Umm al-Duwais (and Other Notable Female Jinn)

I think about her a lot. If she were nonfictional, she would probably be the most beautiful woman. I imagine her in an ankle-length, tight red dress, concealed beneath a black cloak. Her hair would be  long and dark, woven into one braid that drags to her hips. She would wear red lipstick and nothing else. She would smell like oud or musk. Perhaps, oud in the winter, musk in the summer.

 I imagine her to be a reader, haunting the abandoned mansion in my grandparents’ neighborhood in Sharjah, which is said to have a grand, rich library. When she’s not busy luring gluttonous, lustful men, she would be reading works by Freud, Said, and Foucault. As Muslims, we believe in otherworldly spirits, but it is said that she was fabricated by an ancestor to ward men off the streets during the night’s ungodly hours. If she were nonfictional, I would have liked to meet her. I am aware of her reputation for attracting and murdering men who roam in the night, seeking to fulfill their desires. I am not afraid of her. For all I know, the men she kills deserve it, for no well-intentioned man would chase after a woman in the middle of the night. She may belong to the ill-omened jinn world, but she is nevertheless a woman. And the world tends to villainize women.

 Umm al-Duwais is not different from the rest of us.   

* * *

I enjoyed jinn stories and horror movies from a very young age. My favorite horror film was The Grudge and its sequels, a U.S. American remake of a Japanese movie about a cursed home, haunted by a mother and her son who died victims of domestic violence.  I watched the first three films as a child in my grandparents’ home with my younger uncles and aunts and little cousins. We enjoyed making a spectacle out of those who flinched at jump scares and kept count of how many times one of us showed fear. 

The movie’s antagonist, a Japanese woman who becomes a ghost after being killed by her husband, has skin the color of snow and drags her long, black hair as she croaks towards the victims who end up entering her home. My younger brother couldn’t stand the image of her; she gave him nightmares for at least a month. All the kids in the family referred to her as ‘al-jinniya’. No one ever thought about the abusive husband who killed her and turned her into the jinniya she was. Whenever we stayed up to watch the movies, Yadoh would wake up for her 3 AM snack (the reason behind her high blood sugar levels, we later discovered), and she would trudge over, as al-jinniya does, to the majlis where we all nestled together to watch films. Every night, my grandmother reminded us that the night did not belong to humans.

"الليل مب حق البشر"

“The night is not for humans.” 

I remember wearing my long, messy dark hair around and in front of my face, imitating the jinniya. I twisted my joints in unpleasant ways and dragged my body like a corpse as I hovered behind my brothers and cousins. I was always referred to as a jinniya, maynoona, or sahra by the other kids in the family. Family members referred to me as “kisha”, meaning a person with messy, ungroomed hair, and my younger uncles made a game out of giving us nieces and nephews mean and embarrassing nicknames. We defended ourselves by reciprocating the profane names. I remember being a very sensitive child, and that is probably why I was an easy teasing target.  

Perhaps, horror movies empowered me to reclaim hurtful  nicknames like kisha and maynoona. I find an opportunity to use those labels to get them to fear me instead. In order to do that, I had to demonize myself into a mindless jinniya. The more I scared other kids, the more they got taunted for their weakness, and the less I was mocked for my messy hair or my non-feminine Arab/Persian features. Today, I realize how much I used – and still use – my joy and love for horror as a defense to appear strong and fearless in the face of a world that constantly villainizes women. 

* * *

My family and I sat together on the sand, overlooking Sharjah’s beach for a late evening dinner. We each had one Turkish shawarma sandwich – a ten dirham meal the length of wrist to elbow. Baba, sitting cross-legged on the sand, his white wizaar peeking beneath his white kandoora, announced the beginning of a story I’ve heard endless times. “Kan ya makan, fee qadeem el-zaman!” I was probably nine years old.

My ears perked up. I had already memorized this story of the demon girl, but I never grew tired of hearing it. That night’s account in particular was my favorite retelling. My mother kept my baby brother, 4 years old at the time, close to her side; he wasn’t brave enough to listen to scary stories, surrounded by darkness. My slightly younger brother by two years sat on Baba's right side and I on the left, extending his bony legs towards the shore. The waves washed over our senses.  

كان يا مكان في قديم الزمان، كان في عايلة كبيرة. أم وأبو وبيت مليان أولاد. ولا بنية وحدة

“There was, oh what there was, in the oldest of days and ages and times, a big family. A mother and a father and a house full of boys; not a single girl.”

Kan ya makan. There was once a big family. A mother and a father and five boys and an empty pink bedroom. The family dreamed of a baby girl in the house, occupying the emptiness that the parents felt with a home full of unruly boys. After giving birth to the first two boys, the following three attempts were in hopes of being blessed with a girl. The third, fourth, and fifth came into the world, and the couple could not afford another failed attempt; they had one remaining empty room in the house, already decorated with floral wallpaper and butterflies hanging from the ceiling and a life-size toy gazelle. 

You must understand that the mother was especially desperate. She was one woman in a house of boys; she needed a companion. Someone to tend to her when she was older with the same motherly eye she had been unconditionally given. And so, her husband agreed for one last try.

الأم كان عندها فرصة أخيرة إنها تيب بنية صغيرة جميلة حبوبة. بنية نفسج، يا ميثاء.

“The mother had one last chance to bring a small, lovely, beautiful girl. A girl like you, Maitha.”

