Tuesday, June 27

Book: The World Of The Jinn & Devils, Umar S. Al-Ashqar

The third of eight in the Islamic Creed Series (previous reviews here) . This volume, as the title suggests, covers what are called the Jinn.

The blurb boasts of the book being a relatively detailed account of these invisible living beings, but after completing it I remain unconvinced. A lot of the evidence seems forcibly interpreted at best, but even bearing that in mind the book seems a bit unfocused and confused as to exactly what it wants to talk about.

So instead of continuing to talk about the behaviour and origin of Jinn (which to be fair it does for a while), it goes on to talk about good and evil, halal and haraam and sinning and worshipping in general. It's this recurring attitude that makes the reader a bit unreceptive to some of the more amazing claims about the effects of and interactions between the Jinn and mankind, some of which have pretty big implications with regards to free-will and accountability. In short: although TWOTJAD talks about the existence of Jinn successfully it seems to do little else.

Perhaps there aren't many books about the topic is because there isn't much to say? Unfortunately instead of filling this gap, this book appears to just perpetuate it.

1 comment:

  1. hey salaam...I believe in Jinn, but only because they're mentioned in the Qur'an and hence have truth to them. Still, I haveta agree with you that most books i've read discussing Jinn's are incomplete and kinda require one to make a leap of faith in order to entertain some of the arguments presented.

    ~ m ~

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