Jinn in the Qur’an

The Qur’an refers to a group of beings known as the jinn living alongside humankind. They are treated as a separate race, ambivalent in nature, with the capacity for both good and evil. The Qur’an describes creation as fashioned by a singular deity who made the worlds, plants and animals, and three types of rational life: angels, humans, and jinn. The Qur’an takes this cultural background of the jinn for granted, drawing them into a new Islamic framework. While the idea of jinn would have been familiar to the contemporaries of Muhammad, the Qur’an adjusts much of the Arabian lore and Islamizes it. The Qur’anic narrator assumes the hearers are already familiar with the jinn as having different abilities from humans but rejects their role as spiritual intercessors and instead imagines them as a parallel form of life to humans and thus under the power of prophets.