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Welcome to The Hidden Gem, a production of I Heart Radio and Greyman Mild from Aaron Manque.

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I love to smell good, and I have been kind of obsessed with smelling nice since I was about 13 years old, and I'm happy to say this was well before the advent of axe body spray. Now, you might not be aware, but perfumes that are filled with alcohol aren't very popular in many parts of the world, including where our family hails from.

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Pakistan, instead, scented oils called other have been used widely for thousands of years by people in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. And our family was no different.

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My parents had tiny, little precious vials of the rich perfumed oil tucked away here and there in a dresser drawer in the glove compartment of my dad's pickup truck. Some were clear, others had a dim golden color and some red, deep amber viscose and thick, sealed tightly like a treasure. And they were treasures because a real authentic author is a very, very expensive costing in the thousands for a single ounce of the really good stuff.

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It's pure, unadulterated essence with no alcohol, no dilution of the deeply heady sense captured inside every drop it so strong that you can smell the essence even when the vials are sealed, a drop on each wrist, maybe one behind an ear, would last all day. I never dared to steal any drops because there would be no hiding it. The scent travels, turning you into a walking incense stick and the minute you enter a room wearing, some others will immediately know.

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And also my siblings and I were strictly forbidden from wearing out there and not because it was expensive, we were forbidden because, see, the scent doesn't just draw other people to you. It draws creatures that we can't even see to it, especially outside and especially at nighttime. So our elders told us to be wary of going out at night when the jinn were most active, heavily perfumed, because it could prove irresistible to them. After all, the jinn lurked everywhere in the darkness and smelling sweet and inviting could be just the thing that captured their interest.

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On the other hand, you also don't want to piss them off. You don't want to anger them, which you could if you disrespected them by doing something so heinous as urinating under a tree at night, because that's what you find a lot of them, or at least that's where they can find you under a tree at night. It said that many jinn live in trees peacefully, not bothering anyone unless they get distracted by a sweetly perfumed person passing by or a rude interloper who decided to relieve their bladder there.

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According to Jewish law, demon gin are especially dangerous around palm trees and you are bound to invite their attention by sleeping under a palm tree or squeezing between two palms or between a palm tree in a wall. The general rule here is definitely just stay away from palm trees, also from Sorba trees, because at least 60 demon jinn live in its shade, but also avoid the Kaper bush because the blind demon rule lives there. And while you're at it, stay away from the roots of trees because an entire other species of demon jinn are found.

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They're trespassing into Georgian territory is enough to make a jinn follow you all the way home, snatch you right up so you disappear forever or even possess you. So beware of lingering under trees at night for any reason, because while it might seem like the jinn only occupy faraway lands, the bad news or good news, depending on how you feel about all this, is that you'll find them both far and very, very near. I'm Robert Chaudhary and I'll be your guide into the ancient world of the Hidden Jinn.

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Welcome. As we've noted before, while we may share our physical world with the djinn, it's not their only abode as metaphysical beings. They live in multiple dimensions, occupying both their own jinn worlds and the human one, too. But let's start at the beginning. The original dwelling of our fiery friends, the mountain of Guff.

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It's not unusual that people have historically believed in mystical, powerful beings living in the highest of peaks up among the clouds, far from common human Riff-Raff, for example, the Himalayas have been revered for thousands of years by Hindus as the homeland of the gods, a sacred place where ancient Hindu deities live and love battle and triumph.

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Where, to this day, sages and saints and those seeking salvation track to meditate and commune with the divine and the beautiful slopes are dotted with sacred caves and shrines. The very sins of mankind, it said, are forgiven just by laying eyes on the mystical mountain range. But while mankind can actually lay eyes on it, we aren't quite able to see the esoteric deities that are believed to live there upon its limits from time immemorial. They are there, but not for our naked eyes to witness.

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Similarly, the Greek gods, when I saw it, are said to be found atop Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece, and the ancient Persian God of light. Mithra rules from atop the sacred Mount Hood area and other Persian gods, saints and heroes find rest in the Mount Elba's range. Mountains and mountain ranges, as you can see, figure heavily in many diverse mythologies and religions and the Djinn story is no different. If the jinn had a homeland, it was Mount GoF, sometimes referred to as a single mountain and other times as arrange golf as a place so mystical that it is both everywhere and nowhere, at least nowhere, human experience can find and place it.

