The Angels and the Geniuses

The Angels:

In the Islamic belief the angels are made of light and act as intercessors between God and men, being the most well known of them the angel Gabriel. Was he who taught to prophet Muhammad (SAWS) the Qur’an and also who disclosed to Maria the future birth of Jesus.

 The angels had not been endowed with free-will, being incapable to contest or to disobey God, existing only to serve Him and being able eventually to assume the human form (they do not get pregnant and they don’t have a gender). As such, to Muslims Satan could not be a "fallen or rebellious angel" due to the impossibility, a feature of angels’ nature, to disobey God. 

The Geniuses:

The geniuses or spirits are made of fire and possess, as human beings, free will. Muslims believe that the Qur’an was revealed for both human beings and geniuses and both creatures can accept or not this revelation. 

They believe that the geniuses can assume the human form or the form of certain animals as serpents, scorpions, etc., and that they are not necessarily bad, being able to be good and submitted to God.  Yet according to Islamic belief, they live on Earth in a parallel world being invisible to human eyes in their natural state. The Arab word "Jinn" is drifted from the verb "Janna" that means, “to hide”. In Islamic literature "Shaytan" or Satan is the name given to the unbelieving geniuses that rebelled against God.

The error of associating the geniuses of the Islamic belief with the magical geniuses of the stories as "A Thousand Nights" is common. The possibility of identification in the mythological or legendary field is possible, in the same way that it is possible to detect the belief in magical or malignant spirits in other cultures or religions, however, to restrict the Islamic concept of geniuses to the field of magic is a simplistic view. 

Text by Maria C.  Moreira & Marcia Vianna Gaspar.