ANGELS AND DEVILS OF ISLAM
To-day in every hamlet in Malaya, that has sufficient inhabitants to form a congregation, there is a mosque where, along with his fellow villagers, the magician acknowledges that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet. The office of Caliph or head of the Muslim faith within his own State is the most cherished prerogative of a Malay ruler. His installation is attended by the magician, once master of the ceremony but now merely an onlooker, who listens and hears the court heralds call to the four archangels to send down upon their new ruler "the divine majesty of kings by the hands of his angels: the angels of the rising sun, the angels of the evening, the angels who stand upon the right and left of the empyrean throne, the angel of the zenith and the horned princess, angel of the moon." Suckled in creeds outworn, the magician sits at the feet of the pious and learns all he can about these angels and the demonology of the youngest of Malaya's religions. He adds the names of angels and devils and spirits to his repertory of incantations.
He learns that there are angels, demons (or Shaitan) and jinn, all higher than man. Actually he has had a Malay account of Muhammadan mythology for nearly three hundred years in a work called the Garden of Kings, written in 1638 A.D. by an Indian missionary of Islam in Acheen. That work tells him of the four angels who bear the throne Of God, one in the form of a bull, one in the form of a tiger, one in the form of an eagle, and one in the form of a man. It tells also of the cherubim who cry incessantly "Glory to God." But more interesting to him are the four archangels with individual names, who are concerned with the welfare of men. There is Gabriel, the angel of revelation, with six pinions, each composed of one hundred smaller wings; he is covered with saffron hairs; between his eyes is a sun, and between every two hairs of his body a moon and stars. Every day he dives three hundred and sixty times into the Sea of Light, and every drop of water from his wings creates a spiritual angel (Ruhaniyun) in his likeness. Two of his pinions he expands only when God desires to destroy hamlet or town. Two green pinions he opens only once annually on the night of destiny, when from the tree that stands by the throne of God the leaves fall inscribed with the names of those who shall die during the ensuing year. There is Michael, created five hundred years before Gabriel and five hundred years after Israfil. His whole body is covered with saffron hairs, every hair possessing a million faces having a thousand mouths, each mouth containing a thousand tongues that entreat the mercy of God, while the tears of his million eyes, weeping for the sins of the faithful, create cherubim in his likeness. These cherubim are his servants, who control rain and plants and fruits, so that there is not a drop of rain falling on earth or sea that is not watched by one of them. There is Israfil, whose head is level with the throne of Allah and whose feet reach lower than the lowest earth. With one pinion he envelopes the west, with another the east; with a third he covers his person, and with a fourth he veils himself from mouth to chest. Between his eyes is the jewelled tablet of fate. His duty it will be to sound the last trump on the day of judgment. There is 'Azrail, who according to this version is not (as he should be) the angel of death but only his warder, and is like Israfil in appearance. The angel of death, bigger than the seven earths and the seven heavens, God kept hidden and chained with seventy thousand chains until the creation of Adam. When he was seen by the angels, they fell into a faint that lasted a thousand years. He has seven thousand pinions. His body is full of eyes and tongues, as many as there are men and birds and living things. Whenever a mortal dies, an eye closes. He has four faces. When he takes the life of prophet or angel, he shows the face on his head; the face on his chest is shown to believers, the face on his back to infidels, and the face on the soles of two of his feet to jinn. Of his other two feet one is on the borders of heaven, the other on the brink of hell. So huge is he that if the waters of all seas and all rivers were poured upon his head, not one drop would reach the earth. No living creature shall escape death except the four archangels and the four angels who bear the throne of God.
There is also a huge angel called Ruh or the Spirit, with the face of a man, who will stand beside the throne on the day of judgment and implore mercy for the faithful.
There are the two inquisitor angels, Munkar and Nakir, who visit the dead in their graves and enquire if they are believers.
Night and day man is protected from devils and jinn by two out of four attendant angels, who change guard at sunrise and sunset. Recorders of his good and evil deeds, they are termed Kiraman Katibin, the Noble Writers; good deeds are written down by the angel on his right, bad by the angel on his left.
Nineteen Zabaniah (or Guardian Angels), under Malik their chief, are in charge of hell.
Finally, Iblis, the fallen rebel angel who refused to prostrate himself before Adam, is commander of an army of supreme interest to the magician, the host of infidel genies or jinn.