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The mountain stands at the most distant point on the earth, on the very edge of it, and those who say it's a range say that it surrounds the entire planet while remaining invisible to the eye. Every visible mountain range on Earth, however, springs from gof connected deep underground to the original Mother Mountain, where the natural and the supernatural meet. Golf itself is created out of green gems, some say emeralds. Others say peridot. And among its gleaming peaks and valleys, you find Jennison the land of the gems.

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Jennison is the entire region spanning golf, and in the regions are kingdoms and tribes, cities and villages spanning thousands of metaphysical miles.

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According to the legends, two such cities are Jabiluka and are both made out of pure Emerald, one to the east and one to the west of golf, it is said that Alexander the Great set out to find these cities, which can only be reached by trekking four months in utter darkness.

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But he gave up the riches of Jabiluka and Jabiluka were not to be his. And how could they be? He was seeking what he could never find, attempting to cross into a realm that remains out of human reach and human sense far on the other side of a cosmic divide. While you will likely never make it to golf if you're seeking to find the gin, no worries, because on this side of the mystical mountain, right here in the earthly realm, there is no dearth of where they can be found.

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The most beastly ones, as we've mentioned before, hot places of desolation, deserts and caves, abandoned ruins, graveyards.

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But then there are Jinn who prefer not to lurk so far from humanity, and they make it their business to stay close to the sacred. If you want to find a jinn, go visit a shrine. In 2006, an unnamed correspondent from The Economist did just that, going in search for them in Somalia and Afghanistan, the correspondent noted that it was often village women of little or no education that visited the shrines with their pleas and prayers. The shrines, it was reported, are often little more than a carved niche in Iraq, with colorful prayer flags tied to nearby trees.

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And according to the author quote, Ginner said, to be attracted to the ancient geography of shrines, many of which pre-date Islam.

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And as some have it, the shrines were attracted to the djinn, which takes us to one of the most famous such shrine located in the land of 100000 Saints, Morocco. That's where you'll find the shrine of the Saint Bennetto, also known as the Sultan of the Jinn Saints.

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In this part of the world, like saints in most part of the world, are replete with the miraculous powers to heal the sick fight drought and famine and plagues, mend rifts and fight oppressive rulers. Every day people pray to them, beseech them for their assistance in big and small matters, and often hang all their hopes for help on these human vessels of divine power.

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Bennetto, a saint from centuries ago, was no different. It's hard to be exactly sure when BNF who lived, but historic documents place him sometime between the eighth and 14th centuries, a rather considerable span of time because he'd written local histories were not nearly as common as oral ones. And for many of the saints of this region, all that remained behind as proof of their existence are the folk stories about them and the shrines.

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The legend goes the benefits family have moved from the Sahara Desert to Marrakesh, Morocco, where one part of the city, a powerful engine called an Freeth, haunted a spring of water. And this gene would harm anyone who tried to access the spring. Thanks to the terror of the gin, the locals were always struggling for water and food, not even being able to supply sufficient water for their herds or their fields. They tried everything they could to appease the gin, throwing fists and his honor and even sacrificing a virgin here and there to make peace with the beast, but nothing worked.

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And year after year, they suffered. Finally, the tribesmen begged the great saints of the area to rid them of the gin, and they were told that only NFL could help them. So they summoned by SNAFU who addressed an assembly of all the local saints. Who is the supreme spiritual leader in our Times vignette, who asked them, you are they replied, who is the supreme helper? When Yahoo! Then demanded, you are said the gathering of Saints.

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Then you give me permission to Master Gin's by treading upon them with my foot and whipping them with the Sword of Djinns. The Saints responded, You have our permission and promise that neither we nor our descendants would advance in front of you or your progeny to face Gin's till Allah inherits the Earth and all its inhabitants. Upon hearing that Beneful approached the spring and summer Virgine who jumped out at him in the shape of a lion, but before the lion could touch him, bnf a blue on it, turning the animal into a roaring flame that reached the sky but then quickly burned out.

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Who, having been in doubt, all the djinn controlling power by the other saints, moved from place to place during his life and eventually settled in Duckula with his followers when they built a shrine which exists to this day. Some of you may not know that the hidden gene isn't my first foray into podcasting for the past five years, I've cohosted and co-produced the biggest wrongful conviction podcast in the world, undisclosed, along with two brilliant colleagues, attorneys Susan Simpson and Colin Miller.

