What Is An Ifrit? Evil’s New Monster Explained

Evil season 2 episode 3, “F is for Fire,” just introduced a brand-new creature called an ifrit–but what is that, exactly? The second season of the hit CBS show, which moved to Paramount+ for season 2, has already introduced a few new demons and angels, including Abby, a new female demon tormenting Ben, a terrifying version of the Archangel Michael, and others soon to come. Showrunner and co-creator Robert King teased that Evil season 2 would have “five or six new scary things this year,” those “things” being new creatures.

The third episode introduces another new monster, and this one looks set to stick around for a while. Kristen, David, and Ben investigate the case of nine-year-old Mathilda, whose foster parents are concerned that fires keep breaking out. They worry she could be a pyromaniac, but  Mathilda insists she’s not doing it, but a tall man with a flaming head who sets the fires. As is always the case with Evil, things get weirder and suddenly, Mathilda’s insistence she’s being haunted by the fiery spirit isn’t so implausible. Her description triggers a memory in Ben, who goes digging and determines that the thing Mathilda keeps seeing–or thinks she’s seeing–is something called an ifrit.

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It’s a new kind of supernatural entity for the show which, to this point, has dealt solely with Christian theology. Evil season 2 is opening things up, however, as an ifrit is a spirit from Islamic mythology and scripture. Their origin is a little murky, since, as with so many creatures of ancient myth, they’ve appeared in slightly various and described in different ways over the centuries. But a simple explanation is that ifrit are a type of djinn in Islamic folklore. Christian mythology has a binary view of supernatural creatures: angels are good, demons are bad. But Islamic folklore is different, describing djinn as spirits with free will; therefore, they can be either good or bad or both. Ifrit, however, are almost always malevolent and malicious in nature. The first and only mention of them in the Islamic Quran describes them as “the ifrit of the djinn” and positions them as rebellious members of the djinn–similar to Christianity’s fallen angels, in a manner of speaking. Over time, the meaning and description of ifrit morphed to become something very similar to what would be considered a demon in the Christian religion.

As with their exact definition and nature, their physical description has changed from source to source. But most describe them as enormous, winged creatures made of smoke and, sometimes, the djinn‘s fire. They can be found in desolate, ruined places such as cemeteries, abandoned buildings, and ancient ruins. While occasionally ifrit can choose to help humans, they almost always mean to harm. Across various Muslim cultures and among the diaspora of Muslim immigrants, ifrit are blamed from everything to small household items and belongings disappearing, to death and disease, even human possession, which falls right in line with Evil‘s storyline of the ifrit seemingly possessing Mathilda and later, possibly, Kristen.

The end of the episode indicated that despite the exorcism, the ifrit was still haunting Mathilda, perhaps because the exorcism had been largely Roman Catholic in nature and not Islamic. Regardless, it’s a new and terrifying demon for the writers’ room to play with, especially as it appears the ifrit will be sticking around for a while. There was already some tension with the Catholic priest and the Islamic sheikh in regard to the black-and-white nature of Christianity vs. the shades of gray in Islam. Keeping the ifrit around and further exploring the nature of good and evil from other religious perspectives will provide a whole new world to explore in Evilseason 2. Meanwhile, the ifrit is sure to cause some diabolical chaos, particularly, it seems, for Kristen.

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