Aliens in Islam: Jinn, UFOs & Life Beyond Earth | Religion Camp

1400 years ago the Qur'an described living creatures scattered through the heavens and some Muslim scientists and theologians believe that we've been seeing them ever since and we've just been calling them different things. They're generally invisible to the human eye, able to change their shape known for snatching people away at night and strong enough to build for a king. If this sounds like a UFO encounter to you, well you're actually not alone. Today we are diving into what Islam says about aliens, alien encounters, UAPs and other worlds. We're tracing a nuclear scientist who wanted to run all of Pakistan by tapping into the power of Jinn and later sat down with Osama bin Laden himself. And the story of another man who vanished from Medina came back years later with a tale about where he'd been and changed Islamic belief forever. So according to Islam, when people see lights in the sky are they seeing visitors from another planet or neighbors who've been here all the way. Well today, we're going to find out. So sit back, relax and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up dude and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me on this beautiful Sunday where we explore the most interesting, fascinating, cultural stories from every religion from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent is I try to figure out what everyone believes. There's billions of people on this planet, all of which have some type of, I don't know, philosophy about where we came from, where we're going. And I feel like it's my obligation to at least know the bare minimum about every single religion on Earth. Right, I feel like it makes me a better person just the more I know about what other people believe. Like for some guy living somewhere in the Bronx, Islam is the most important thing to him. Or someone else Hinduism is the most important thing or Judaism or their relationship with Christ. And to not know feels a little ignorant. So I'm doing my best to just try to be less dumb. Now today we're diving into a fascinating topic. But before we jump in, I just want to say thanks to you for tuning in because every time you click or comment or like any of our videos, you help tell the algorithm overlords, we're doing a pretty good job. And you keep the lights on at the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now this is also not possible without my good friend, the Greek freak himself, the Orthodox legend, the beast from the east, Greece, those bucking up and those. How are you? What's up everybody? How are you, my friend? You're good. I'm doing great. You expect me to cut you off. I did. Not today. I'm feeling quite good. What's different about today? I don't know. I just feel like we're just on a good level you and I, and I just don't want to, I just don't want to jam me up. You know, what if I wanted to talk about that? See that this is where you push it too far. You just, I give you an inch and you take a freaking kilometer. I felt it, you know? Now we're talking about UFOs specifically in Muslim theology. Now this is a fascinating topic and I'm sure not something you've, you know, maybe ever thought of if you're not Muslim, but it's a thing that's coming up a lot within like Christian theology, right? There's all this conversation about aliens, okay? UFOs, all the stuff that's happening in the zeitgeist. And as Christians, like I grew up Catholic, okay? And as Catholics, like we talk to each other and we're like, you know, what, how do aliens affect our belief system? A lot of people think that if aliens are proven that all religions of the world fall apart, not really the case. A lot of Catholics are just like, hey, if UFOs exist, if aliens are out there, maybe they're just other, you know, human being type things that Christ also died for. And maybe this all exists within God's greatness. Like if, you know, there's other worlds, why couldn't God create other planets with other beings on them that also have the same value as humans? This is the thought. And as, you know, time's gone on, a lot of Christians have debated this. But have you ever thought, what do Muslims think about aliens? We did an episode recently on Hindu cosmology and what Hindus think about aliens and they have a whole philosophy around it. But it's interesting, right? You think about a religion and you think, well, how do they deal with this very specific type of like, kind of strange esoteric topic? Well, that is why we're here today. What do Muslims believe about aliens? Are they allowed to? Does their theology suggest it? Suggest it? Have their scholars talked about this? And, you know, the possibility of this? Well, don't worry. I'm going to break it all down for you. Whether you are Muslim or non-Muslim, by the end of today, you will understand what the theological basis is within this religion. Now, let me just say up top. I'm not Muslim. I grew up Catholic. I'm Catholic to this day. So if there's anything I get wrong here, there's any words I must pronounce. My apologies. I'm not trying to be disrespectful. The whole purpose of the show is me trying to explore topics in good faith, which had we done a different name. That would have been a great name for this podcast in good faith. But that is just what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to understand where they are at. So what's interesting is that there's actually some conversation about this. There's really interesting bits from the Quran, specifically that suggests yes, right? And this is something that we should kind of reckon with. So let's look at them. There's actually one verse from the Quran that alien hunters always point to first, okay? It's in chapter 42, Sarah, Al-Shura, verse 29. And in a translation by this guy, Mostafa Qatab, it says this, "And among his signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth. And all living beings he disperse throughout both. And he is most capable of bringing all together whenever he wills." Hold on. You hear what that's saying? All living things he disperse through both, the heavens and the earth. And he's capable of bringing them together whenever he wills, the heavens and the earth. That kind of sounds like it's making a claim, okay? Life isn't just down here. It could be out there too. And that last line, God or Allah bringing all of it together, it sounds like kind of a meeting of these two worlds. Well, we can't come to that conclusion so quickly. The key word here in Arabic is daba. And if you kind of look at it next to the major English translations, you get creatures or living creatures or living beings, moving creatures. It's tough to always find a perfect translation. But this is how translators will do stuff. One translation will even say crawling things. And each one of these translation kind of gives different vibes. Essentially, a daba is something that moves, something that walks or like creeps along. So to be clear, what the Arabic does not say is like definitely alien civilization. Like it doesn't describe planets or spaceships or like little gray men or anything like that. So the question now is what kind of creatures do you picture when you hear that term throughout to both? Well, for most of Islamic history, the answer was nothing close to aliens. So take Ibn Qathir, a 14th century scholar whose commentary on the Quran is still one of the most widely read and all of the Muslim world. And when he gets to this verse, he lists exactly who these creatures are. Angels, humans, Jin, and all the animals in all their forms, languages and natures. So