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Together, we reinvestigate cases in which an innocent person is paying the price in prison for a murder they didn't commit while a killer runs free. We began with the infamous Adnan Syed case from Serial.

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But today, not only does undisclosed have over 355 million downloads, we've covered 22 cases, found new evidence in nearly every case we investigated and have helped exonerate over half a dozen innocent people. If you love true crime, unsolved mysteries and Criminal Justice, Undisclosed is the podcast for you. You can find Undisclosed on all your favorite podcast apps. And check out the cases we've covered on our website. Undisclosed Basche podcast, Dotcom. Be sure to check it out and subscribe today.

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In his decades of saintly miracles, Beneful became known for a particular miracle, the ability to draw water out of dry, barren land, which was certainly useful in those parts.

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But it wasn't his power of divination that resulted in a legacy that has lasted centuries, if not a millennia. It was instead his legendary defeat of a mysterious figure known as a black sultan. Now, in stories from this region, the black sultan wasn't only destroyed once by Beneful, he was destroyed numerous times by different saints.

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Anthropologists believe the black Saltum figure stood for any number of tyrannical, oppressive rulers that the population felt helpless against. And so it was the spiritual sultans, the Saints, that rose up against the material once, the conquerors and rulers who made life miserable for their subjects. But there is also another tradition about the black sultan, an even darker one. It is said that he, in fact, the son of Shem, Haresh, the demon jinn who stands guard at one of the entrances to the Palace of Satan.

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What are the black sultan was descended from a demon jinn or was an actual oppressive ruler. The legend goes that when BNF, who moved into the Duckula region, he inadvertently encroached into the black sultan's territory. The Sultan heard about this powerful saint who had just arrived and realized this could mean a serious challenge to his own power. So he assembled an army and rode out to meet Beneful with thousands of soldiers flanking him. The sultan demanded that Beneful leave the region and never return.

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But the saint was unperturbed. He calmly refused. The Sultan, outraged over the Saints arrogance and disdain, commanded his army to attack. But what the Sultan didn't know was that the saint wasn't alone. He had his own army, an army of jinn under his control with barely a movement BNF who signaled for his battalions of gen soldiers to counterattack the Sultan's army when flying men and horses in the air as Ajin mounted an all out assault. Some stories say the Sultan himself was lifted off his steed and high into the air by a man with seven heads where he was suspended, terrified until he conceded, humiliated and defeated the black sultan.

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Asked by SNAFU for a truce, the state agreed, but only on one condition that the Sultan sign a decree declaring Beneful to be a true saint. The black sultan did so and handed BNF with a declaration stating so all could hear. I am a sultan and you are a sultan. That episode definitively established BNF, whose position as a bonafide saint and entitle him to the eternal honorific. The Sultan of the Gin Penya, who is also known by another name, the Green Sultan, as a contrast to the Black Sultan.

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This name he received when a man possessed by Jinn came to him to be cured. The afflicted patient saw the saint as a vision of a knight on a white horse. When Beneful lifted his arms in prayer, the sick man's eyes opened wide as he saw entire tribes of Jide living under the folds of BNF, whose gown all bowed to the green sultan in allegiance. And since then, then, full sovereignty over the jinn has never been challenged. Today, the shrine of Beneful bustles day and night with spiritual healers, these healers continue the spiritual tradition of their saint battling evil gene causing harm to human beings.

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And the shrine also draws Genta it who come to aid the healers or commune with them, or they're just unable to resist the draw of the power of Beneful himself. And there is another reason the Jinn gather at Beneful, because that's where an assembly of jinn, led by the spirit of the Satan himself, preside over a mythic gin court. That's right, a court with judges and trials and defendants. The Shrine Abana, who is simply designed. It's a common dome shaped structure and circled by a series of small cells that hold seekers waiting for relief.

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They're called patients, but they come bearing a most serious spiritual disease gin, possession.

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And so, as they are exercised by the spiritual inheritors of the saint, the healers, the genes themselves are put on trial for having transgressed against humankind. The proceedings in this court called Ginne evictions involve judges which are usually the healers and sometimes lawyers and witnesses of both the human and Djenne variety. And the defendants are brought before the court through the physical body they have possessed. The ginner dragged to this court from all over the world because the court a who is what you might call the Supreme Court of Jin misbehavior, the highest ruling body in the world, exercising jurisdiction over the djinn.

