Jinn

Jinn are imagined as unseen presences in the ksar and its granaries, guardians of a place understood to have been built for Muslims. In the accounts attributed to local elders, their supposed anger gives supernatural shape to unease about foreign residents and their conduct; the narrative leaves open whether anything more than rumor is at work.

Local Belief and the Foreign Residents

The old people whisper that the Jinn are outraged by the infidels living in a Muslim-built ksar. At night, the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchens is described as the sound of supernatural rages. Their story makes domestic noise seem like evidence of a hidden conflict, joining the uncanny to the residents’ judgment of the foreigners’ presence.

That judgment is entangled with a contradiction: the elders are said to disapprove of the foreigners while also admiring their wealth and cosmopolitan style. The tales of the Jinn belong to this mixed response, in which material benefit does not dispel cultural and religious suspicion. The narrative reports the belief and its rumors, rather than establishing an independently witnessed supernatural cause.

David’s Imagination of the Jinn

At a party, David walks carefully across the geometrical patterns of the carpets spread over the outdoor seating. He dislikes what he sees as the guests’ ethnic pretense and wonders privately whether treading on the carpets is taboo and might anger the Jinn. His thought does not confirm that the Jinn are present; it shows how the local supernatural account has entered his own uneasy reading of the scene.

The Jinn thus connect two perspectives without resolving the gap between them: local rumor casts them as defenders of sacred space, while David uses their imagined displeasure to register his distaste for the party’s cultural staging. In both instances, they make the ksar’s invisible boundaries—religious, social, and contested—felt through ordinary sounds and objects.