The mother travelled a long distance to a foreign town, where a witch hid in her lair and was only pursued by the malicious and the desperate. She searched for days for this witch, growing hungrier and more tired as time passed. After days of relentless wandering, she managed to find a hut, cocooned in a swarm of wild Nakheel trees next to an oasis, which she later discovered to be the witch’s hiding place. The mother did not have to explain herself; the witch, with a long black cloak covering her hair and body and a golden burqa covering her nose and lips, had already found the mothers’ solution. She silently handed it to the mother, who drank it without a single question.

الأم شربت الشراب ونامت. نامت نوم عميييييق ولما نشت شافت عمرها في بيتها ويا أولادها وأبوهم.

 وبعد تسع شهور، وصلت البنية.

“The mother drank the potion and slept. She slept a deep sleep. And when she woke up, she found herself in her house with her boys and husband. And nine months later, the girl arrived.” 

A baby girl with big eyes and a pleasant smile was born nine months later. The parents welcomed their little girl with divine love. They shaved her head and recited the call to prayer in her ear. She did not cry when she came out of her mother’s womb, nor did she cry when her father repeated the words Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar in her ears. And so, the family returned to the house, complete. 

لكن ما كانوا يدرون إن النعمة، كانت في الواقع نقمة.

“But they didn’t know that a blessing was, in fact, a curse.”

Baba’s voice dropped a few decibels every time he arrived at this part of the story. This brought  us closer to him, our bodies leaning in towards his towering figure. He turned to look at me, his eyes lingering  around my curiosity: 

The little girl, a product of malicious and dark magic, came with a cost. The mother had challenged God, and God punishes those who commit blasphemy. Everyday, the family awoke to food disappearing from their cabinets. First, it was the big bag of rice. Then, it was the frozen stock of dates, stored for the Holy month of Ramadan. Then, it was the sugar and the salt and the cardamom and the saffron. The parents consistently restocked their food, but the more they bought, the less they had. They barred their doors and windows, but somehow, the supposed thief/stray cats/homeless person continued to steal from the house.  

What baba always left out, until the very climax of the story, was that the beautiful little girl was born with a full set of teeth. 

And so, the story goes. The brothers found out first, and after a week of disbelief, the parents too came to terms with it. The girl continued to grow, and her appetite grew as well. She ate raw chicken and sunflower seeds and whole apples, but only when everyone was asleep. The family tried to assign one member to stay awake each night, but no one ever succeeded in staying up. It felt like witchcraft that they ended up fast asleep every night, exactly at 3 AM. 

They knew: they would have to sacrifice her for God’s forgiveness. But she was their only baby girl. Soon enough, her appetite would grow so large that the food in the kitchen would not suffice. 

She ate and she ate and she ate. Nothing ever satisfied her. She swallowed her entire family whole. She feasted on the neighborhood’s souls, and soon enough, she was all alone in an empty, bloody, quiet town. 

بنت الساحرة، انتهى بها المطاف وحيدة.

“The witch’s daughter – inevitably born a witch, as well. Now deserted and alone.”

***

In many Emirati folk tales, women are used as devices. Sometimes, as devices that fulfill a purpose for and towards men in the community. Umm al-Duwais, quite evidently, was a device used to keep young men off the streets during late hours. She was the fictional scarecrow, planted in the minds of every young man too troubled to sleep when God lowered the blinds on the deserts of what once was the Trucial States.

And so, the story goes. She is beautiful, she is scary, she eats sinful men alive. That is all we need to know. The imagination fills in the necessary details, and she fulfills her purpose.  My grandmother was the first person to tell me this story. My father brushes over her when we reminisce about  jinn stories. My mother, who fervently feels the presence of jinn whenever she enters a space that feels “heavy and suffocating”,  she wards her away with prayer whenever she enters the room through our zealous storytelling. I, on the other hand, think and talk about her more than I should. I reshape her nonexistence in my mind and on paper, manipulating her identity and giving her story a depth that she is always deprived of.

She was born – or perhaps, fabricated – in Ras Al Khaimah, where all the notable first jinn gained their fame. Today, she makes a home out of the abandoned houses in the Emirates, spending as long as it takes to finish the books old tenants left behind. She is old friends with bu Darya, the spirit that haunts the Gulf’s waters, even though they have nothing in common. She writes many letters and essays on the books that she reads, which she leaves behind in the houses she temporarily inhabits. We have that in common: we write, and we leave our creations behind when we are done. We walk away, because that is easier than confronting our realities.

Like my mother, I always had a strong intuition about the unseen spirits around me. I hold my breath when I walk into rooms where they are heavily gathered, often feeling my heart beating faster and the hairs on my body rising. I once saw my little brother’s qareen, fast asleep to my left and my real brother to my right, one unusual night in our childhood, when we had  fallen asleep in front of the TV.  I’ve heard things: knocks coming from within my closet, the call to prayer at two in the morning, my father’s voice singing Fairouz in the hallways when he was away on a business trip to Saudi.

My grandmother tells me that Umm al-Duwais is fictional, but my intuition tells me otherwise. She travels with me and through my memories. She seeps into my writing and the counseling sessions I spend grappling with my womanhood. She helps me heal. I rarely listen to my intuition, but when it comes to her, I do not have a choice but to believe.

Artwork by Noor Althelhi