yes, Ibn Qathir absolutely believes that there are beings in the heavens, they're just angels. And that line about God bringing all of it together, well, for him, that's the day of resurrection. When God or Allah gathers every creature from first, basically the first and the last and judges between them. So to him, it's not like first contact of aliens coming to earth. He's talking about kind of the end of the world. Now remember, that is interpretation because here's where things get a little bit messy. In 1987, a man named Mirza Tahir Ahmad gave a lecture in Zurich, Switzerland. And this guy is pretty important. He was the fourth caliph, basically a spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. This was a Muslim movement founded in 1889 in what was at the time, British India. And by the way, just like a real quick aside, many Muslims, specifically like the majority of like Sunni Muslims or many Sunni Muslims, don't accept the Ahmadiyya as a part of like mainstream Islam at all. That's like a whole separate episode on its own. We don't really have time to get into it today. But just to be clear, if you meet like a, you know, just your average Sunni Muslim guy, they might not see Ahmadiyya or respect this, this leader as a, as like a resource on Islam. But regardless, in that lecture that he gave, he eventually turned it into a massive book called Revelation, rationality, knowledge, and truth. And it was published in 1998. And one chapter has a very direct title. It is titled the Quran and extraterrestrial life. And he looks at this verse and it's basically the mirror image of Ibn Kathir. So he basically argues that daba means physical creature, something that moves along the ground, not a bird, and not a fish, and not a spiritual being. And Arabic he says, you'd never call an angel or a ghost a daba. So if there are daba in the heavens, then according to him and his interpretation, they are physical and that there is perhaps biological life out there in space. And according to him, the verse doesn't just allow for it. In his interpretation, it is declaring it. And then he goes one step further. That phrase about bringing all together, jam ihim in Arabic, he reads it as a prophecy. Basically that life on earth and life out there will one day meet like maybe face to face, maybe through some type of, you know, communication. He doesn't claim that it's happened yet. He actually ends the chapter hoping that he lives long enough to actually see it. So just to recap, okay, that one word in Arabic in the Quran, daba. Two different scholars. One says daba includes angels and jinn. The other says that it can't. Now one reads the gathering as, you know, judgment day. The other reads it as actual first contact with extraterrestrial beings. And that debate is actually still going on to this day. So just a few years ago, 2024, an academic book called Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life edited by Shauyib Ahmad Malik and George Matthias Deaderman made a point of saying that there's no single Islamic position on aliens. The introduction even quotes a Muslim astronomer Manaza Alam who believes that the Quran flat out states that life does exist elsewhere in the universe. And that's like a real sincere reading. It's just not consensus amongst all the Muslims of the world. Now the idea of other worlds is not new, however. The idea of other worlds is actually pretty documented within Islamic history. So like medieval theologians like Fakir Al-Din Al-Razi, he died in 1210, and he, and a lot of, you know, his work was associated with debates over whether God could have created more than one world. Now, again, to be clear, these guys lived in an Earth-centered universe, inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy. They were not picturing like exoplanets. They were asking a theological kind of philosophical question, like how far does God's creative power go? And then Shia tradition, which is sort of the other kind of school within, you know, mainstream Islam. We did a whole episode on Sunni in Shia splits. Most Muslims are Sunni, but there is a big minority of Shia. And they even have a kind of more wild interpretations. So there's a saying attributed to Imam Muhammad al-Bakir, recorded in the 10th century. He was recorded by the scholar Al Sadduq, who basically kind of asked this question. He says, "Do you think God only created this one world and nobody but you?" And then he answers his own question. God has created a million worlds and a million atoms, a million first man's, and we are living in the last of them. Now, that's usually read as a cycles of creation, like worlds that come before and after this one, not necessarily like a multiverse or like literal like aliens on Mars. But you can see why it gets interpreted that way. And there's even one more verse that comes up constantly. Chapter 16, verse 8. And again, the context really matters in this one. The verse will list horses and mules and donkeys. Animals that God gave people to ride and to admire and to utilize. And then it adds that God creates what you do not know. Now out of context, that sounds incredible, right? It's like, whoa, hold on. Like God creates, there are Allah creates all these creatures that we know, and He also creates the creatures that you don't know. Now, in context, it's in the middle of a passage about livestock. And sure, some scholars have read entire chapters asking whether that line points to alien life, but reading what you do not know as specifically aliens just is a it's a leap that a lot of scholars say that the verse doesn't justify. Now, just a quick side note, I know we've mentioned Sunni and Shia and kind of their interpretations. There's an even smaller but growing movement that kind of branched off of Islam. It's not accepted within sort of the mainstream Islamic community, but it's called the Baha'i Faith and its founder Baha'i Ula actually went way further than any of this, writing in the 1800s that every star has its own planets and every planet has its own creatures and different religions amongst them. But again, this is like a different sort of philosophy than Islam, but it's just a really interesting kind of parallel. So to sum up this section, the Quran describes living creatures spread through the heavens and the earth. Now, does that mean life and other planets? Well, serious Muslim scholars still argue about it, but while everyone's arguing whether the Quran hints at aliens, it describes other intelligent species outright, like a lot, like not humans, not angels, but beings that think and speak and have free will to an extent. And according to the text, they've been here the whole time. There is a moment in Islamic history and theology where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, interacts with Jinn and basically recites the Quran to him. And he basically disappears and none of his companions know where he is and they search all through the hills until the morning. Well, apparently they're not the only ones that were out there. So no one actually saw what happened in the hills outside of Mecca on that night. This story comes from Sahih Muslim, one of the most trusted Hadith collections in Sunni Islam. The Hadiths are generally described as just writings about the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him during his life and basically like a collection of like saying some things that he did. It's not on the same level as the Quran in terms of importance to Muslims, but it's really important when trying to understand the Prophet. So right at the start, someone asks, "Eben Masood, a very simple