually gives the marid is bulk, endurance and refusal. It is vapour before it is a body, which means it can fill a sky or a bottle at will, and it does not age in any way that matters, since eighteen centuries under the sea left it with nothing worse than a grudge. It knows where treasure lies. It can grant, when it chooses to. It is strong enough that the only reliable way to hold one is to seal it inside metal, which is why the Nights is so full of jars.

Its limits are the mirror of all that. The stars stop it at the edge of heaven and burn it back down. The Most Great Name of God, spoken aloud, empties it of nerve, and Solomon’s seal on a lead cap is a wall it cannot pass. A body of smoke can be stoppered. And its own defiance, the quality it is named for, is also the flaw in it: too proud to be doubted, it will climb back into its own prison to prove a point to a fisherman. For all its size, the marid can be stopped by a lid. What the sources preserve is not a lord of the ocean but a refusal, a thing that would rather spend eighteen hundred years in a copper jar at the bottom of the sea than say yes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a marid in Islamic mythology?

A marid is a rebellious devil or jinni in Arabic and Islamic tradition. The Arabic word mārid is an adjective meaning recalcitrant or defiant, from the root m-r-d, and it is used in the Quran to describe devils rather than to name a separate species. Later Muslim scholars turned it into a rank among the jinn, placing the marid above the ordinary shaytan in malice and strength.

Are marids water genies?

No. Nothing in the Quran, in classical Islamic scholarship, or in the Arabian Nights associates the marid with water or with the sea as an element. The idea of the marid as a blue-skinned water genie was invented for the game Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s, which needed water and earth counterparts to the air djinni and the fire efreeti, and it spread from there into modern fantasy.

What is the difference between a marid and an ifrit?

There is no fixed difference, and the sources use the two words for the same creature. A classification widely attributed to the jurist Ibn Abd al-Barr ranks the marid below the ifrit, with the ifrit as the stronger and more vicious, but other authorities reverse them or ignore the ranking entirely. In the Arabian Nights the same jinni is called an ifrit by the narrator and a marid by the fisherman within a few lines.

Where is the marid mentioned in the Quran?

The word appears in Surah as-Saffat, where the stars of the lowest heaven are described as a guard and a protection from every rebellious devil, shaytanin marid, and in Surah al-Hajj, which condemns those who dispute about God without knowledge and follow every rebellious devil. In the as-Saffat passage these devils try to climb toward the assembly of the angels to eavesdrop and are driven off with fire.

What happens to the marid in the Arabian Nights?

In the tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni, a marid is released from a copper jar sealed with the ring of Solomon, having been imprisoned there for rebelling against the prophet alongside Sakhr al-Jinni. After eighteen hundred years on the seabed it has resolved to kill whoever frees it, and offers the fisherman only a choice of deaths. The fisherman goads it into proving it can fit back inside the jar, then reseals the lead cap and throws it into the sea.

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Ifrit, Djinn, Shaitan, Qareen, Ghoul, Nasnas, Dajjal, Satan, Al-mi’raj, Anqa, Bahamut, Roc, Shahmaran, Div, Peri