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In one reported instance, a young boy who was unable to walk was brought to benefit by his father, who carried him into the shrine and placed him before one of the healers, the father, accused the defendant, Ajin, for his son's affliction. The healer focused his gaze on the boy, whose body began twisting and writhing in pain. As prayers began being chanted, the boy suddenly opened his mouth and started reciting verses in Arabic. But the hero silenced him, demanding to know who was speaking the boy or the jinn.

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The voice that responded said it was a jinn named NuQ and that he was a God fearing Gend, not an evil one. Well, why then, as the healer did, he possessed the boy because of the jinn. The boy had entered a cave with a jinn lived and well, he took a leak. What the boy didn't know was that he had urinated right on the jinn itself. This act of disrespect so enraged the jinn that he possessed the young man ever since the healer reprimanded the jinn.

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Is this any way to treat a fellow God-Fearing person? Forgive him, he demanded. The Jean agreed and forgave the boy, releasing him from his bondage. And immediately the boy rose and stood able to walk again. The trial of the jinn was over and his eviction secured. These are the kinds of stories that people witness regularly at Beneful, and it's not uncommon for the offending jinn to cite some kind of wrongdoing against them as a reason for their taking a hostage, which, if you remember from the top of the show, is one good reason not to take a leak under a tree, just like our elders warned us not to, because you never know who or what you might be leaking.

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On an interesting note about the evictions at the shrine of Beneful is this while the defenders makes up the verdicts issued to them, a release their victims? It doesn't mean they just go away. Often they will linger at the shrine and sometimes they leave one victim only to occupy another. And every night, they say, the jinns gather to dance in a trance at the shrine, moving in circle upon circle of spiritual ecstasy, honoring their master Beneful and his power over them.

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So if you're looking for Jin, the shrine of Beneful will surely not disappoint. Of course, benefit isn't the only shrine you can find in the most shrines certainly don't hold gin trials, but across the world at shrines both big and small, Jinnah said, to guard the sacred spaces, often in the form of human beings that appear and disappear, protectors who live there to safeguard pilgrims and honor whatever saint is buried there. In some shrines and places of worship, you'll find legions of pigeons and other birds that lined the rooftops and wander in the courtyards.

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These birds, they say, are actually jinn who come to share the quiet, contemplative peace of these spaces, who listen to the prayerful chants, and who harbor no ill will towards human beings. And just as some Gengel shrines and worshippers, there are others who stand guard over an entirely different kind of charge, worldly treasures. Now, we've mentioned before that Jan often dwell in desolate places among crumbling, abandoned sites. That way they're far removed from humanity and can live there in peace.

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But sometimes the reason they're living among the ruins is because somewhere in those ruins and that far off lonely place, there is a hidden treasure that needs guarding. There is an ancient legend about an awesome treasure concealed in the Nabatean ruins in the Hijaz region of Present-day, Saudi Arabia. The Nabatean were an Arabian tribe whose earliest inscriptions date hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. Some say they were nomads and travel through the desert with their herds following the seasons and food and water supplies.

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Other sources say they were a tribe of warriors numbering in the thousands, and they were also master tradesmen. With their trade stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The Nabatean faded from history but left behind grand monuments to their existence across the region for modern day Jordan, to Israel, to the Sinai and in northwest Saudi Arabia. Now, many of you may have heard of Petra, the ruins of an ancient Nabatean city in Jordan that attracts thousands of tourists from across the world.

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But you likely haven't heard of Madain Saleh, the second largest Nabatean archaeological site, after Petra dating back to the first century. And that's where we find our next story. Madain Saleh translates to the cities of Saleh, named after an ancient prophet from before the time of Abraham, whose story is found in both behi and Islamic scriptures. According to the stories, the Prophet Saleh was sent to the Nabatean people of this region to call them to the true religion.

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But they rejected him. And while things didn't go so well for them, then they were wiped out by God for their impiety and arrogance. And since then, only their ruins remain. And it seems, according to the archaeologists, the people of this region did disappear sometime between 400 and 600 A.D. left behind with the vestiges of a once sprawling, dynamic metropolis with residential communities, places of worship, 130 wells and four separate necropolis areas to bury and honor the dead.

