Jinn and Jins: Sensuous Piety as Queer Ethics

Abstract

This article explores the speculative short stories of Egyptian writers Alifa Rifaat (Alīfah Rifaʿat, 1930–1996) and Mansoura Ez-Eldin (Mansūrah ʿIzz al-Dīn, b. 1976) in conversation with scholarship from the anthropology of Islam, Islamic feminism, and queer theory. Rifaat’s 1974 “ʿĀlamī al-Majhūl” (“My World of the Unknown”) and Ez-Eldin’s 2010 “Jinniyyāt al-Nīl” (“Faeries of the Nile”) both stage queer encounters between women and jinn (sentient spirit-beings within Islamic cosmology) who provide spiritual actualization as well as sexual fulfillment. I argue that their emphasis on sensuous forms of piety—largely through Sufi mystical philosophy and poetic imagery—models a queer ethics of being and knowing. Addressing the polarized critical receptions of Rifaat and Ez-Eldin among both the Arabic literary establishment and Anglophone reading publics, the article further exposes the secular sensibilities of the “world republic of letters,” in which feminist and queer modes of reading are often uncoupled from spiritual, and particularly Muslim, epistemes.