The ghul (ghoul)

The ghul is a figure of Arabic lore, counted among the jinn in pre-Islamic poetry and said to haunt lonely places and burial grounds. A hadith denies it exists, and some Muslim thinkers rejected it.

Wikipedia places ghouls among the jinn of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, where a well-known poem tells of the poet Ta'abbata Sharra fighting one. Wikipedia says belief in ghouls did not win general acceptance in Islam. A hadith in Sahih Muslim (2222, on Sunnah.com) lists the ghoul with contagion and ill omens among things it says do not exist. The Mu'tazilites, it says, denied ghouls were real, and that al-Jahiz condemned Ta'abbata Sharra for boasting of his win.

Edward William Lane, in a study of Arabian society edited in 1883, wrote that the ghool was usually taken for a kind of evil jinnee or devil that eats people, and by some for a jinnee or sorcerer who can change form. He wrote that ghools were said to take human or animal shape, or monstrous ones, to haunt graveyards and lonely places, to eat corpses, and to kill and eat anyone they came across. For this reason, he said, the word ghool was used for any cannibal.

Richard Burton's 1885 translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night carries the tale of a prince and an ogress. In a note he equated the ghulah, the female ghul, with Lilith, the classical Lamia, the Russian Baba Yaga and other figures, and said the word ghul means a calamity or a sudden panic. He read the figure as the horror of the grave given a body. These comparisons are Burton's own.