The Israelis have astounded the world in recent weeks with several unparalleled feats of wartime ingenuity, most notably the explosion of thousands of pagers that belonged to high-level Hezbollah operatives. Topping even that was the elimination of arch-terrorist and media darling Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, who had been in hiding for nearly two decades and was in a bunker sixty feet underground when the Israelis found a way to take him out. One Muslim cleric in Iran, however, is certain that the Israelis’ success can’t be ascribed to their ingenuity; he thinks they had some help. Help, that is, of the supernatural variety.
Mostafa Karami, who teaches at a Shi’ite Muslim seminary in Iran, said Sunday that the Israelis were able to kill Nasrallah not by the power of any human agency, but only with the aid of jinn, who are better known in the West as genies. Karami didn’t say whether or not the Israelis employed the services of Barbara Eden of “I Dream of Jeannie” for this operation, but as Ms. Eden is now 93 years old, she is unlikely to have participated.
Karami also remained mum about whether or not the Israelis have a secret laboratory full of bottles, from which they summon their trained jinn whenever they need them to carry out special ops. The jinn, according to the Qur’an, are spirit beings that Allah created from “smokeless fire” (55:15). They can be dangerous; the Qur’an says that some of them even try to turn prophets away from their mission: “In this way we have appointed an adversary to every prophet, satans of mankind and jinn who inspire in one another plausible discourse through guile.” (6:112) The “assembly of the jinn” has “seduced many among mankind.” (6:128)
The twentieth-century Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn al-Uthaymeen states a standard Muslim view when he asserts that while human beings cannot see jinn, “undoubtedly the jinn can have a harmful effect on humans, and they could even kill them.” Hmmm. Did the jinns not only lead the Israelis to Nasrallah but do him in themselves?
Al-Uthaymeen adds that the jinn “may harm a person by throwing stones at him, or by trying to terrify him, and other things that are proven in the sunnah (prophetic teachings) or indicated by real events... There are numerous reports which indicate that a man may come to a deserted area, and a stone may be thrown at him, but he does not see anybody, or he may hear voices or a rustling sound like the rustling of trees, and other things that may make him feel distressed and scared. A jinn may also enter the body of a human, either because of love or with the intention of harming him, or for some other reason.” Were Hassan Nasrallah’s last moments filled with that kind of jinn-inspired confusion and terror? We may never know.
Karami, however, sees it as a possibility. He states, “Considering the Zionists’ history of subjugating genies, they carry out many of their missions through this means, and demons are their secret army.” Hassan Nasrallah is by no means the first victim of these Zionist jinn: “They [the Jews] have had access to genies and cosmic science since the time of David and Solomon. Historically, they have always used genies, their documents and traditions proved that. They have used genies and demons for warfare and intelligence operations throughout history.” Well, that certainly does explain the stunning against-all-odds Israeli victories in 1948, 1967, and 1973.
Related: The Decline and Fall of the Iranian Empire
Is Karami serious? There is no reason to believe that he isn’t. In "The Caliph’s House," the Afghan-English writer Tahir Shah’s marvelous account of his adventures moving his family to Morocco and buying and refurbishing a home in Casablanca, Shah is repeatedly amazed by the belief of the locals, including Westernized Moroccans whom he believes to be sophisticated, in the existence of jinn. The mischievous spirit beings are constantly interfering in the most mundane human affairs, repeatedly frustrating Shah’s attempts to renovate his new home. The Moroccans’ invariable reply to Shah’s astonished inquiries about whether they really believe in jinn is “It’s in the Qur’an.”
There you have it. In the Qur’an, it isn’t just the jinn who stand as adversaries to the Muslims. The Jews are described as “the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe” (5:82). So why shouldn’t these two great enemies of the believers join forces?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member