Jinn of the Desert in Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta

Record summary

Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, published in 1888, records Bedouin customs, oral traditions, ruins, dangers, and beliefs concerning jinn and other unseen beings. The book is a major identifiable source for nineteenth-century Arabian spirit lore and may contain reports connected with night travel, deserted places, wells, and roads. Its value lies in documenting cultural categories and the traveler’s mediation of them, not in proving apparitions. Doughty’s language, selective access, and Victorian ethnographic assumptions require comparison with Arabic sources and later scholarship.