The purpose of this article is to gain a historical perspective into how certain categories of plasma life forms were viewed by Muslims through their sacred literature.
Introduction
Genie is an English translation of the Arabic term "jinn". The English word comes from the French "génie", which meant a spirit of any kind, which in turn came from the Latin "genius", which meant a sort of personal guardian spirit assigned to each person at birth. The word "jinxed" may very well be related to "jinn".
Islam teaches that there are 3 main intelligent life forms: angels, jinns and humans. Angels are made of light. The fifty-fifth chapter "Ar-Rahman" of the Qur'an states that jinns are made of "smokeless fire" and humans are made of clay (like that used in pottery). In modern terms, we may say that humans are carbon-based or water-based, jinns plasma-based (this will become apparent after reading the text below) and angels are photonic life forms. Jinns are believed to have been created before humans and appear to have undergone some form of evolution. In Islam the existence of jinns is taken very seriously and is fully accepted, even legally and even to this day, in Islamic jurisprudence.
UFOs and Aerial Jinns
The famous Islamic cosmographer and Persian physician who lived in the thirteenth century, Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud Abu Yahya al-Qazwini, states that jinns "are aerial animals, with transparent bodies which can assume various forms." This is recognized as one category of jinns which permeate the atmosphere and is reminiscent of Trevor Constable's plasma-based "sky creatures".
Gordon Creighton and Chris Line, as far back as 1989, have argued that UFOs are in reality jinns in different issues of the "Flying Saucer Review". The idea that Earth's atmosphere could be the habitat of living aerial creatures which manifested as UFOs is not a new one. Charles Fort seemed to believe that too and Kenneth Arnold, who kick-started modern Ufology in 1947, also believed UFOs were living creatures. His belief that UFOs were space animals with the ability to change their density has bothered other Ufologists. Nevertheless, aerial jinns comprise only one category. Jinns are also believed to pervade the solid body of the Earth and its surface.
Plasma Jinns
Muslims believe that jinns have the power to fly and size-shift by fitting into any space. It is interesting to note that the popular depictions of a "genie" often show a large giant whose body tapers into a vortex and who, despite his size, is able to squeeze into Aladdin's lamp or a small bottle. This piece of fiction actually illustrates quite nicely the ability of jinns to size-shift. The depiction of a flame in a lamp is also reminiscent of plasma. Neon signs and fluorescent lamps have plasmas in them. Any type of fire with a very high temperature can generate a plasma.
Jinns are also believed to be able to shape-shift and therefore can appear to humans as snakes, scorpions, cattle, donkeys, birds, and other animals. They exist at a different "vibratory rate" or "energy level" and therefore are not normally visible or detectable by us. In other words, they can be said to be living in a parallel world which interpenetrates our own.
The Dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes states: "They become invisible at please (by a rapid extension or rarefaction of the particles which compose them), or suddenly disappear in the earth or air, or through a solid wall." Particles in plasma, through magnetic and electric forces, can increase their inter-particle distance to decrease the density of the plasma. The inter-particle distance in collisionless plasma is so large that objects of collisionless plasma can easily pass through each other.
All of these characteristics are consistent with plasma life forms as described by this author. Some writers have already argued that jinns are in fact plasma life forms, for example, Dr Ibrahim B Syed, a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Louisville, School of Medicine.
We should note that the concept of plasma is a relatively modern one. The term "plasma" was coined by Irving Langmuir around 1929 and modern plasma physics only began in the twentieth century. A thousand years ago the concept of plasma did not exist. But the term "smokeless fire" captures rather nicely the image of a plasma. If we had fluorescent lamps and neon signs (which are composed of plasma) a thousand years ago, they would probably be described as "smokeless fire" or "fire without smoke".
Jinns cannot see human beings clearly but only as blurred images. However, just like humans, the perceptual ranges of some jinns may be wider giving them intermittent access to the human world (just as some humans have intermittent access to the jinn world). It will not be surprising if these jinns are considered "psychic" in their own world - being the few who are able to communicate with a strange species called "humans". The majority of jinns would probably consider humans as ghosts living in a parallel Earth.