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There are over 2000 burial sites deep within the earth and above ground. There are monumental tombs. While the land is arid and flat, massive rose colored sandstone formations rise up thousands of feet high from the desert. And centuries ago, the Nabatean carved 131 monumental tombs into these rocky outcrops, which still stand today. The legend goes, the people of the region didn't just leave behind these monuments, they also left behind a grand treasure seal in one of the thousands of Iraqi chambers underground, a treasure so great that it found the kings of the world would battle over it.

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Tribes would destroy one another friend would turn against friend and brother against brother. And such a grand treasure, of course, cannot stand unguarded. Protecting it since the time the inhabitants were wiped out is Ajin and not just any jinn, but an ancient ifrit. Now, the ifrit are known to be powerful, wicked and cunning, their winged and massive and are usually found in places like Madain Saleh debone the ruins where they rise to from the underworld. Some say their demons and they are nearly impossible to control or defeat.

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Your best bet is to steer clear of them, which is what the Arabs of the region did for centuries. The ruins. Amadi and Saleh were left unattended for hundreds of years, avoided precisely because the locals feared the jinn that haunted them. And yet still they stayed incredibly well preserved, some say, thanks to the arid climate and others say thanks to the jinn that while their. In 2008, the site was declared a UNESCO heritage site, and while today the Saudi government highly encourages tourism there, many locals still refuse to visit.

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They know seeking treasure there could end up being fatal for them because despite the lure of a buried treasure, at the end of the day, no one wants to battle a demon for it. Now, another legendary treasure guarded by John is said to be buried in the ruins of the lost city of Ubar, dubbed the Atlantis of the Sands by Lawrence of Arabia himself. While stories of Obama can be found in both Islamic law and the tales from 1001 Arabian Nights, many scholars thought it never existed.

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That was until in 1992, when the ruins of a fortress was located by an unlikely team of Los Angeles archaeologists who used satellite imagery from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and found something in the most barren part of the country of Oman in a region so desolate it's called the empty quarter.

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The photos they found was surrounded by eight walls, an impenetrable octagon, each wall was 60 feet long, 12 feet high and two feet thick and 30 feet high. Watchtowers stood in every corner. It was the watchtowers that convinced the archaeologist that this was indeed Ubar because it matched the description in the Islamic scripture. The Koran, which referred to Ubar as the, quote, the many towered city whose life has not been built in the entire land. If this was indeed the ancient city of Ubar, that mean the researchers had found what was the center of the global frankincense trade over 3000 years ago, and thanks to that trade legend, has it that the rulers of Ubar were rich and powerful beyond imagination.

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According to the legend, they were ruled over by a brutal king named Shaddad, been on King Shaddad ruled over a thousand tribes and he was obsessed with creating a paradise for himself on earth. So he ordered gems and jewels from around the world to be used in building a city that would be his own paradise on Earth, Ubar was filled with pillars of rubies and emeralds, threshold's of pearls, walls of gold and silver, the entire place lush and fragrant from flowers studded with saffron and musk dotted with exotic gardens that invoked all the beauty of a heavenly paradise.

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Unfortunately for Shaddad, he never was able to see the fortress completed in all of its glory. It said that when Shaddad finally headed out to inspect the city after it took 300 years to make and in case you're wondering about himself, was apparently 900 years old. His arrogance finally caught up to him for the sin of trying to recreate God's paradise on Earth, along with plenty of other things like greed and debauchery.

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Shaddad and his entourage were swallowed up by a massive desert storm, as was his jewelled city. But while the treasures ended up buried under mountains of sand and earth, they weren't forgotten. For thousands of years, those treasures have been guarded by the jinn creatures called the business. Strangely have formed the Knysna be mistaken for human at a distance, but upon getting closer, the illusion disappears with half a head, half a body, a single eye, the nastiest hop around on a single foot attached to their only leg.

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While they are considered a weak without much power, there shape, misshapen form terrifies the imagination of believers from the east to the west. They even make an appearance in the French writer Gustaaf Slobbers literary work The Temptation of St. Anthony. In this book, The Saint, who has isolated himself on an Egyptian mountaintop, is tested by visions, haunted by gods and demons, tempted by magicians and monsters.

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And one of those monsters is the business Labourites. The listeners have only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a body, half a heart. They say we live quiet in our halves of houses with our haves and wives and our halves of children. Then it's nice to have limitations to their powers, but they are able protectors of their charge. If any human gets too close to the treasure, they summon a sandstorm to blind and disorient them.

