Qareen

The qareen ("companion") is, in Islamic belief, a jinn assigned to every human being. The Quran uses the word at 43:36, where turning from the remembrance of God brings a shaytan as an inseparable qarin; and at 50:23 and 50:27, where at the judgement the person's companion presents them and then disowns them, protesting "I did not make him transgress, but he was himself far astray." A well-known hadith states that every person has a qarin assigned from among the jinn (and an angel), and that even the Prophet had one, though his had submitted and prompted him only to good.

In popular belief the qareen whispers toward wrongdoing, may cause bad dreams, jealousy or discord, and is sometimes blamed for a person's besetting faults or for a spectral "double." The qareen thus gives the abstract idea of temptation a concrete, personal form, an unseen counterpart accompanying each individual through life and testifying against them at the end, and it belongs to the same Quranic order of the jinn as the ifrit, distinguished by its function rather than its power.

The core report is short. Asked about it, the Prophet is recorded as saying that every person has a companion appointed from among the jinn, and when the companions asked whether this applied to him as well, he answered that it did, but that God had helped him against his, so that it submitted. The Arabic of that last clause carries two readings, one in which the companion itself became Muslim and one in which the Prophet was made safe from it, and both are discussed in the commentary tradition rather than one being obviously correct.

Around that report a large body of folk practice grew, and it varies widely by region. The qarin is held responsible for whispered suggestions, for bad dreams, sometimes for a person's more troubling impulses, and in some traditions a person has a qarin of the opposite sex. Practitioners in several parts of the Muslim world treat the qarin in the context of healing and protection, and those traditions are living and are practised now.

The distinction worth holding is between the scriptural and hadith material, which is narrow and specific, and the folk elaboration, which is broad and local. Western writing on the subject regularly presents the second as though it were the first. An atlas can record that both exist, that they are not the same, and that the practical traditions belong to the communities that keep them.