Episode 309:
Twitter, Jinn, & the Great Conjunction with Dr. Ali Olomi

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

Today’s episode is the second of a pair centered on Islam, because THE Dr. Ali Olomi is here, and we are starstruck.

Dr. Ali Olomi a historian of the Middle East and Islam researching, writing, and publishing on Muslim communal identity in the post-caliphal context at Penn State Abington. His work focuses on how Muslims from the early to the modern period thought about themselves, their collective identity and imagined a global Muslim world. Doing that is all part of research that examines the deep roots of religious nationalism, Islamism, and the tension between imagined global religious community with local identity. He’s a twitter luminary—with over 50K followers, which is a galaxy’s worth for anyone let alone an academic—in part because of his work on Islamic esotericism, which includes monsters and jinn. He hosts one of IRMF’s always-listen podcasts, Head on History and we’re so thrilled he’s here!

As a reminder, this mini-arc looks like this:

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

This episode is really a doozy. We talked about Islamic studies, historical empathy and necromancy, medieval texts, jinn, astrology, Islamic science, sexism, Twitter, and more.

We think the episode’s t-shirt is Dr. Olomi’s claim that good historians are necromancers because:

“We do two things, we either raise the dead so that we can see that we're just like them. Or, we lay the ghosts of our past down, right? This is the work of decolonizing, this is the work of dismantling white supremacy, the ghosts that continue to haunt, right? That are- that are built into the machine. But the other component of us is to kind of reawaken the ghosts or the dead that have been silenced.” —Ali Olomi

Like we said last time jinn—and how we do or don’t talk about them—links to imperialism—because of course they do. How?

Well: one of the reasons jinn remains a ubiquitous feature of Islamic lore and religious text but absent from Western understanding is precisely because of imperialism. When Islam comes to be defined by white Christian imperialists, it is in the vein of “unmodern,” “backward,” “rebellious,” “insurgent.” Belief in or suggestion of things like “evil eye” “jinn” “ghosts” all sounds…superstitious, right? And if your whole community is racialized as backward, unscientific, premodern, unmodern, anti-modern, well, these kinds of beliefs, texts, and practices either ought to be hidden away or rigorously reformed or simply don’t fit the narrative—so they aren’t repeated.

Dr. Olomi agreed but said it differently:

“When I first started talking about the jinn, people were like what the F is this dude talking about, right? And so for me, talking about Islamic thought, particularly Islamic thought about cosmology and the world around is a really interesting way to understand how Muslims identified themselves, constructed identity, but also how they imagined 'the Other.' And so, the histories of science and religion offers us- offers opportunities to sort of examine the anxieties, the ideas, the beliefs of people, and the way that they interact with their world, the way they interact with other people. It's histories of empire, it's histories of colonialism. So when we talk, for example, about the jinn, we're also talking about what Muslims imagine exists outside the borders of their empires.”

The Great Conjunction also came up, because Megan is obsessed with it, a little.

Dr. Olomi said:

“The Great Conjunction is in astrological theory that was first developed by Mashallah Ibn Athari, a Jewish Persian astrologer in the Abbasid Caliphate, and then picked up about a century or so later by Abu Ma'shar, who was probably the preeminent astrologer of the medieval Islamicate world. And what it does is it divides up all of history into a series of conjunctions, that is planets aligning together, and specifically Jupiter and Saturn because they were the slowest moving planets, the most distant planets that they could observe.”

Primary Sources!

(the segment where we talk about how the episode’s themes affect us, as humans, because the “I” matters)

Homework!

(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)

Follow Dr. Olomi if you aren’t already—and here are some epic threads!

• On Jinn.

• On the jinn Aicha Kandicha.

• On good jinn.
  

Dr. Olomi suggested some fiction that does jinn and Muslim stories well:

• S. A. Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy is excellent (IRMF loves this, too)

• P. Djèlí Clark, A Dead Djinn in Cairo

What to get into Dr. Ali Olomi’s work beyond Twitter?

• Head on History podcast!

• “Jinn in the Qur'an,” in George Archer, Maria Massi Dakake, and Daniel A. Madigan, eds. Routledge Companion to the Qur'an (2021)

• “Women, Education, and Islam.” Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History, Edited by Susan De Gaia. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2018.

• “The Roots of Homophobia and Anti-Gay Sentiment in the Muslim World.” Duke University’s IslamiCommentary, 2016 

• “Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Beginnings of Salafism.” Great Events in Religion, Edited by Florin Curta & Andrew Holt. Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2016.

if you don’t know [Islam], now you know