The Haunting of Afghanistan: The Jinn and Imperial Geography

During the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, US soldiers shared stories of jinn encounters. In forums and online posts, Afghanistan was a discursive place of hauntings, the supernatural, and the other. Nearly identical narratives are found in the French colonization of North Africa, where ifrits, ghuls, and Aisha Qandisha represent the monstrous other. Placing the imagining of Afghanistan alongside similar French stories of North Africa, this paper examines how tales of jinn and the supernatural construct an imagined geography at the edges of empire where monsters reside. Colonial occupation is then defined as a civilizing act of taming the monstrous and ‘primitive’. In response, Afghan discourse of the jinn derives from premodern notions of custodianship of the land and lend themselves to resistance to colonial intervention by flipping the notion of haunting back against invaders. Drawing upon comparative history, folklore, and ethnographic accounts, this paper explores the discourse of the supernatural and its role in colonialism.