question, where any of you actually with the Prophet on what became known as the night of the Jinn?" And his answer is no. None of them were there. And in another version, he says that he wasn't there, but he wishes he had been. So what the companions experienced was the absence of the Prophet and the panic and the search. And then the morning after the Prophet walks back in and tells them that a caller from the Jinn had basically come and invited him and then kind of led and then basically he led them out to show them the traces that the Jinn had left behind and the remains of their fires. So according to the Prophet, the Jinn were there. And then there's a very specific detail, kind of almost like strange in how it's described. The Jinn asked the Prophet about food and he told them that basically every bone over which God's name has been mentioned would be provisioned for them. Which is why according to that same Hadith, Muslims aren't supposed to clean themselves with bones. They're the Jinn's food. I know that seems insignificant, but that tiny detail tells you a lot about how the tradition sees the Jinn. They're not ghosts, they're not just metaphors, and they're not like demons in the way that Christians have demons. Like sometimes they're evil, but also sometimes Jinn are good. Like they have free will. They're creatures with communities and appetites and questions. And the Quran itself describes a moment like this in two places. In Surah Al-Aqaf, chapter 46, a group of Jinn come across the Quran being recited. And the first thing they do is tell each other, be quiet and listen. And when it's over, they go back to their own people as basically like a warning. And they describe what they heard as a scripture revealed after Moses confirming what came before. And they urged their people and their community to answer God's call. And then there's a whole chapter named after them. Surah Al-Jinn, chapter 72, and it opens with the prophet being told through revelation that a group of Jinn listened to the Quran and said that they had heard a wondrous recitation. One that guides to what is right. And so they believed they heard the Quran and accepted it. And now let's just pause for a second thing about what that actually means. The Quran describes beings who are not human, who hear a message. They understand it. They have a religious experience and then convert or technically revert to Islam and then go home and preach it to their own kind. It's not like a monster story. It's a congregation of non-human beings on earth that are reciting and understanding the Quran. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee and then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good. But sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. And that is what got me thinking so seriously about testosterone. Like I think about testosterone a lot because it's the thing that makes me feel amazing. And that's why I've been taking Marsmen. Here's what I learned, your body can be making testosterone but a portion of it gets bound to a protein called SHBG. It's literally like the testosterone's there but you can't use it. It's in jail. Marsmen is designed to help you free up that lock testosterone so your body can better utilize what it's already producing. And what's great about Marsmen is there's no needles, no synthetic hormones. 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And for a limited time, the listeners of this show, if you are a camper, you are going to get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts when you go to men go to Mars dot com. That is men go to Mars dot com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you. Now let's get back to the show. So let's just break that down and talk about what these beings actually are. A lot of people in the West, then when they hear gin, they think maybe like a genie, they think like a blue guy with like a magic lamp and like three wishes. And it's true that the two words got tangled together when an 18th century friends translator of one thousand and one nights rendered gin as genie, but the carons gin are not like magical wish machines. So in Sarah Al-Raman chapter 55, it describes how humans in gin are made. Humans are created from dry clay, like pottery. And the gin are from a flame of fire, which a lot of translations will call smokeless fire. So these are beings created from a smokeless fire. And then a Hadith reported from the prophet's wife Ayesha also in Sahi Muslim kind of completes the picture. Angels were created from light gin from this smokeless fire and Adam from like we said this clay. So you have light fire and clay. These three different kinds of materials creating three different kinds of intelligent creation. Now to be clear, the light part about the angels comes from that Hadith, not from the Quran itself. And you'll see plenty of videos claiming like the smokeless fire means like plasma or electromagnetic energy or beings from another dimension, but the text says fire. And maybe that's an interpretation thing. Who knows? But everything past that is just how people kind of it's just kind of speculation around what these words mean. Now here's another big misconception. A lot of people in the West assume that gin are demons and demons. are inherently evil. So, Jin are inherently evil. Well, that's not really the case. In Surah Al-Jinn, the Jin themselves admit that some of them are righteous and some of them are not. They follow different paths and the ones who believe they say have nothing to fear from their Lord. So, they're kind of like humans in a way, just not human. Like, they have free will, they can be believers, they can rebel against a law, and they can have moral lives. And the most famous rebel of all, he's actually a Jin. So, in Surah Al-Khav, chapter 18, God commands the angels to bow to Adam, and they all bow, except Eblis. And the verse says it pretty plainly. He was one of the Jin, and he rebelled against the Lord's command. Now, that's a big one if you grew up Christian, right, where Satan is a fallen angel. In the Quran, Eblis is described as one of the Jins. Now, to be fair, classical Muslim commentators actually debated that since he was standing amongst the angels when the command came. Some say that the Jin were a kind of angels, some say that he was just in the room, but either way, the devil's rebellion doesn't make every Jin a devil. And then there's a part that makes all of this feel really eerie. So, in Surah Al-Araf, chapter 7, the Quran warns that Satan and his tribe see human beings from where you cannot see them. Now, again, let's be careful. That verse is about Satan and his company specifically, and it's a moral warning, not a scientific theory about invisibility or interdimensional beings, but it plants that idea that's going to matter a lot later in the episode, that there could be intelligent beings sharing our world and watching us while we can't see them at all. Now, for the record, the Quran is not a fan of humans trying to make contact with them. So, Surah Al-Jinn mentions men who used to seek refuge with Jin and says that it only made things worse, increasing them in burden and wrongdoing. So, to sum up this section so far, the Jin can hear, they understand, they believe, or they don't, they are moral, or they rebel, they can argue, they eat, and they have their own people to go home to. In other words, they sound a lot like us, except for one thing. According to the stories, they can do things that we cannot do. So, let me give you an example of what I mean. And don't worry, this ties into why many people see Jin as possible