humans. Yet humans are more rational, truthful, just, and faithful to their covenants, while jinn are more ignorant, deceitful, unjust, and treacherous.

The point is that practitioners of adjurations—quite apart from the fact that their adjurations contain polytheism and disbelief, which may not lawfully be used in adjurations or oaths—are often unable to repel a jinn. The jinn frequently mock them when they ask them to kill or imprison the jinn possessing a human being. They make them imagine that they have killed or imprisoned it, when this is merely illusion and falsehood. This assumes that the person who sees what they conjure up is truthful about what he has seen.

For they generally impart what they wish someone to know through unveilings and direct communication, if he is one of the devotees among the polytheists, the People of the Book, or the Muslim innovators whom the jinn and devils lead astray. As for what they show practitioners of adjurations and oaths, they produce a likeness of what they wish to make known. When the practitioner sees this likeness, he reports it. He may know that it is a likeness, or they may lead him to believe that it is the actual thing depicted.

When they want him to hear the words of someone calling to him from a distant place—for example, someone appealing for help to one of the misguided devotees among the polytheists, the People of the Book, or the ignorant Muslim devotees—one of his admirers may appeal to him, saying, “O my master, so-and-so!” The jinn then addresses him in a voice resembling that human’s voice. When the shaykh replies to him, that human answers in a similar voice. This has happened to a great many people, some of whom I know.