JINN
Jinn or genies sprang from three mangrove-leaves, the green jinn from a leaf that soared into the green sky, the black from a leaf that fell at the gate of the forest, the white from a leaf that fell into the sea. According to another incantation they were created from the earth of the mountain Mahameru, the Malay Olympus with the Hindu name. So Malays believe, unless it is to be supposed that in such charms the magicians were merely inventing fictitious origins for spirits they wished to control. According to some incantations the genies of the earth were born of afterbirth, according to others of the morning star. One magician's account says that jinn are sprung from the coconut monkey! Another declares that they were created from Sakti-muna, a great serpent: the king of the jinn from his life's breath, the white jinn from the whites of his eyes, the black, blue, green and yellow jinn from their irises, the genie that lives in the lightning from his voice. Muslims hold that Jan was the father of all. the jinn, and Jan in the Quran also signifies a serpent. There is another legend with a Muslim colouring. When Cain and Abel were still in the womb they bit their thumbs till the blood came, and along with them were born jinn, black from the blood that spurted cloud-high, white from the blood that fell to the ground. So run the discrepant accounts of the Malay magician, who accepts also the Quran's version that jinn were created from smokeless fire.
The account of genies in the Garden of Kings is as follows: Jan, the father of all jinn, was originally an angel, called firstly Aristotle but later 'Azazil. When 'Azazil refused to do obeisance to Adam, his name was changed to Iblis or Jan and his form into that of a genie; of the relation of Iblis to the genies, however, there are several variant accounts. Begetting a child every two days, Jan became the ancestor of all the genies, countless shadowy beings, numerous as the sands of the earth and filling hill and cave, forest and plain. At first they inhabited the lowest heaven. Thence they got the permission of Allah to descend to the earth, seven thousand troops of them. In time they fought among themselves and disobeyed God. So He sent Prophets and Angels to quell them and pen them in a corner of the world. To plague mankind jinn can assume any shape. Some take the form of men, others of horses or dogs or pigs, others of snakes, others of insects. Some can fly. Some can eat, drink and marry. One tradition talks of three classes of jinn, one winged, another in the form of dogs and insects, another in human form. A few are good Muslims and will go to heaven; most are infidels doomed to hell. Their great age is illustrated from the story of the genie detected by Muhammad under the disguise of a very old man. Being recognised as a genie, he admitted that he had met Noah and all the Prophets after him.
Again the Malay has read of jinn in his recension of the story of Alexander the Great. That world-conqueror meets a descendant of the genie Sakhr, who stole Solomon's ring, and assuming Solomon's shape reigned in his stead for forty days. He and his kin are guarding till the day of judgment a mosque built for Solomon by Sakhr in retribution for his presumption. He appears to Alexander in the form of a handsome youth but turns by request into his proper shape: huge as the mosque, having seven heads, each with two faces, each face having four eyes like tongues of flame, a cavernous mouth, teeth like fiery tongues, a nose like the nose of a bull; on each forehead are two snakey locks, and the genie has the feet of a duck and the tail of a bull! Near the border of the world where the sun sinks Alexander finds genies guarding King Solomon's treasure-house of jewels. They are the descendants of human men and ten daughters of Iblis. When Alexander marvels, the Prophet Khidzr quotes the case of the Queen of Sheba, who had a human father and a genie mother, and showed this origin by the hair on her calves.
All jinn are the subjects not of Muhammad but of Solomon, to whom God gave authority over genies, the animal creation and the wind of heaven.
One Malay charm speaks of "Jin the son of Jan of the line of the Pharaohs," a pedigree founded on the Arab notion that the last king of the pre-Adamite jinn was Jan the son of Jan, and that he built the Pyramids.
According to Malay belief there are jinn inhabiting the sun, the moon, the sky, the wind, the clouds. There are others whose homes or hosts are ant-hills, wells, rocks, the hard heartwood of trees, ravines, fields, swamps, lakes, rivers, mountain or plain. Others are genies of cape or bay, the sea, the tide, estuaries. Syncretism has included in these classes Indonesian soul-substance and nature-spirits and Hindu divinities; but one tradition of the Prophet also distinguishes three kinds of genies, one in the air, one on the land, and one on the sea. Malay medical lore, having borrowed from Arabia Plato's theory of the origin of disease, differentiates a fourth class, the genies of fire and fiery sunsets.
The colour of a Malay genie varies according to his habitation. Genies of earth and the dark forests and lowering clouds are black. Those inhabiting the sky are blue or to the Malay eye green. The jinn of fire and sunset are yellow. In fleecy clouds and the shimmering sea they are white.
Just as Plato ascribed disease to disturbance of the balance of power between the four properties of earth, air, fire and water, out of which the body is compacted, so the Malay medicine-man ascribes all diseases to the four classes of genies presiding over those properties. The genies of the air cause wind-borne complaints, dropsy, blindness, hemiplegia and insanity. The genies of the black earth cause vertigo, with sudden blackness of vision. The genies of fire cause hot fevers and yellow jaundice. The white genies of the sea cause chills, catarrh and agues.