aliens. According to the Quran, King Solomon, or King Suleiman, had the most extraordinary workforce in history. And Islam, Solomon, the son of David, isn't just a wise king, he is a prophet, given a kingdom that no one else could ever have. So, in Surah Saba, chapter 34, God puts the wind under his command, and he makes a spring of molten copper flow for him, and working in front of him by the Lord's permission are Jin. And the Quran tells us exactly what they built. They built sanctuaries and statues and basins that were so huge, they are compared to reservoirs, and these massive cooking pots fixed in place. Now, that wind details where a lot of people's imagination will take off. Like literally, the Quran says, Solomon's wind could travel a month's journey in a single morning, and another month's journey in a single evening. It says the wind blew gently at his command wherever he wanted it to go. So, over the centuries, storytellers filled in the blanks. So, medieval stories of the prophet collections describe Solomon riding on a giant flying carpet big enough to carry his throne in his court and his entire army, lifted by the wind and cared across the world. Jewish legend has its own version of Solomon's flying carpet, and in Ethiopia, a 14th century text called the Kebra and the Ghost even claims that Solomon's sons flew home on a wagon that rode in the wind. Now, you fast forward to today, and ancient alien theorists have run with this, and they say that, hey, that was not a carpet, that was an aircraft. Some even point two mountains across Iran and Central Asia called Takt-e-Suleiman, which is basically Suleiman's throne or Solomon's throne, and they claim that those were his landing pads. Now, again, real quick, because you'll see a lot of this online, the Quran itself does not say that the Jinn built Solomon a flying machine. The wind is subjected to him, basically. The wind is under his command, and the Jinn build structures and objects. Those are two separate things in the text. The flying carpet thing comes from later storytellers, and then, of course, a flying aircraft that was for King Solomon and his kids is a much, much later leap that was developed by theorists and storytellers, kind of in like the medieval times. But the most famous Jinn feat in the whole Quran is in a different chapter. It's in Surah al-Namul, chapter 27, and here's basically how it goes. Solomon has sent a letter to the Queen of Shiba, a very powerful woman ruling a very wealthy kingdom. The Quran never actually names her, but later traditions will call her Bilqis, and basically now she and her people are on their way to him. So Solomon turns to his court, and he asks, "Hey, which of you can bring me her throne before they arrive?" And according to the Quran, a Jinn steps forward, and the Quran actually designates him as an "efreet among the Jinn." It's the only time where that word appears in the entire Quran, and in later folklore, it actually becomes the name for a very powerful fearsome kind of Jinn. And he says, "Hey, I'll bring it to you before you can even rise from your seat. I'm strong enough for it and you can trust me." But then, the very next verse introduces someone else, the one who had knowledge of the scripture. And this figure says, "I'll bring it to you before your glance even returns to you in the blink of an eye." And just like that, the throne is there. Now, there's a lot of retellings of this story that get a lot of the details wrong. People say, "Hey, if you look at the Quran, a Jinn teleported the throne in a blink of an eye." But if you read it closely, the "efreet makes one offer," and then a different being or a different figure, the one with the knowledge of the scripture makes the blink of an eye offer. So the Quran never says that second figure is a Jinn. Commentators have argued for centuries about who it was or what it was. A lot of them name a man called Asaf, which was Solomon's scribe, but the text doesn't really specify it. And look at how Solomon reacts when he sees it. He doesn't marvel at the speed. He says, "This is from the grace of his Lord to test me whether I'll be grateful or ungrateful." So far, the Jims seem the Jinn are basically superhuman. They can build monuments. They have great speed and strength. And then in Surah Saba, verse 14, Solomon dies. And no one realizes it. Here's how Solomon is standing over seeing the Jinn as they work, leaning on his staff. And right there, mid-shift, still propped up on that staff, he dies. And his body doesn't fall. It stays upright, leaning on the staff exactly where it was. And from a distance, he looks like he was just doing what he always does, like he's a king. He's standing there overseeing. Now the Quran gives us the staff and the fall, the detail that he died standing comes from the classical commentators. And some of them even say that his body stayed upright for an entire year. So again, that comes from later retellings. So according to the story, the Jinn just keep on working on the commands that he gave them, hauling and building and laboring away because as far as they can tell, the king is still standing there, leaning on his staff and watching them. And then a little creature of the earth starts eating that staff. Many translations call it a termite. And here's a fun little detail. The Arabic word that the Quran uses for that creature is daba. The very same word that we talked about at the beginning, that living creature thing. And they describe daba in the heavens. Well, they use that same word here to describe a creature eating away at the staff. So that tiny daba basically chews through the staff and it gives way and Solomon's body falls to the ground. And only then do the Jinn realize that he's dead. And the Quran delivers the punchline. If the Jinn had known the unseen, they wouldn't have stayed trapped in that humiliating labor. Think about that. Beings who can build reservoirs and move thrones across kingdoms, they couldn't tell that the man standing right in front of them had actually passed away and was just leaning on his staff. Now, this isn't a one-off either. Back in Surah Al Jinn, the Jinn described trying to reach the heavens to eavesdrop like they used to. Except now, the sky is filled with stern guards and flames. And anyone who tries to listen finds a flame waiting for them. And then they admit something really interesting. They don't know whether harm is intended for the people of earth or whether their lord intends to guide them. So in their words, like, hey, we don't know. Here's the real lesson of the Solomon story. It's going to be really important in a few minutes. Extraordinary power does not equal extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary providence or visions. Like Jinn can do things that human beings can't. But in the Quran's world, they don't have access to what is truly hidden. That is only known to Allah. And then there's an Arabic word for that hidden realm, the al-Gayb, the unseen. And near the end of Surah Al Jinn, God is described as the nowhere of the unseen who reveals it to no one except a messenger that he chooses. So al-Gayb isn't a place it's not out like past Neptune or something. It's knowledge that belongs to God and only gets revealed on Allah's terms. So al-Gayb isn't about distance. The unseen isn't something that you could eventually like build technology to get to. It's about what God has revealed and what he hasn't. So trying to keep our category straight because things get a little bit messy, okay? You have angels. Those are beings created from light according to the Hadith. You have Jinn. That is