Benzīn al-jinn
continuing to search for a name for oil
Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce in public a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.
Thanks to Khalid from Subliminal Jihad for recommending Knot of the Soul by Stefania Pandolfo, and answering endless pestering questions on Arabic philology. You should subscribe to SJ if you like well-researched, 3-hour deep-dives into topics like the Liberian civil war, cryptids, cybernetics, religion, Credence Clearwater Revival, or Khrist Koopa.
I have been hunting for other ways to replace the phrase “oil, coal, and gas,” which I find intolerably clunky and imprecise when writing at length on the subject. Previously, I used Negarestani’s [d]ead [g]od or the Zorastrian Druj. I noted that Cyclonopedia doesn’t mention jinn, and I respect the author’s intelligible lacunae.
Jinn are beings of smokeless fire who live here with us in the sublunary Earth. They can be acted upon by humans, and act upon us, while also remaining unchanged / conserved. They are mentioned in the Qur’an 32 times in 31 verses.
In Arabic, each time the two letters jim and nun occur together, as in jinn, it conveys the meaning of hidden / unseen / veiled.1 Jannah refers to Paradise and means “garden,” for heaven is pictured as a shady garden, and also one unseen. Janīn is the fetus in the womb, because we do not see it. Insanity, junūn, shares this root because of its association with jinn. In her book Knot of the Soul, Stefania Pandolfo explores this association, speaking to a man she refers to only as the Imam:
“The Imam outlined the two major causes of insanity in the approach of the Quranic cure, al-mass shayṭani, ‘the demonic touch or demonic infringement,’ and siḥr, ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery.’ The first was the harmful bond that jinn established with humans on the mode of encroachment and occupation; the second was the result of a deathly human intervention, a “machine of destruction,” as the Imam put it, a machine that was operated and kept running with the fuel (benzin) of the jinn. The machine of siḥr was both ancient and contemporary; it remained active across generations as a deathly transmission, and could live on “until the end of times,” he said, if no attempt was made to stop it. It was by far the most dangerous cause of mental illness, and intermingled with somatic conditions to the point of an uncanny indeterminacy.”
Mental illnesses, especially those considered “psychotic” in psychomedical terms, are the results of these “harmful bonds” between man and jinn. And then there is siḥr, which is the action of the jinn on the world at large. Disorders of mood—depression, anxiety—can be caused by the general degradation of the world and its hope, rather than a direct invasion of the perceptions of a person. That degradation, the general crisis of meaning and affordability at the end of the world, that war machine that has extinguished so much life in the Middle East and everywhere else, is entirely a product of the exhumed jinn we call fossil fuels—as is gestured towards by the Imam’s careful word choice:
When the Qur’an says fuel, usually referring to the fires of hell, the word used is waqūd. For example: “Fear the Fire fueled (waqūduhan) with people and stones, which is prepared for the disbelievers” (2:24). But Pandolfo’s Imam is choosing his words carefully, and instead used benzīn (or banzīn. Pandolfo omits the diacritic), which is imported to the language from the German benzin, meaning petrol/petroleum (as opposed to the English benzene, which is a specific petrochemical but shares the root). The Imam left no room for ambiguity; if he was talking about “fuel” in a generic or metaphorical sense, he would have said waqūd. But he didn’t—he said benzīn al-jinn . The fuel of the jinn is petroleum-derived. Pandolfo’s Imam has seen a historically-specific machine of siḥr that would have been un-thinkable in the Prophet’s (PBUH) time. This “machine of destruction” fueled by benzīn creates the context of depression and anxiety. In these so-called neurotic conditions (in opposition to psychotic) the patient is not possessed by a jinn, but rather immiserated by a machine that is fueled by them.
Jinn, in both pre-Islamic and Islamic understandings, are bound with humans by our commonalities: we both have free will, we both are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, and so on, and we both live down here, on the surface of the world. Fakhr al-din al-Razi (who died 606 years after the Hijrah / AH) concluded that jinn are among us; they listen to what we say, and understand it. They can become visible in the manifest realm at will. Their beliefs and agendas are as diverse as our own, but there are some, led by Iblis himself, who take a distinctly anti-human stance. And yet, it must be pointed out that Jinn are not demons, and certainly not all jinn are allied with Shaytan.2
Jinn are our neighbors in the ontological realm, they live here with us, and they can see us, understand us, and interfere in our affairs. Ibn Qayyim al Jawziyya (751 AH) tells us of the world of spirits (ʿālam al-arwāḥ) that surrounds and permeates the material realm, and that can interact with and shape the manifest realm, and does so quite frequently. Illness, particular mental illness, is “a breach in the veil, an incursion of the invisible in the visible world.” The words we are given are demonic infringement.
Remember that electricity was rarely seen in Ibn Qayyim’s day. Lightning, of course. But any one of our technologies fueled by benzīn would seem bizarre and supernatural. For us, benzīn is the unremarkable landscape of our daily routines, and it is now un-thinkable to be without it—even the fossil fuel industry buys ads on YouTube to remind us that this is the case. Perhaps we live in a visible world that is saturated by such demonic incursions and breaches, each ignition a small illness.
In my own interpretation, Jinn are dissolved in oil, hidden between the bonds of a hydrocarbon molecule; and they are also functionally always hidden within some piece of infrastructure, either pipeline or tank.
Benzīn al-jinn are not the only manifest jinn. If they are in oil, they must also be in faḥm (coal) and ghaz. Moreover, hydrocarbons are far from the only type of molecule with high-energy bonds. There are very strong jinn that live in high-energy Nitrogen bonds. This is the source of every artificial explosion in war or peace, and also directly responsible for at least forty percent of the calories in the world food system. But those nitrate jinn owe their very existence to benzīn. Without benzīn, that nitrogen would have remained trapped in the low-energy bonds of atmospheric N2. Remember also that benzīn al-jinn can become an immortal, shapeshifting resin: plastic.