All these are external genies, visible to lonely wayfarers, to the magician in a trance or, according to Kelantan belief, to the gazer upon the finger-nails of small innocent boys. They can talk among themselves or through the mouth of the shaman medium. Genies of the earth may appear in human form "floating in the air and not always remaining the same size," or in the form of animals or ants or scorpions or in any shape they please. The manufacture of old Chinese crackle-ware is ascribed by Malays to genies. Muslim genies haunt two mosques in Negri Sembilan, flitting to and fro in long white robes and sometimes chanting the Quran. If a person stand under a ladder and bathe in water wherein a corpse has been washed, he has only to stoop and look between his legs to see crowds of genies and demons sipping the water. Infidel genies of the earth are thought in Patani to assume the form of dogs and guard hidden treasure. If they take a fancy to a person, they change into little old men and leave sacks of gold for their favourites to remove. Peculiar bubbles on the surface of the water indicate the presence of jars of treasure placed by genies in pool or well. There is a genie "supposed to resemble the human form but to dart about like a will-o'-the-wisp" and daze the man that crosses it. Seize a genie and hold him, no matter what terrifying aspect he may assume, and one can wrest from him the secret of invisibility. "If a man had a tame genie, he could cause the meat from another man's cooking-pot to come to him." The founder of a house of great chiefs in Perak was a poor fisherman. His traps were repeatedly thrown on the bank and his weirs opened. He watched and saw the offender, a genie clad in the green robes and turban of a Muslim pilgrim. He seized the genie and refused to let him go. The genie said "Swallow this," spat in his mouth, and told him that he would become the greatest chief in the country and his family prosper for seven generations.
But these external jinn (for whom Malay physicians find yet another origin suitable to their medical theories, namely wind) cannot inflict disease without the help of the class of genies that inhabit the bodies of men. So, at least, it is said in Kelantan. When the genie, whose host a man's body is, has weakened him by loss of blood, coughing, dyspepsia, then only can jinn from outside enter and cause him hurt. There is a yellow genie controlling a man's five senses. There is a white genie (jin or malaikat), also called the Light of the Prophet, that "takes up its abode in the heart of every Muhammadan and prevents him from being wicked," Even these internal jinn have colour and shape. False etymology and recollection of the Indonesian bird-soul make Patani Malays identify a man's white genie with a bird, one of Muhammad's parrots!
In some genies abstract ideas seem to find a local habitation and a name.
The genie of golden life,
The genie of bright desire,
Wearing bangles of brass and coat of steel,
can both abduct a woman's soul on her lover's behalf.
The moral character of the white genie in man's bosom may be due to confusion of this spirit with the Light of the Prophet. Genies, destined for heaven, are moral beings, and belong to the several schools of Muslim belief. The others are capricious and do not distinguish between good and evil.
The syncretism that has made the name of Malay jinn legion is patent in the Perak magician's address to "the procession of the thousand jinn." In that invocation the evil influence believed by Malay animists to invest the corpses of deer, Indonesian goblins of the soil, the Misty Beauty that floats over blind wells, the Piebald Pony, four spirit guardians of the corners of the world, Kala or Siva in his destructive form, Sri the Hindu Ceres, a Hindu Moon Fairy beautiful upon waters, the Herald of the World that dwells in the clouds with a name half Sanskrit half Arabic, Jamshid a spirit of the headlands bearing the name of a Persian king, the spirits of the Muslim dead-these and scores more are entreated so that the magician may display the wealth of his uncritical lore, offend none of the spirit world and let no genie escape the net of his magic.
An equally good example is found in the list of the guardian jinii of Perak, or, to give them their other name, the genies of the royal trumpets, whose indwelling spirits were fed and revived annually centuries before the coming of Islam. These include the Four Children of the Iron Pestle, Old Grannie from up-river, the Prince of the Rolling Waves, the Children of the Gaffer who lives in the sky. Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra are among them. King Solomon and 'Ali, the fourth Caliph, find a place. There are royal familiars of the State shaman and his assistant. There is the Raja of all the jinn, who is throned on the breeze of heaven. There is the Sultan of the Unsubstantial World (maya), who condescends to the ear-posies of kings from his throne on a crystal car that is followed by all the Sultans of the universe. And there are spirits with royal titles in Persian, and female fairies with Sanskrit names. The list shows a wide knowledge of Malay romances, like the Hikayat Shamsu'l-Bahrain and the Hikayat Indraputra, that are based on Indian models and full of heroes and genies with Indian names. Acquaintance with such literature was an esteemed accomplishment at Malay courts. Among the jinn regarded by Perak commoners is 'Umar Ummaiya, the Ulysses of the Persian romance of Amir Hamzah!
http://www.online-bible.org/misc/sp/Shamanism/sss.htm