a separate sort of entity subclass created from this fire. A community with free will and faith and serious limits on what they know and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad. Well, some people have looked at everything we just covered, beings made from fire, hidden from human eyes with powers that we don't have and some of these later retellings of like flying carpets and they draw a very interesting conclusion. That when people see UFOs or have alien experiences or interactions, they might actually just be seeing Jinn. And one of the first people to to try to treat Jen like. physics wasn't a YouTuber or someone in like the UFO community, it was a decorated nuclear engineer. One of the men who helped build Pakistan's atomic program and actually sat down with Osama bin Laden. So August 2001, Kandahar Afghanistan, two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists sit down with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, I'm an al-Zawahiri. And what exactly they talked about is still disputed. The scientists said that they were there for humanitarian work like food and water and health care. But American intelligence was not so sure. Even the CIA director later called the reports about the meeting frustratingly vague. One of those two men was Sultan Bashir Odin Mahmoud. And years after he got anywhere near Kandahar, he had a theory about Jin. So let's just back on paper, Bashir Odin Mahmoud was one of the most accomplished engineers in Pakistan. He studied at the University of Manchester here in graduate degrees in control systems and nuclear engineering and joined the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. After India's first nuclear test in 1974, he was put in charge of Pakistan's early uranium enrichment effort until his rival, AQ Khan, pushed him out. And he went on to serve as chief engineer on the Kushab reactor. And in 1998, the government gave him one of the country's highest civilian honors, the Sitarah E-Mtiaz. And according to the New York times, he'd also published papers on Jin. His idea was that the Quran says Jin are made of fire. So why not use them as an energy source? He proposed that Jin could be tapped to solve the energy crisis, literally using the Jin power. I know it sounds wild, but in a 1988 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said that he thought that if we develop our souls, we can develop communication with them. And he insisted there was no conflict at all between Islam and science. But of course, this ruffled some feathers and not everyone agreed. That same year, the Pakistani physicist, Pervez Hoodboy, went after his ideas in a very tough public debate, slamming them in the whole concept of so-called Islamic science as ludicrous. And then in 1999, he took early retirement, founded a charity that worked in Taliban-run Afghanistan. And that's how he ended up in that room in Kandahar with Osama bin Laden. Now after 9/11, Pakistani authorities detained and interrogated him at America's request. Pakistan never charged him, but the UN Security Council sanctioned him in December 2001. And he's lived quietly in Islamabad ever since, writing books about Islam and science. Now, let's just set the geopolitics aside for a second because the Jin part reveals something really interesting. It takes a being from scripture, a being that the Quran describes as having faith and free will and a relationship with God. And it treats it like a natural resource, like fuel. It turns this religious question and description into a physics problem. And that move dragging something from the unseen world into the world of the physical, like measurable stuff is exactly what powers the modern theory that we're about to look at. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about ultra-focused pouches. Now, if you know anything about me, I love nicotine. I also love caffeine. Now, the thing that I didn't consider with nicotine is that around workouts, I'm actually doing myself a disservice because nicotine's a vasoconstrictor. It literally narrows your blood vessels, which gives you a little boost. You feel good, but it actually restricts oxygen delivery and it can raise your heart rate, which is the exact opposite of what I want when I'm going to the gym. And that's why I reached out to ultra. I literally saw them online and I was like, this is cool. So I reached out to them. And what I liked about them is that it's a nicotine free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. It literally uses neutropics and adaptogens to provide smooth energy and focus mental clarity without leaving me like overstimulated or feeling like I'm going to crash. So I put one in like five minutes before I work out or before I do a podcast or before I go do stand up. And if I feel calm, I feel steady. It lasts for about like one to two hours. My favorite flavor is watermelon, but the blue raspberry is making a real comeback. I love that one. And so if you want focused energy without nicotine or caffeine, I'm telling you ultra is the way to go. Ultra pouches are awesome. It is the guilt free pouch. Even if you just like putting in a pouch because it feels nice, ultra has something for you. New customers can even use the code camp, C-A-M-P to get 15% off at TakeUltra.com. That is TakeUltra-U-L-T-R-A.com for 15% off with the code camp. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about ultra. Tell them the market increased dose here at the campsite center. So in an essay last update in 2024, published by the Sapiens Institute, a Muslim educational organization, a writer named Imran Hussein lays it all out. The title, the gin hypothesis and modern UFO phenomena. So Hussein compares UFO and alien encounter reports with Islamic traditions about the gin. And he builds his case on four parallels. So the first is appearance. People who report alien encounters describe a bunch of different beings. So there will be little grays and like tall humanoids and glowing lights and creatures that look like, you know, a bunch of different things every single time, like reptilians or Nordics. And Hussein points out that Islamic tradition says that gin can take on different forms. So he argues shapeshifters could explain why the encounter stories are sort of all over the place. Number two is deception. Here he pulls in two big names from Western UFO research. Of course, Jacques Valle, a computer scientist and astronomer who back in 1969, he wrote passport to Magonia. This is a book basically comparing UFO stories of the modern day to old European fairy folklore. And then he also pulls in John Keel, author of the Mothman prophecies, who suspected that whatever was behind these encounters was messing with the people who had them. Hussein argues that trickster quality fits Islamic descriptions of these malevolent gin. And that gin in the malevolent sense are known to be very mischievous and deceptive and trying to fool people. And again, this is a phenomenon that's been described by people that have these experiences. The third thing he pulls up is abduction. So Hussein compares modern abduction stories to much older accounts of people being taken by gin. He cites a story attributed to Al-Behake and 11th century scholar about a man who vanished during the caliphate of Umar. And whose disappearance was later explained as an abduction by gin. So, you know, ancient alien theorists will hear about this gin abduction in the 11th century and say, Oh, that was obviously aliens. Whereas what this scholar is doing is basically saying, Hey, what you guys are describing as aliens on the modern day is actually gin the whole