“Half a man, one arm, one leg, hopping out of the wastes to fell travelers with a deadly touch.”
The nasnas is what remains when a human being is split down the middle and the missing half refuses to matter: half a head with one eye, half a torso, a single arm and a single leg on which it hops with unnerving agility. Arabic folklore placed it in the empty quarters of the world — wastelands, lonely roads, the desert edge of settled life — and the storytelling traditions that flowed through Ottoman lands carried the halved man into Anatolian lore.
Accounts of its habits are grim. Lacking a full throat, it cannot speak, and is said to cry out in a high, haunting hoot; some tales have it pose as a bent elderly traveller to lure victims toward water, where it drowns or beats them to death. Yet in the lore of Hadhramaut, in southern Arabia, the tables turn: locals were rumoured to hunt the nasnas for the pot, its flesh reputedly sweet.
The Legend
Tradition offers two births for the halved man. In one, the nasnas is the offspring of a human being and the shiqq — a lower order of jinn that is itself only half-formed, so that the halving runs in the blood. In the other, told in some Arabic folktales, the nasnas descend from 'Ad, the ancient tribe named in the Qur'an, whom God punished for rebelling against their prophet by remaking them as half-people, condemned to hop like birds and graze like beasts.
The Thousand and One Nights gave the creature its most famous appearance. In 'The Story of the Sage and the Scholar,' a magician applies kohl to one of a man's eyes and he becomes a nasnas, half his body simply gone. Edward William Lane, the Nights' great nineteenth-century translator, fixed the being for English readers: half a human being, having half a head, half a body, one arm and one leg, with which it hops with much agility.
The Record
The nasnas enters the written record through the encyclopedists of the medieval Islamic world. Muhammad al-Qazwini's thirteenth-century treatise, Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing, describes the creature and supplies an artistic rendering of the half-man. Shi'i exegetical sources reach further back still, holding that the nisnas lived on the earth alongside the jinn before humankind was created at all.
Lane's translation of the Nights, published from 1840, carried the standard English description, and the creature's shadow stretches into European letters — Gustave Flaubert gave the nasnas a place among the monsters of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Folk accounts from Hadhramaut record the practice of hunting and eating the creature, which makes the nasnas that rarest of monsters: one prized as game.
The Lore
The halved body is the point. In a tradition rich in jinn who pass for human, the nasnas is the being that cannot pass — its wrongness is visible at a glance, a walking demonstration of creation left half-finished. Related beings multiply across the region: the shiqq of the deep desert, and in Somali tradition the xunguruuf, offspring of a jinn called shiqq and a human, said to kill by touch, stripping flesh from bone in seconds.
In Shia interpretation the nisnas acquired a theological role as proto-opponents of rightful doctrine — an unusual afterlife for a hopping desert monster. Elsewhere it remained a bogey of the empty road and a set-piece of the storyteller's repertoire, carried wherever the Nights were told, from Cairo to Istanbul: a reminder, in every version, that the desert's other inhabitants are not made as we are.
Field Notes
- ✦ Described as a vertically halved human — half a head, one arm, one leg — that hops with startling agility.
- ✦ Its Somali kin, offspring of the jinn Shiqq, is said to kill by touch, stripping flesh in seconds.
- ✦ Appears in the Thousand and One Nights, where kohl applied to one eye turns a man into a nasnas.
- ✦ Sometimes linked to the Shikk, a half-formed jinn, reckoned its demonic parent in older accounts.
- ✦ Described and illustrated in al-Qazwini's 13th-century Marvels of Things Created.
Case File
- Classification
- Half-bodied demon
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Anatolian and broader Near Eastern folklore
- First Sighted
- Medieval Near Eastern folklore
- Habitat
- Deserts, wastelands and lonely roads
- Reported Size
- Half a human body
- Also Known As
- Nesnas · Shikk