We can only directly see these Jinn when they are burned; we see their effects. But they were always there, within the material: they are what makes the material a fuel. The flame is there, even when it is only a potential; energy stored in chemistry. Invisible / smokeless fire.
The Qur’an says,
On the day when He shall muster them all together; “Company of jinn, you have made much of mankind.” Then their friends among mankind will say, “Our Lord, we have profited each of the other, and we have reached the term determined by Thee for us. (6:128-130)
We have profited (is'tamtaʿa) each of the other. Benzīn al-jinn have utterly remade the human experience from what it was before industrialization. It has remade humanity into the lords of the earth, the destroyers of nature itself. Lifted us from animalism—from living like animals, in the colonizer’s tongue. Although we remain animals, and always will be. The process added energy and warmth to the atmosphere, creating this world of constant cataclysm, of constant cataclysmic opportunistic markets.4
And in that crisis called modernity, the jinn were freed from their prison. They now live out in the air, free to capture & retain solar energy & hasten the Tellurian Omega. They are now assured of a reliable flow from obscurity underground to radical power aboveground. Now that it is lit, the ceaseless flame can never be extinguished—not while there are people upon this earth. We’re not going to forget how internal combustion engines work.
Yes, we have profited each of the other. Not all of us, but certainly the few who get to make decisions about such things. We can say that the elite of modernity entered into a pact with the jinn of benzīn. The terms of that pact are mediated by meta-human entities with inhuman compound names like Aramco. We—you and I—are made to be complicit in such arrangements, but we have no power in them. Some Jinn and some men have profited each of the other, and now we are nearing the end of the term on this earth determined by the Lord for us.
Jinn each have their own personalities and make their own choices. They can be devout Muslims if they so choose. They were on this earth long before humans, and they are vastly more numerous than us. However much our population grows, there will always be more jinn. But they can die. They can also transform.
The benzīn al-jinn live not in the atoms themselves, but in the atoms’ relationships to each other. Theirs is a once-abstracted world where power is manifest in positioning and orientation. And there lives the thing which can be neither created nor destroyed: energy. It is in the pattern of the electrons’ orbit(s) around nuclei that create chemical bonds; the contained movements of electrons that contain the energy of a covalent bond, the flow of electrons from one atom to the next that makes electricity. These are ambiguous spaces, more probabilities than events, dependent upon the spin and mass of a thing which is both particle and wave and maybe something like an interdimensional string. This where Jinn can hide in the manifest world. Benzīn al-jinn are a type of fire that can move in and out of the realm of human perception, changing forms and becoming more and less visible as they move through a trophic hierarchy(ecosystem), or modern economy.
In most Islamic traditions Shaytan / Iblis is a jinn. He didn’t fall from anywhere: he just switched sides when he refused to bow to Adam. Even the angels, supposed to be better than both jinn and man, bowed to the first man, because they saw in him a reflection of the glory of Allah that even they lacked. That certain divinity that comes from manifesting in the material realm, from being real, from being ourselves. Jinn are said to lack this quality, but maybe Iblis felt that he did have it. Maybe he understood—as we didn’t know yet—that there are jinn out here in the manifest, buried and dissolved in organic chemicals, and now in our walls and devices and plastics.
That refusal to bow marked a political realignment among the jinn. A formation of an anti-human party. Of course, many did not join—most jinn are kind and well-intentioned, same as most humans. We are told of the jinn who studied the Qur’an with the grand jurist ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597 AH). But each jinn and jnun had to make the decision on their own. The taxonomy of jinn is not stable or universally recognized, and includes other types of jinn such as Marid, ghūl, Hinn, Ifrit, and more. Perhaps benzīn al-jinn are a separate type from these others, a new type, or perhaps benzīn al-jinn are made of a diversity of these types. Perhaps there are certain reservoirs that are dominated by factions of Iblis’s shaytanic coalition, but other pools of oil, perhaps oil-saturated shale formations, that are dominated by secular jinn, or greedy jinn, or Cowboy jinn or Yankee jinn. Perhaps some benzīn al-jinn are ghūls, a type of jinn known to live underground and eat corpses from their graves. Or perhaps they are only distant cousins. I have no access to the political alignments in ʿālam al- arwāḥ or the al-ghayb (the Invisible). But they can choose to become perceptible at will. Perhaps Patillo Higgins did smell a jinn when he visited Spindletop with his prepubescent mistress.
In case you’ve been meaning to return to the Nitrogen essay at Apocalypse Confidential to finish up your read, here’s the link. The internet is a hot mess right now, so if you like what I’m doing here, tell a person or two. This will be it from me for a while, I’m going to be rerereaudioreading to Gravity’s Rainbow on StumbSmack with Andrew, I encourage you to join us. I find it necessary to return to the source periodically, and for better or worse, that book is the source for me. Do it — go on the used book sites and bid up copies of the 760 page editions, don’t buy the new splatterpaint edition: they re-keyed the whole manuscript for that, and I found at least one place where there’s a phrase within a long sentence that got lost, just disappeared out of the text. So the text is degrading generation-by-generation.
When people spell the word “djinn” they run the risk of partially obscuring this meaning. There is only one J-sound consonant in Arabic, so the “dj” doesn’t serve to distinguish it from another letter. Rather, the old British orientalists transliterated the letter jim to “dj” every time. They spoke of “djihad” and “hadjdj” and so on. It’s time to drop the D — it only serves to otherize and Orientalize.
Islam, Arabs , and the Intelligent World of the Jinn by Amira El-Zein.
Translation found in El-Zein 16.
Parts of this graf have appeared elsewhere.
I found Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik to be an effective fable in this regard.