time. Now he draws a fourth kind of parallel. He talks about attachment. So in UFO circles, there's something sometimes called the hitchhiker effect. This is a claim that strange experiences will continue to follow people after an encounter. So a lot of people describe, you know, seeing like a UFO in the sky. And then for the next five or 10 years of their life, there's weird experiences that are happening, like pre-cognitive dreams or astral projection or, you know, other UFO encounters. Now Hussein compares that to Islamic traditions about possession and gins like attaching themselves to people and plaguing them for a long time. And then he goes after the obvious objection. Maybe the beings are gin, but what about the craft, these metallic discs and these triangles in the sky and, you know, like the tech tech shape and things showing up on, you know, military radar. Well, for this Hussein gives two possibilities. Maybe gin can take on inanimate forms or maybe the gin also have technology of their own. And to back up that second idea, he points to the gin as builders, the ones who worked for Solomon. So if they could build ravines and sanctuaries for Solomon, why couldn't they build their own craft? So we can actually watch the chain of this belief come together over time. It starts with the Quran saying that gin built sanctuaries and all of these basins. And if they're these skilled builders, then maybe they have advanced technology. And maybe that technology is what people are seeing in the sky. Now in fairness, Hussein says explicitly that Muslims are not religiously required to believe that all UFOs or alien encounters are gin. In his view, Islamic sources leave room for the extraterrestrial explanation as well. So even the guy making this argument isn't trying to call for official doctrine. It's just his hypothesis. And he's not the only one that 2024 academic book. It has a whole chapter by a Yub and Ilham Ibrahim on the Indonesian Islamic UFO community. This is basically an online movement building UFO theories out of the Quran. So this isn't unique to Islam either. In our Dead Sea Scrolls episode, we talked about the watchers from the book of Enoch and there are entire corners of the internet convinced that those are ancient astronauts. So whenever a religion sees unseen beings and a culture has flying saucers, someone's going to connect the two. So here's the theory basically summed up. Okay, UFOs are not new. They aren't even from outer space. They're the latest disguise of beings of gin that the Quran described 1400 years ago. The visitors were here all along. And it's a really fascinating idea. It's built on real scripture and actual folklore and actual reports from real people. But out of everything that Hussein puts on the table, there's one piece of evidence that's older than all the rest. And it's not a blurry picture. It's not like a blip on a radar. It is a man who stepped out of his house one night in the city of Medina and disappeared for years. And the story of where he went didn't just survive for 14 centuries. It became law. So one night in the city of Medina, a man stepped out of his house and never came back. This is the time of Umar, the second caliph of Islam. So somewhere around like the 630s or 640s AD. And the man's wife did everything that she could. She searched and she asked around and she tried to get help. But there was nothing. And a couple days turned into a couple weeks and turn into a couple of months and turn into a couple of years. And finally, she goes to Umar himself and asks, Hey, what am I supposed to do? And his answer was this, wait four years, like literally the number four. And so she does four years goes by and her husband is declared dead. And she mourns him and eventually she remarries. And then the man walks back into Medina completely alive. So Umar asks the very obvious question, Hey, dude, your wife's been looking for you where have you been. And the man says, the gin took me now, according to the story, he'd been abducted by gin and lived amongst them for years until one day, a group of believing gin like actual Muslim gin who submit to a law, they attacked his captors and took him prisoner themselves and then gave him a choice. Do you want to stay with us or do you want to go home? And he chose to go home. So they brought him back. So then Umar asks him some questions, Hey, what did you eat there? And the man says beans and any food that didn't have God's name spoken over it. And then he goes, well, what did you drink? And he names something that the Arabic sources call al-Jadaf. And to this day, scholars aren't really sure what that even is. Some say froth, some say like a desert plant, but then comes a really messy part. His wife is now married to someone new. So Umar makes a ruling. The returning husband gets to choose. He can take his wife back or he can take back the dowry that he paid when they got married. Now, here's a twist that makes this story so much more than just like, you know, a little kind of vignette from a hadith. The whole problem ended up in Islamic law. When jurists later worked out what a woman should do if her husband goes missing, like how long she waits before he's declared dead, what happens if he comes back, many of them pointed to Umar's ruling on this exact case. And so that four year waiting period became a standard position, especially in the malachee school of law. So for years, a story about a man abducted by gin actually helps shape how real Islamic courts handled real missing persons. Now here's why the story keeps popping up in the, you know, Muslim UFO community conversation. Just look at the details of it. He's taken at night. He's gone for a stretch of time that he can't really account for and returns with a strange story about being held by nonhuman beings and, you know, what they fed him and what he drank. It sounds pretty familiar, right? In 1961, a new hamster couple named Betty and Barney Hill report losing about two hours on a dark highway and later described being taken aboard a craft by these weird beings and then examined. And it became the first widely publicized alien abduction case ever in America. And it sort of became like the template for every abduction story that came since. So if you swap out gin for gray aliens, you basically got the same story separated by more than 1300 years. I mean, granted, you know, the time is a little different. Betty and Barney Hill only described being gone for a couple hours, whereas this guy in the Hadith describes being gone for a few years. But it's very similar, right? Like, if you swap out gin for aliens, the Hadith sounds like an alien abduction. But at the same time, if you swap out Betty and Barney Hill's story for gin, it sounds just like the Hadith. And that's exactly the argument that writers like Hussein are making that maybe it is the same story. It is the same experience as the same beings just with different words to describe them. But here's the core problem as simple as I can put it. These stories looking alike is not the same as these events were caused by the same beings. Stories of mysterious visitors and missing time and strange lights show up in cultures all over the world. That's literally the book that Jacques Vallet wrote and like when he was comparing UFOs to fairy folklore, like the similarity is real and it's worth studying and it shows up over and over again across millennia. It just doesn't prove the cause. So what does the science side of all this actually say? Well, in September 2023, an independent panel of 16 experts commissioned by NASA released a report on UAP and their