Jinns in Societies
Like human beings, jinns are entrusted with responsibilities (careers, family life, etc.). We are told that many jinns accepted the mission and message of the Holy Prophet when they heard the Holy Qur'an read by the Prophet while performing "Fajr salaah" in Ukaz. It is therefore believed that jinns, just like humans, congregate into different religions and come together in different groups, sects and cults such as Muslims, Christians, Jews and even presumably atheists. They would have their own mosques, churches and temples - as reported by some persons who have had near-death experiences. In other words, jinns operate in societies, communities and within political systems and are startlingly similar to humans. Their plasma-based civilization has probably a longer history than ours.
"Good" and "Evil" Jinns
It is believed that every person is assigned a personal jinn called a "qareen". We are told that the Prophet Muhammad's qareen converted into a "good" Muslim jinn on listening to a recitation of the Qur'an because, among other things, it was "beautiful". This shows that jinns can be persuaded by arguments to change their behavior and that they are intelligent life forms with a sense of morality and even aesthetics.
Muslims believe that jinns will be rewarded for their righteousness and be punished for their wickedness just like humans. Jinns, like humans, will be judged on judgment day and be sent to heaven or hell according to the moral quality of the life they completed. They are therefore obviously thinking beings with free choice. Hence, they would also have a conscience.
In certain texts, jinns have been portrayed as "demons" or "evil" in contrast with humans. As explained in plasma metaphysics, the density of the bioplasma body is correlated to the strength of the being's self-concept - the denser the bioplasma body the more "egoistical" the being. When density increases the frequency decreases. We live in a lower energy universe than the jinns. Egoistical and malevolent jinns, with denser lower frequency bioplasma bodies, are therefore more likely to fall into and infiltrate our space more often. This sample of jinns that humans would most often encounter is both biased and tiny compared to the total population of jinns. We should therefore not judge all jinns by the few that we most often meet.
Furthermore, with all the wars, genocides, atrocities, murders, tortures, forced extinctions of other life-forms, irreparable damage to Earth's environment and simply despicable behavior of humans in recorded history it is quite difficult to defend a thesis which argues that humans are in some way more virtuous than jinns.
Some may argue that jinns influenced humans to do evil. But do not humans have free choice? The responsibility for evil acts must therefore lie squarely on the shoulders of humans that commit those acts. Jinns may have therefore become convenient scapegoats for humans. The logical conclusion based on all the most reliable facts is that just as there are good and evil humans there are good and evil jinns. This is in fact the general belief of Islam. (Here "good" and "evil" are used as subjective terms relative to some identifiable moral frame of reference.)
Can there be Plasma Life?
One critic is of the view that jinns, which are composed of "smokeless fire" cannot be life forms since the twenty-first chapter of the Qur'an says "We made from water every living thing." The argument is that since jinns are not composed of water they cannot be living things.
Logically before anyone can come to this conclusion she or he will have to define what life is. They have not done so. Perhaps they already know that there is still no consensus on the definition of life in the scientific community, though many leading scientists have tried to do so and have failed in one aspect or another. The definition of what life is, clearly, is far from settled. Just ask any biologist!
Secondly, in terms of sentence logic, it can be argued that "we made from water every living thing" does not go as far as "we made every living thing from water". The latter means the set of all living things is a subset of things made from water. The former simply means that everything that was made from water, within the context of the twenty-first chapter, was living. In other words, it means that the set of living things (not all) is a subset of things made of water. This more restricted interpretation is clearly more consistent with the rest of the Qur'an.
Anyone who states that jinns are not life forms must also explain how entities which live in societies, have free choice, are persuaded by verses from the Qur'an to change their behavior, have a sense of morality and an appreciation for aesthetics, move and communicate and ultimately to be subjected to judgement based on their actions and thoughts are not life forms or living things. Will it make sense to say that God will "judge" a non-life form on whether it had acted morally or not? How can a non-life form have free choice? How can a non-life form have a sense of morality?
