Si’lat

The caravan stops in a wadi, the fire burns down to coals, and somewhere past the last ring of light a woman starts to keen. Every man lying on the gravel knows the sound has a name. It is not the ghūl. The ghūl is the thing that changes its face and its clothes and comes walking in to ruin a man, and the Arabs kept a separate word for the one out there in the dark who does not bother changing anything at all.

That word is si’lat, and the clearest account of what divides her from her kin comes from al-Jāḥiẓ, writing in Basra in the ninth century. In the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān he sets it down with the flatness of a man tidying a drawer. The ghūl, he says, is the name for any jinn that waylays travellers and works through a range of shapes and garments, male or female, though most speech makes it female. The si’lat is the name for one of the women of the jinn when she does not change her shape to beguile the travellers. She is what remains after the disguise is taken away.

The lexicographers could not agree on how to gloss her. Ibn Manẓūr, compiling the Lisān al-ʿArab in the fourteenth century, offers three answers in one line and declines to choose: the si’lat is the ghūl, or she is the female of the ghūls, or she is sāḥirat al-jinn, the sorceress of the jinn. Al-Jawharī had already settled three hundred years earlier on akhbath al-ghīlān, the most vicious of the ghouls. The definitions sit beside each other in the dictionaries like witnesses who were never allowed to confer.

Against the whole cluster stands a hadith that the commentators worried at for centuries: no ṣafar, no hāma, no ghūl, but the saʿālī. Ibn al-Athīr and the other glossators read it as a correction rather than a denial. The ghūl has no power to ghoul a man and walk him off the road, they say, but among the jinn there are sorcerers exactly as there are among people, and what those deal in is talbīs and takhyīl, dressing up and the casting of images. Not transformation. Suggestion. That distinction is the whole of her.

Because she kept her own shape, the Arabs could say what shape they meant. Al-Jāḥiẓ records the usage without comment: when they saw a woman sharp of eye and sharp of mind, quick in her movements, slender and finely drawn, they said, a si’lat. It was not praise and it was not quite an insult. More than a thousand years later the Baghdadi scholar Maḥmūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī was still reporting the same bundle of qualities, slim, quick-witted, formidable, and not to be trusted around a husband. The verb built from her name travelled in the other direction. To say that a woman had gone si’lat, istasʿalat, meant she had turned loud and foul-mouthed, and al-Zamakhsharī records men saying, I take refuge with God from these saʿālī, meaning the shrieking women of their own houses. Some of the Arabs held that the word was only ever applied to old women and to horses, which is a pairing worth sitting with.

Nobody says what she looked like. Not one early source gives her a face, a height, a colour or a gait. The donkey’s hoof that everybody remembers belongs to her cousin: al-Jāḥiẓ notes that the common people insisted the ghūl could take the fairest form she pleased provided her leg stayed a donkey’s leg, and a bedouin recited for al-Khalīl a line about the hoof of a wild ass above a plump shank, and an eye socket slit the long way, unlike a human’s. The si’lat is granted no such tell. She is simply present in the poetry, at the rim of the waste, at the hour when night covers the jinn. ʿUbayd ibn Ayyūb, an outlaw who spent years alone in country nobody else would cross, put an azall, a si’lat and a ghūl into a single line and had her lift her voice as the dark came down. Jirān al-ʿAwd was blunter about the encounter: she is the ghūl and the si’lat, and what lies between my collarbones is clawed and scored from the pair of them.

The tradition never explains where she came from, because it never felt the need to. She is of the jinn, and the jinn were simply there, ranked by temper rather than by descent. Al-Jāḥiẓ gives the ladder: a jinnī plain, an ʿāmir if it settles among people, an arwāḥ if it troubles children, a shayṭān if it turns vicious, a mārid above that and an ʿifrīt above that again. The saʿālī stand off to one side of that ladder, female and sorcerous, and named to their ground the way the rest were named to theirs. The shayṭān of the ḥamāṭa tree. The ghūl of the empty country. The jānn of the ʿushar shrub, and in one rajaz line the si’lat of the ʿushar as well, going out at evening with woe and coming back at morning with calamity.

Then there is the marriage, which is the story that outlived all the definitions. ʿAmr ibn Yarbūʿ of Tamīm took a si’lat to wife. She stayed years in his house and bore him children, and he kept her from the sight of lightning, because he knew what lightning over her own people’s country would do. One night the sky opened in the direction of the land of the saʿālī. She saw it, said his name once, and went, and he never saw her again. Their descendants carried the name Banū al-Siʿlāt, and a rajaz poet used it on them as a weapon: God fight the Banū al-Siʿlāt, ʿAmr ibn Yarbūʿ, worst of people. Al-Jāḥiẓ passes on a second telling from Abū Zayd, and adds that some traced Bilqīs, the queen of Sheba, to the same mixed stock.

Her powers are few and specific. She works by illusion rather than by change, which lets her put a fright into a traveller and then, if the fright has shaken something loose, move into the space it left. She leads people off a known track in country where losing the track is fatal. She keens, and the keening does half the work before she has laid a hand on anybody. She can bear a human man living children, and she can cross whatever distance separates a tent from the land of the saʿālī in a single night.

The limits are drawn just as tightly. She cannot take another form, which in a tradition crowded with shapeshifters is close to a disability. She has no authority over a mind that is intact, and al-Jāḥiẓ makes the point with a straight face, remarking that if the jinn had been given that authority they would have begun with ʿAlī and Ḥamza and Abū Bakr and ʿUmar rather than with shepherds on the road. And she is not free. One flash of light over the right horizon ends the marriage she built over years, and leaves the children on the floor of the tent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Si’lat?

A si’lat is a female jinn in Arabic folklore, described by the classical Arabic dictionaries as the she-ghūl or as the sorceress of the jinn. She haunts open desert country, unsettles travellers by illusion and suggestion, and in some tellings takes a human husband. Her plural is saʿālī.

What is the difference between a si’lat and a ghoul?

The ninth-century writer al-Jāḥiẓ drew the line by shapeshifting: the ghūl is any jinn that waylays travellers by moving through different shapes and clothes, while the si’lat is a woman of the jinn who does that work without changing her shape at all. She relies on sorcery and illusion instead. Later dictionaries blurred the two, calling the si’lat the female of the ghouls or the most vicious of them.

Are the si’lat mentioned in Islamic tradition?

Yes. A hadith runs, no ṣafar, no hāma, no ghūl, but the saʿālī, and the classical commentators read it as a correction rather than a denial. Their gloss holds that the ghūl cannot truly lead a man astray, but that the jinn include sorcerers, as humans do, whose craft is talbīs and takhyīl, disguise and the casting of images.

Did a si’lat ever marry a human?

According to the most repeated Arabian story, yes. ʿAmr ibn Yarbūʿ of the tribe of Tamīm married a si’lat who lived with him for years and bore him children, and he shielded her from the sight of lightning. When lightning finally flashed over the country of the saʿālī she spoke his name once and left for good, and her descendants were nicknamed Banū al-Siʿlāt.

What does a si’lat look like?

The early sources never describe her body. What they describe is a bearing the Arabs claimed to recognise, a woman sharp of eye and sharp of mind, quick in her movements and finely drawn, and the word was used of living women on that basis. The donkey’s leg often attached to her belongs to the ghūl, not to the si’lat.

Related Entries

Djinn, Ghoul, Ifrit, Marid, Qareen, Nasnas, Shaitan, Al-mi’raj, Peri, Lilith, Lamia, Empusa, Leanan sidhe, Baobhan Sith