conclusion was blunt. They found no evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin. Of course, right? Other people are going to say like, yeah, we don't have any evidence that it's aliens. The bigger problem that they said is data. The information needed to explain a lot of these sightings just doesn't really exist in a lot of these cases. So when a case stays unexplained, it usually means not enough data, not that something extraordinary happened or you know, that something completely normal happened and just says like there's not enough information to actually make a actual data driven decision on this. And there's one more test and this one comes from inside Islamic tradition itself. Remember King Solomon? The Jin couldn't tell their own king was dead and in Surah Al-Jinn, they admit they don't even know what God intends for the people of earth. So in the Quran's own framework, the Jin are powerful, but they're not all knowing. They're not of the same knowledge class of Allah. So then think about those modern encounter stories where mysterious visitors deliver like cosmic revelations, warning about humanity's future, or like trying to stop nuclear bomb testing or that we have to be good stewards of the planet or a secret knowledge about the universe. If you accept the Islamic framework, that should make you more suspicious of those messages. Because in that tradition, a being that shows up claiming to know the future is claiming exactly what the Quran says the Jin don't have. So either these aliens that are giving these revelations are not Jin or they are Jin that are being intentionally deceptive to somehow sway humanity. So to some things up so far, the Jin hypothesis is a fascinating piece of modern religious thinking. It's a real living tradition trying to make sense of a brand new cultural phenomenon with its own ancient categories. But you know, it takes an old story and a modern report and takes a line drawn between them and then kind of stacks them onto an answer that feels kind of obvious to those who believe. That Jin are real, then these modern alien stories sound a lot like Jin. But you know, it's not as intuitive or obvious to those who don't draw those lines. If you're not a believer in Jin, then both of these phenomena are still a little bit less explainable. Okay. Just for a second, forget like the blurry lights and like the radar blips and like the grainy videos and like all the stories people tell. Imagine the real thing like, hey, disclosure is officially true, like pretend that the government confirms that there is a living civilization of beings somewhere out there and they are sentient and intelligent doing stuff. What would Islam say to them? Now again, finding alien life could mean a bunch of different things like if a rover finds fossilized like microbes on Mars. That's one of the biggest discoveries of human history, but it doesn't change anything theologically. A microbe doesn't pray, doesn't, you know, need a prophet, it's not getting judged for its sins. So it fits right into that verse from the Quran that we talked about about living creatures spread through the heavens and the earth. The hard thing is like, okay, what if we find actual aliens the way people describe like graze or, you know, like reptilians or something like that? Like actual advanced beings who are capable of good and evil? Well, Muslim scholars are working on exactly that question right now. So in that 2024 book, Islamic theology and extraterrestrial life, it brings together Sunni and Shia thinkers, plus philosophers and historians and social scientists. And the editors are very upfront, they're helping direct an ongoing conversation, not trying to give the final answer. But the big theological questions are this, like what happens to the idea that human beings are special? How should we treat these other intelligent beings? And does salvation and submission to a law apply to these beings as well? So just take the first one. The Quran says that God has honored the children of Adam and made humanity a kind of steward on the earth. So if there are intelligent beings on other worlds, are we less special? Or was that honor always about this world? And maybe God has honored others with other worlds elsewhere. And then there's the more responsibility. If aliens exist and they can think, do they owe God the same things that we do? Would they need revelation or their own prophets? Or are they covered by the prophets on earth? One chapter by the scholar David Solomon Jellajel tackles exactly that through classical Sunni theology and law. Another by Shojib Ahmed Malik works through six possible conflicts between alien intelligence and Islamic belief. Now Islam already has a working example of these exact scenarios, okay? First is the Jinn, right? Think back to the night of the Jinn, a species that isn't human. Here's a revelation. Some believe some don't. They go home. The idea that God's message could reach non-human minds and hold them morally responsible. It's not like a modern add-on. It's been in the text since the seventh century. But that doesn't settle what an alien species would be. The Quran describes the Jinn very specifically in their origin and their history and their relationship to revelation. So you can't just copy and paste that onto all the species of the universe and the ones that the text never mentions. And that's honestly why scholars are writing entire books about this. But there's one verse that comes up again and again whenever Muslims talk about space. Surah Al-Raman chapter 55, "God addresses Jinn and humans together with a challenge. If you can pass beyond the regions of the heavens and the earth, then pass. But you won't, not without authority." So classical commentators mostly read this as being about judgment day, meaning nobody can escape God and God's perfect judgment. But either way, notice who's in that verse. You have Jinn and humans side by side, the two responsible species in creation. So Islam already imagined that we're not the only minds that God is talking to. The only question is how big is that circle really? And to answer that, we've got to go back to where we all started, right? That dark night, a group of frightened men searching the hills outside of Mecca and the traces of a fire that no one saw being lit. When the companions found the prophet that morning, they never saw what took him. They only saw what was left behind, proof that something or someone had been there and has already left. And maybe that's all any of us will get. Not the visitor, just the traces, a light in the sky that doesn't move the way that it should, a story passed down 1400 years, a verse that implies that there's more out there. There's a phrase that Muslims repeat every single day in every unit of every prayer. Abu Alamin, Lord of the worlds. Notice that. Not Lord of the world, Lord of the worlds, plural. For most of history, that meant angels and Jin and us as humans, different realms of creation layered on top of each other, kind of sharing the same kind of cosmic space. In the Quran's world, you can share a room with something extraordinary and just never know. A man steps out of his house in Medina and comes back years later with a story that people can't even see. They just see the remnants. A couple drives down a dark highway in New Hampshire and loses two hours that they'll spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. 