Scientists are currently seriously considering other forms of life including silicon and gaseous life forms; and other substrates besides water, for example, liquid methane and ammonia. "Whether water is necessary for life is, I think, very dubious," says Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Washington State University in Pullman believes that the reliance on water by life forms on Earth is purely coincidental. "Life on Earth learned to work with water because it's the only liquid that is really abundant. I don't think there's anything magic about it," he says.
There are serious scientific reasons that have been put forward to argue that oceans of sulphuric acid might well do the job on a warmer planet; and oceans of methanol, ammonia, or even methane might suffice on a cooler planet. Some scientists have pointed out that not all of water's properties are unique. Hydrogen fluoride, sulphuric acid, ammonia and hydrogen peroxide share water's ability to carry around hydrogen ions which catalyse chemical reactions that are crucial for cells to digest nutrients - making life possible.
This author has already argued in the article "Dark Panspermia" (2008) that liquid water is essential for biochemical life as an agent for transport and protein folding. Its high heat capacity, ability to remain a liquid over a wide temperature range and properties as a solvent ensures a stable and useful substrate for biochemical activities. However, its importance is relative to biochemical life - not electromagnetic plasma-based life.
Bioplasma life forms are electromagnetic life forms which use magnetic fields to form structures and electric fields as agents of transport. Water is not necessary. Complex plasma (which is what bioplasma bodies are composed of, according to plasma metaphysics) can exist in a liquid-crystal state - similar to biological cells in the human body. Particles in a liquid-crystal phase are free to move about in much the same way as in a liquid, but as they do so they remain oriented in a certain direction. This feature may make it superior to water in its ability to support life in a higher energy location or universe.
Clay or Water?
Furthermore, as quoted above, in the fifty-fifth chapter of the Qur'an, it is stated that humans were made from clay. I think if you went into a restaurant and ordered a glass of water and you got a glass of clay - you will be able to tell the difference. So are humans made from water or clay? According to one category of scientific theories that deals with the origin of life, fine-grained crystals of clay might have very well been the first life forms on Earth.
According to these theories, self-replicating layered clay crystals evolved the ability to manufacture complex biomolecules, such as RNA, over millions of year which eventually became the dominant form of life on the planet. This gave rise to all types of life forms that we know today (not only human beings). A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have shown that materials in clay were key to some of the initial processes in forming life. But Science also tells us that that the most common molecule in the human body is water. So is there a contradiction? The answer is "No" because we are describing the composition of life forms at two different points of time in their evolutionary history. The concept of evolution has to be taken into account in studying not only humans but also the jinns.
The eleventh chapter of the Qur'an states, "I will fill Hell with jinns and men all together". In this connection, there is also another criticism in the literature that if jinns were made from fire then they could not possibly suffer in hell fire since they are composed of the same substance. Notwithstanding that this implies a contradiction in the Qur'an, it is as absurd as saying that humans will not feel pain if pelted by clay pellets.
Again the concept of evolution is applicable. Even if humans evolved from the distant past from clay life, today we are of different composition. Similarly, jinns have also evolved from the elementary substrate "smokeless fire" to sophisticated plasma-based life forms. This includes (based on the author's study) a protective plasma membrane, which if destroyed, could subject a plasma life form to harmful radiation and unpleasantness. There are also as many types of plasma as there are types of hells. It is possible to imagine hot overcrowded hells as well as cold isolated hells.
(Note that in plasma metaphysics theory, the concept of hell is somewhat more complex. While there are natural regions in Earth's parallel plasmasphere that can be considered pleasant and unpleasant relative to a particular life form, there are also culturally conditioned landscapes which are superimposed over these regions. Plasma, particularly "super plasma", is highly responsive to thoughts. Hence, the collective psychological forces emanating from a particular belief system in any particular community can generate a shared reality that can seem as real as the underlying natural region to the inhabitants of that belief system. The degree of reality experienced by the inhabitants existing in the shared reality is proportionate to the number of persons in the community and the duration of the beliefs.)
