and the sending down of the Table laden with bread, fish, olives, and the like. Plainly, none of this proves—beyond all doubt—the specific nature of the possible; so on what grounds do you declare that such and such is what actually happened? Their speech here is identical to their habit of attributing every kind of seizure solely to an excess of black bile or phlegm. That explanation would hold only if the jinn did not exist in the first place. Yet the physicians have no evidence with which to deny the jinn, nor does anything in their craft preclude their existence. The early physicians—Hippocrates and others—acknowledged as much, saying merely that their art provides no proof to establish the jinn.

But ignorance of something is not knowledge of its non-existence, and the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The lack of an indicator for a given matter does not entail that the matter itself is unreal—especially when abundant proofs attest that the jinn do, in fact, overpower human beings. ʿAbd Allāh the son of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal said: “I once told my father, ‘The physicians claim that a jinn cannot enter a human body.’ He replied, ‘My son, they are lying; here it is speaking with the man’s own tongue!’”