13th century is a part two totally different vocabularies and cultures and yet the same quiet suspicion underneath all of it that the universe God made is bigger than any of us could have ever imagined. Bigger than telescopes, bigger than even just our categories of creation. Whether it's Jin or aliens or something completely different that we didn't have name for yet, we might not be alone out there. We might not even be alone right here on earth in this room. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief description of aliens in Islamic theology. I think it makes a lot of sense, right? It seems actually pretty similar to kind of the Christian position, like, okay, you have this entire phenomena where people are describing being abducted and having negative experiences with aliens, but also some of them having positive experience with aliens. And you could say, all right, well, many of these are Jin. Many of these abductions are beings that are coming and taking people, look at these hadith during the time of Umar, look at the night of the Jin with the prophet. Yeah, these beings can take you and bring you somewhere like maybe some of these UFOs are Jin. That tracks with Christianity saying like, hey, maybe some of these experiences are demons. Now there is still room to say, well, God can create other worlds while we're trying to put a limit on God. If you can create earth and make humans the stewards of earth, why couldn't he make a totally new civilization, a totally new planet somewhere else that's way, way far out there and put them as stewards of that? And it's also possible they could be very advanced and could be coming here. So maybe there are just other humans or other beings that God created that have some type of sapiens, so to speak. I mean, it leaves room for both and I actually think that's like a decent position to land at. If you're any type of religious person, like, if you're a religious person, you kind of have to believe in demons or Jin or angels or these types of like divine, like, sort of beings that interface with God. And if you believe in the omnipotence of God, then you also have to be open to other worlds. So I think both can be true. And you kind of just have to like scrutinize each individual case to determine which one is for you. Now, if you're not spiritual at all, then you're going to say like, well, obviously, it's not demons or Jin. It's just extraterrestrial or interdimensional. And I think when people are talking about those two things, it's like, well, it could be both. There could be interplanetary visitors coming down here that have a base under the ocean, but also there could be Jin coming from, you know, another dimension. The smokeless fire and plasma thing is really interesting because in like Christian like demonology, there's not really a description of like what the demons are made from. But the fact that they say smokeless fire and people connect that with plasma is fascinating because there's so much research and conversation right now being done around like plasma, having like sentience. That book, New Science of the Heavens, talks about this a lot of like, Hey, is it possible that plasma's moving and reacting in ways that describes some type of sentience as a possible that dark matter or plasma is actually like the consciousness of this, you know, nonhuman intelligence that's like dispersed throughout the universe and that it's all around us. We just can't measure it properly. It's an interesting side note. I'm not an expert on it, but I think it's an interesting little detail that I picked up. But yeah, it kind of tracks, I think with Christian theology pretty well, but I didn't obviously know prior to researching this, all of the details within the Quran and the Hadith that describe these kinds of things and how people talk about it. Obviously within the Christian tradition, we talk about Ezekiel's wheel within a wheel. We talk about, you know, different, you know, chariots of fire. We look at like ancient paintings and, you know, see these paintings as, you know, having like saucers in the background. And then from Catholic tradition, people talk about Mary and apparitions and obviously connect that with UFO lore. But it's interesting reading it from the Muslim perspective, because for me, not growing up, most of them, I'd never heard a lot of these stories prior to researching them. And now I can see like it's almost easier to see when you come from outside of it because I can, I know like UFO lore. And then when I read these stories from the Quran or from a Hadith, I can go like, oh, I can see why people do that. And it actually helps me understand why people interpret Christian revelations from that perspective. I've never grew up hearing about Mary and apparitions and then you hear about this woman showing up in Portugal and then the sun moving around and like crashing into the earth and like making this crazy display in front of thousands of people. If you don't, I heard that story from the Catholic position first since I was like a kid. And then hearing it in the modern time, kind of with like the UFO overlay, I was like, how do people get to this? But now I totally understand like, yeah, did if you only ever heard the story after already knowing about UFO stuff, then it's going to be very clear. But it's an interesting theory. I understand how people will get to this stuff. Again, if there's anything I missed, if you are Muslim or if you're a Muslim scholar or you are involved in like the Muslim UFO community, tell me if there's anything that I got wrong here. Again, I was not intending to be offensive. I was just trying to understand the perspective from that mindset as best I could. So there's anything I missed or anything that I didn't put in or anything I got wrong. Please drop a comment. YouTube Spotify. Read all of them. If there's anything you learned, anything that you were not aware of or if it gives you a better understanding how people come to these conclusions within a religious framework, please let me know. Drop a comment. YouTube Spotify. I love hearing from you guys and it makes me feel less alone in the world, you know, when I get to hang out with you and hear your thoughts and, you know, actually like interact and, you know, shop it up. It's pretty cool. Now great news. If you like talking about aliens and UFOs, well, we have a channel where we talk about that a lot. That is camp gag. And that's not all we talk about. We talk about mysteries and conspiracies and matters of the esoteric trying to understand what everything really means. And we dropped this episode twice a week over on the main channel. We also have a history channel where we go through all the craziest events and people of history from all time forever. That's where I try to understand everything that's ever happened. It's called history camp. And you can check it all out in the description. And we also have a secret society patreon.com/campgagnon where you get every episode of this show completely out of free bonus content that never goes to the public and also exclusive information about meetups like the one we didn't did in a Joshua tree. That was pretty fun. Great time. Great patrons out there. They were probably the best part of it. It was the best part by a mile. It was great. So everyone that came. God bless. Appreciate you all. And if you just like to rock with the religious vibe, well, you're in the right spot. This is religion camp. We drop these episodes every single Sunday. I appreciate you all for being here. Life is better with belief. That's what I say. So it's Sunday. Go to your mosque or your church or your temple or your good war or whatever you like to do. Just believe in something. All right. God bless you all. I'll see you next Sunday. Peace be with you. [BLANK_AUDIO]