Homo-Jinns
Jinns are believed to be more numerous than humans on Earth. The author of Lawaami al-Anwaar al-Bahiya mentions a hadith as follows: "The jinn have children in the same way that the sons of Adam have children, but theirs are more in number." Hughes' Dictionary of Islam states that the jinn "propagate their species, sometimes in conjunction with human beings; in which latter case, the offspring partakes of the nature of both parents." This suggests the existence of jinn-human hybrids. A jinn-human hybrid can effectively live in two different "universes" and prevent the extermination of personal identity through the death of any one body.
For example, it is conceivable that the jinn component could separate itself from the human carbon and water-based body on the death of the latter and then propagate itself and its identity (which has now been enriched by the human experiences) through another human in a type of reincarnation. The jinn component could also separate itself when the human component is sleeping to visit other entities at its own energy level. In a sense, therefore, the genie leaves the bottle every time the hybrid sleeps and permanently on death.
Just like humans, individual jinns also die and are therefore not immortal. However, the personal identity of a human-jinn hybrid can conceivably be sustained for a long time by transferring the information relating to the personal identity or the "autobiographical memory" of the hybrid back and forth between the human and jinn components whose life spans are slightly out-of-phase. This is analogous to transferring a computer file from the hard drive in your computer to an external hard drive and vice-versa. But there is a missing piece - the receiving human being must have a way to generate a new bioplasma body for the older jinn to transfer the autobiographical memory of the deceased human-jinn hybrid. The new human-jinn hybrid can then pass on the memories to the next hybrid, and the cycles of existence repeat.
The human's carbon-based body has a brain that is composed of billions of neurons and even larger number of neural networks that can encode vast amounts of information. On the other hand, in the jinn's bioplasma body, we can imagine sophisticated holographic memory systems using plasma liquid crystal. A digital holographic system has been built by scientists at Stanford University and sophisticated real-time liquid crystal holographic memory systems have been created by Penn State engineers. (The holographic memory systems of plasma life forms are discussed in more detail in Jay Alfred's book Our Invisible Bodies, 2006.)
A pertinent question to ask is "How far back did this hybridization occur?" The further back in time it occurred the more extensive the hybridization. What are the implications of this on the human species?
Jinns make up only one category of life forms composed of "smokeless fire" according to Islam. The other categories include the Janns, Shaitans, Ifrits and Marids. It is believed that the Jinn evolved from the more primitive Jann. The process of (Darwinian) evolution therefore presumably also occurs among the Jinn.
Conclusion - Darwinian Evolution in Parallel Universes
If we strip away the folklore and superstitions that have mired the study of the jinns through more than a millennium we will see that there is probably a kernel of truth that can be extracted from the literature to establish jinns as one category of plasma life forms. The history and evolution of jinns and humans have become intertwined - a symbiosis which is likely to continue into the future. To understand the origins and evolution of human beings, we will therefore have to study jinns and other plasma-based life forms within a scientific framework, using the latest scientific research to extend the initial understanding gleaned from religious sources. We may inevitably find that the Darwinian tree of life, identified in our universe only recently, both originates and extends into parallel universes.
Copyright Jay Alfred 2008
Jay Alfred is the author of the Dark Plasma Theory (formerly described as "plasma metaphysics"). This Theory holds that dark matter is largely in the form of plasmas of exotic (non-baryonic) particles. Jay has been researching on terrestrial dark plasma (TDP) life forms, including their evolution in the dark biosphere and their habitats since 2001, in the context of Dark Plasma Theory. He is the author of three books on Dark Plasma Theory which include Our Invisible Bodies, Brains and Realities and Between the Moon and Earth which are available on Amazon online bookstores.
