Law & Order: The "genie" unit

I was thinking that I won't have much entertainment while I wait in Boston to catch a flight for London. But fear not - we have this story from Saudi Arabia:

It seems that a jinn ("genie") in Saudi Arabia is being sued for harassment. A local court is investigating the charges:

A family in Saudi Arabia is taking a "genie" to court, accusing it of theft and harassment, reports say.

They accuse the spirit of threatening them, throwing stones and stealing mobile phones, Al Watan newspaper said.

The family have lived in the same house near the city of Medina for 15 years but say they only recently became aware of the spirit. They have now moved out.

A local court is investigating. In Islamic theology, genies are spirits that can harass or possess humans.
...

"We began to hear strange sounds," the head of the family, who come from Mahd Al Dahab, told the Saudi daily. He did not want to be named.

"At first we did not take it seriously, but then stranger things started to happen and the children got particularly scared when the genie started throwing stones."

He added: "A woman spoke to me first, and then a man. They said we should get out of the house."

A local court says it is trying to verify the truthfulness of the claims "despite the difficulty" of doing so.

Wow! Of course, my biggest concern is the mechanism by which they are going to get the jinn to pay up. Plus, what kind of currency do the jinns use? Do they have a universal monetary system, do they follow international human boundaries, or do they have their own nations (and fight for them to)?

This story reminded me of the mention of jinns in Pervez Hoodbhoy's book, Islam and Science. Pervez pointed put a series of insane papers (for example, one presenter calculated the "Angle of God" using mathematical topology) presented at an Islamic Science conference organized during the time of General Zia in the 1980s. Of course, the topic of jinns was broached. For example, a senior scientist at Defense Science & Technology Organization (DESTO), Dr. Safdar Rajput, made the case that the origins of jinns is methane, together with other sarturated hydro-carbons, because these yield a smokeless flame upon burning. As Hoodbhoy reports on Rajpit's paper, "This conclusion is predicated on the known fact that God made jinns out of fire, together with another known fact that no jinn emitting smoke has ever been found" (this paper was titled, "The Dichotomy of Insan and Jinn & Their Destiny", published in Science and Technology in the Islamic World, Vol 3, No 1. pp 28-48). For some reasons, he also concluded that "the Jinns are the white races". I have to get a hand on this phenomenal paper. But there are actual uses of jinns also. In 1980, a senior director at the time of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Bashiruddin Mahmood, had recommended that jinns, being fiery creatures, ought to be tapped as a free source of energy.

Hey...when is the boarding call? Please fly me away.