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If they keep going, then business don't allow them to escape the desert until they've gone completely mad. And so it's these halflings that still guard the treasure of Ubar today, wherever they may be buried. For some, that's enough to avoid even looking for the treasure.

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For others, Virgine themselves are the keys to the fortune. In 2012, a piece published in the Journal of Archaeology recounts a story written by an author named Salah Al, who Tolia about an extraordinary discovery that he made in the country of Jordan in 1990. Salah had been visiting relatives who introduced him to a young man that was engaged in some questionable behavior. This man told Salah that he was a treasure hunter. He dug up antiquities from archaeological sites, which wasn't exactly legal, and that concerned Salah.

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But his concern only grew when the young man told him he had help in his adventures. His partner in crime was a jinn that pointed him to exactly where he could find buried treasure. Salah was understandably skeptical, to which the young man responded, This is my problem. No one believes me. So Saleh agreed to go along with the man the next day to see if there was indeed any evidence of a jinn working with him. They made three stops during their excursion at different points a cave, a collection of large rocks and a tree.

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And at every point, Salah was directed by the young man to find a hidden object. Objects, he said the Virgin was locating for him. Salaat discovered a ragged old document in the cave, shards of pottery under the rocks and an old piece of fabric inside a hole in the tree. All the items to sell at least look to be years old. These were not recently placed. The document, according to the jinn guiding the young man, was a witchcraft spell meant to lead them further on in their search.

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At that point, Saslaw felt a deep sense of discomfort. He decided to abandon ship and he left. But he couldn't stop thinking about the experience. And over a decade later, in 2003, he returned to interview more antiquities looters, but this time in Palestine. For the following seven years, he interviewed hundreds of them and found a significant number that admitted to engaging Jinn to help find treasure. He was told that there were two kinds of treasures, those that were considered normal, that they were left behind in the usual course of human business.

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And then there was a second category treasure that was under the protection of gin. And to get to that treasure. Well, you kind of needed supernatural help, but that help always came at a price in order to be given the exact location of a valuable hidden object. The treasure hunters were commanded by the jinn that they ask for help from to perform some rather profane acts, including washing themselves with wine, drinking blood and even offering a human sacrifice on an altar.

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In some cases, the treasure hunters had to subject themselves to being tortured physically by the jinn in order to gain access to their secrets, others reported. They agreed to be possessed by the gin and sometimes that gin didn't want to let go. Now, in most cases, though, the gin couldn't be accessed without the aid of a Shiite, a cleric that proclaimed to have the knowledge and power needed to summon and control them all for a fee, of course, or a cut of whatever treasure was found.

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And this, of course, leaves the door wide open for con men of all stripes.

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In 2017, the Gulf News Media Outlet reported an incredible story, a family in Dubai was approached by a woman who told them that she sensed there was a vast hidden treasure under their property and she knew just the man who could help the family find and extract the treasure. They agreed to meet him. And when he arrived, he began digging in a portion of their yard and right before their stunned eyes, he pulled jewelry out of the earth. He quickly reburied it, though, telling them that this jewelry and much other treasure lay beneath the ground.

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But it was guarded by a powerful jinn, and that Gene was not happy that he had dug up the jewels without the Genz permission. In order to appease the jinn, the man told the family they must make an offering of a special liquid and that liquid would cost over 200000 dollars. They gave the man the money in cash and of course, he disappeared not long after they got a call from a third person who told them that their treasure hunter had been captured by the region and was being imprisoned by it.

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He told him it would cost another 200 thousand dollars to release him. Well, by now the family was a little bit suspicious, but they agreed to meet the caller. They handed over the money, but they had already alerted the police to the scam. The authorities busted the con men in their fraudulent scheme and arrested them. Then they advised the public to be aware of those claiming to have contact with or power over the djinn. Now, while the people involved in this caper were certainly a bunch of crooks, the profession of treasure hunting with the help of other worldly partners had a long, respectable history in the region.

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In fact, these professionals even organized into a formal guild in 9th century Egypt, putting out get rich quick treasure hunting manuals. The government quickly realized the economic value of this industry and appointed a supervisor over the group. Over the next millennia, the historical impact of looting antiquities finally became apparent. So in the early 20th century, the very first Egyptologist, Ahmed Gamal, wrote a massive tome on the history and impact of antiquity hunting to try and garner national support for preserving these national treasures.

