Nasnas

In the thorn-scrub of the Hadhramaut, in the flat heat of the afternoon, a branch shakes where there is no wind and something comes down through the acacia on a single hopping leg. It has one arm, half a head, one eye set in one half of a face, and it browses the leaves as it goes the way a goat crops a bush. It moves faster than a whole man could run. If it notices you it may even speak, because whatever else the thing lacks, it has a tongue and a language to use it.

This is the nasnas, one of the odder tenants of the old Arab imagination. The word itself, in classical Arabic, carries the sense of something incomplete, a thing only partly made, and that is exactly how the lexicographers set it down. Ibn Manzur, compiling the vast Lisan al-Arab at the end of the thirteenth century, defined the nasnas as a creature with half a body, one hand, one leg and one eye, that gets about by hopping. Five hundred years later Edward Lane, translating the Thousand and One Nights, gave almost the same picture in almost the same words: half a human being, with half a head and half a body, one arm and one leg, hopping with much agility.

The geographer al-Qazwini gave the nasnas its own section in his Aja’ib al-Makhluqat, the Wonders of Creation, placing it out in the far woods and empty country where such things were supposed to survive. He and the writers who followed him ranked it among the jinn, but at the bottom of that order and with an important difference. The true jinn are made of smokeless fire and move as mist, shadow, or a turning column of sand, and cannot be laid hands on. The nasnas has weight. It is flesh. It can be cornered, caught, and killed, and this is the fact that shapes almost everything else said about it.

Where it came from depends on who is telling it. Some hold that it is simply a low breed of jinn, born to the same stock. Others make it a crossbreed, the child of a human and a jinn called the shiqq, itself a being like a single half of a man divided lengthwise. The grimmest account is a story of punishment. A tribe of the ancient people of ‘Ad, so it was said, rebelled against the prophet sent to them, and God remade their bodies as a judgment, halving them so that they hopped like birds and grazed like animals, stripped of the shape that had made them people. Most tellers add that this original transformed tribe has long since died out, and that the nasnas hunted in later centuries were a separate creature that merely shared the curse’s form.

In the Hadhramaut, people ate them. The nasnas was run down and taken like any other game, and its meat was reputed to be sweet, which is a strange thing to say about something with half a human face. One old anecdote has a captured nasnas hiding in a tree and giving away a fatter companion, remarking that the other one had grown plump because it fed on mastic, the resin of the lentisk shrub. It is a small, almost comic detail, and it tells you how thoroughly these beings had been reduced from monsters into quarry.

The most human of the nasnas stories is the cruelest. In the Thousand and One Nights, in the tale of the sage and the scholar, a man falls into the hands of a magician who draws a line of kohl across one of his eyes, and with that single stroke halves him into a nasnas, a whole life folded down to one arm, one leg, and one side of a face. The horror of the creature was never really its menace. It was the idea of a person made incomplete.

The nasnas reached the edges of religious writing as well. It does not appear in any Sunni reading of the Quran, but some Shiʿi commentators worked it into the account in the second sura, where God tells the angels he will place a successor on the earth. In that telling the earth was already inhabited long before Adam, by jinn and by nisnas, who filled it with bloodshed for ages until God swept them aside and began again. In the hands of those commentators the nisnas became a kind of shorthand for the wrong sort of people, set against the obedient jinn.

Its powers are the powers of a hunted animal that happens to talk. It is quick, quicker on its one leg than a sound man on two, it is hard to catch in broken country, and it has just enough cunning and speech to lie its way out of trouble or betray a friend. Its weakness is written into its whole nature, which is lack. It is half of everything, one of each thing that ought to come in pairs, and being flesh it can be run down and killed and, in the driest joke the tradition allows, cooked and found sweet. A creature made from subtraction has very little left to defend itself with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a nasnas?

The nasnas is a creature of Arabian and Islamic folklore shaped like the vertical half of a human being, with half a head, one eye, one arm, and one leg, moving by hopping. It is usually classed as a low, corporeal type of jinn, but unlike ordinary jinn it has a solid body that can be caught and killed. It is especially associated with Yemen and the remote region of the Hadhramaut.

Where does the nasnas come from?

Accounts of the nasnas’s origin disagree. Some sources call it a lower species of jinn, others say it is the offspring of a human and a half-bodied jinn called the shiqq, and a third tradition says the nasnas were a tribe of the ancient people of ‘Ad whom God transformed as punishment for rebelling against their prophet. In that last version the original transformed tribe is said to have died out, leaving a separate creature of the same shape.

Is the nasnas dangerous to humans?

The nasnas is remembered less as a threat than as prey. In the Hadhramaut people hunted the nasnas and ate it, and its flesh was said to be sweet. Its half-human form and its ability to speak made it unsettling, but the folklore treats it as something to be caught rather than feared.

How is the nasnas connected to the Thousand and One Nights?

The nasnas appears in the tale of the sage and the scholar within the Thousand and One Nights, where a magician transforms a man into a nasnas by applying kohl to one of his eyes. The story turns the creature into an image of a person violently made incomplete. The nineteenth-century translator Edward Lane also used the tale’s nasnas to describe the being for European readers.

What is the difference between a nasnas and a jinn?

A jinn is traditionally made of smokeless fire and is immaterial, appearing as mist, shadow, or wind, while the nasnas has a physical, corporeal body that can be hunted, killed, and even eaten. The nasnas is generally ranked as a lower kind of jinn, and one tradition makes it the child of a jinn and a human. Its defining trait, having only half a body, sets it apart from the whole-formed jinn.

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