Some of the most fun I’ve had reading over the past three months was stumbling across two recent books: P. Djeli Clark’s A Master of Djinn and S.A. Chakraborty’s City of Brass.
Both books are set in worlds where djinn are an active presence. Clark’s book is set in early 20th century Cairo; djinn had been summoned back to the world - to Egypt in particular - some 30 years previous. In return for being granted citizenship in Egypt, the djinn had come to be woven into life in Egypt. What we encounter as readers is a world of steampunk djinn, set amidst the ‘real’ dynamics of modernization, industrialization, globalization, and geopolitical struggle. I loved the book.
Like Clark, Chakraborty begins her story in Cairo, although we’re in (late?) 18th century Cairo. City of Brass is less interested in the world of human geopolitics; instead it takes us to the city of Daevabad, the capital of an empire of djinn. The human world exists on the margins of the book (and the entire series) - and in many ways its djinn cultures/kingdoms are mapped onto human worlds - but this is a geography of djinn.
Because both books put djinn at (or near the center) of their worlds, both draw on a similar set of references: there are djinn, of course, but there are also their rivals the ifrit; the Seal of Solomon is a key object in both; Islam is at once central to both worlds and, in a really lovely way, the normal taken-for-granted basis of everyday life. (Interesting aside: There used to be a Seal of Solomon placed in the decoration of the hacet penceresi [window of need] that looked in on the tomb of Halid bin Zeyd in the mosque of Eyüp Sultan, see Baha Tanman’s article for more.)1
The title of this post - an admittedly awful play on words - riffs on Anand Vivek Taneja’s remarkable ethnography Jinneaology. The book focuses on the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla, a fortress in Delhi thick with stories of djinn. As Taneja writes,
jinns are linked to deep time, connecting human figures thousands of years apart… In these stories jinns are the figures of the transmission of memory beyond all possibility of human history… The popularity of jinns, and their links to deep time, increased in a city whose landscapes, public life, and archives were increasingly marked by the deliberate forgetting of a past - the pre-1947 city - barely a generation old. (Jinnealogy, p. 10-11)
In contrast to a genealogy - which can only ever be articulated in relationship to human archives - a jinneaology opens up the possibility of other histories, ethics, and forms of hospitality. However, Taneja is attentive not only to relationships between different humans but also to relations between humans and other forms of life:
At Firoz Shah Kotla we see the flourishing of life in much more varied forms. [It] is now a zone of zoological density and diversity in the life of the city. Fish swim in the waters of the baoli, the deep circular stepwell still plentiful with water. Colonies of black ants prosper on the flour offered outside their burrows and on the sweets offered to the saints in the underground chambers here. Pigeons flock to the grain scattered for them every day, and kites gather to feast on the meat thrown to them…. As jinns are renowned to be shape-shifters, these birds and animals, especially the cats and the snakes, are seen as embodying the saints. (Jinnealogy, p. 14)
One of the things that Taneja’s book asks us to consider: Other ways of understanding the relationships that make up the world, a mode of understanding that “points us toward the possibility that enchantment - the taking of the natural world to be full of value, and making moral claims upon us - can be both secular and religious” (Jinnealogy, p. 17). Taking djinn seriously, in other words, might provide a way to reorient taken-for-granted assumptions that humans somehow stand apart from the natural world.
So why a ‘djinn-eography’? The question I’m trying to ask: If we took djinn seriously - not just as made-up things that exist in a world of fantasy - what would the world look like? S.A. Chakraborty’s map both provides a starting point and suggests some of the limits in the ways that we imagine geography as only maps.
So this is a map of the world that we recognize: It’s the human world, only with kingdoms of djinn in their place. Djinn, like humans, travel from place to place by moving across this map. There are moments in the book (and this is a mild spoiler) where other kinds of creatures are able to travel differently, but the basic geography of this map is: The world of djinn is, well, like the world of humans.
But geography isn’t just maps - understanding geography involves paying attention to the different kinds of connections that link people (and the places in which they are) to people (and people) elsewhere. These connections span both time and place - these are, in a sense, Doreen Massey’s ‘stories-so-far.’ But djinn, if we take them seriously, are not just able to exist in “deep time, connecting human figures thousands of years apart,” but might also be able to realize ‘deep geographies’ (is that any better than djinn-eography? I don’t know).2
I loved both Clark’s book (come for the steampunk djinn police procedural, stay for the geopolitical imaginings about Egypt as a world power in 1910) and Chakraborty’s series (the plotting is spectacular over the course of the series), but I finished them with a feeling that I wanted something more. Djinn represent a limit - a sense of Otherness that is always present in the world. What would the world look like - what would our place in it look like - if put djinn at the center of it?
I’ll pick up on these questions in two weeks, trying to connect it to Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse.
Neither of them talk about where they learned about this world of djinn, ifrit, and Solomon. You can find some references with a quick Google search, but I realized also that there’s this whole literature in the Encyclopedia of Islam, entries about ifrit and al-Djahiz and more. Research for another day.
It turns out that there’s a ‘Deep Geography’ project, and I’m also reminded of Robert MacFarlane’s Underland (publisher site and his On Being interview)