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Perhaps the most fascinating part of that book is an entire index of gin, over 300 of them listed by name that had assisted the treasure hunters of the past. So, yeah, teaming up the djinn in the hopes of getting rich is a longstanding and rich tradition which takes us back to our antiquity. Looters in Palestine. Ultimately, Salah, who conducted an entire research study on antiquity looters that use the help of gin, found that it was a dangerous and unusually fruitless endeavor because more often than not, there was no treasure to be found.

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But ever believers that didn't deter the faith of the hunters and the existence of ancient buried treasures guarded by Jinn.

[00:36:23]

They just figured the supernatural and super powerful custodians simply moved the treasures to thwart them from being stolen. After all, what else would a good guardian do? The jinn can lurk anywhere at heart, any place they please. Back in 2000, a newspaper reported a spate of inexplicable seizures among the teachers at a girls school in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A local cleric investigated and determined the seizures were the result of gin's inhabiting the place. And in 2006, multiple stories appeared on an Indian news wire about numerous haunted mosques in the city of Bhopal, including a 200 year old one that is actually called the mosque of the Jinn.

[00:37:10]

The area surrounding that mosque is also haunted, and buildings in the neighborhood have been left abandoned, given over to the jinn.

[00:37:18]

Another nearby mosque called the Hera Mosque is built out of pure, brilliant white marble.

[00:37:23]

But nearly no one worships there because they're too terrified. According to local residents, though, the mosque doesn't remain empty because the jinn pray there will end this episode by bringing you closer to home. Because if you're in search of a jinn, you might not be able to get to an ancient shrine or buried treasure or haunted mosque.

[00:37:42]

But luckily, you don't have to travel to the far reaches of the globe to find them. You might not even have to leave home. That's because there are many traditions that say that Gin's who like to stay close to human beings often do so by staying in their bathrooms. Now, today's bathrooms are exactly like the kinds of toilets that people have had to make do with over the centuries.

[00:38:03]

Our bathrooms are generally more sanitary and less foreboding, but historically they were pretty much the least pleasant place a person might have to visit daily.

[00:38:12]

And because they were often dirty and smelly and rarely cleaned, you can be assured it was one place nothing holy was ever uttered. That's why it makes sense that these dark, filthy spaces would attract beings just as dark and unholy. So be careful. The next time you play the Bloody Mary game the bathroom, you may end up summoning a creature you didn't expect. Thanks for joining us this week. Next week will be back to take you another step into the world of the hidden gem.

[00:38:42]

Until then, remember, we are not alone. If you loved today's episode, I'm going to ask you a big favor, please stop by iTunes and leave me a rating and a review, even if it's just one short sentence.

[00:39:02]

Not only is that how other listeners discover the podcast, but it's also what keeps the podcast going.

[00:39:08]

And for every thousand reviews that I get on iTunes, I'll release another Patrón episode. Absolutely free. That's right. We're unpatriotic.

[00:39:16]

So if you're a gin enthusiast, check out the Companion Patriot series at Patreon Dotcom Slash Hidden Gem again, that's Patrón Dotcom Slash Hidden Gine.

[00:39:26]

And remember, Gin is spelled DJI and that's where you go to find an amazing series of interviews between me, scholars, experts, ATA's historians and everyday laypeople who have had extraordinary experiences with Gine. And everybody can check out the first episode absolutely free. It's me and my husband sharing our Djenne stories and it was a lot of fun. And if you have any Djenne stories, well, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at the hidden Ginne at Gmail dot com.

[00:39:55]

Once again, it's the Hidden Jin Jin with Adi at Gmail dot com.

[00:40:00]

And you might just hear back from me or you might hear your story on the show.

[00:40:05]

And finally, don't forget to follow us on social media or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the handle the hidden Djenne.

[00:40:12]

There you can tweet post instr Dmae. I love to hear from all of you. And believe me, I read every single message.

[00:40:23]

The hidden gem is a production of I Heart Radio and Greyman mile from Aaron Manque. The podcast is written and hosted by Rabia Chaudry and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young with executive producers Aaron Manque, Alex Williams and Matt Frederich. Music for the show was provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Our theme song was created by Patrick Cortez. For more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit the heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.