Translations:Priesthood/3/en

Although a kāhin seems to be a priest like the others mentioned above as seen in ancient inscriptions which mention a kāhin of Allat in Ramm and a kāhin of Al-'Uzza in the Sinai, in Islamic-period texts the kāhin was a seer, oracle, and dream interpreter who used the aid of jinn. The title and the function are cognate with those of the ancient Hebrew kohen, their ability to divine what others could not perceive came from their tendency to be alone in wild places, to spend a lot of time in reflection, and to view the world with ‘the eye of enlightenment’ according to the historian al-Mas’udi. In addition, al-Mas’udi says, many of them were physically deformed, and made up in spirit for what they lacked in body: the celebrated legendary kāhin Satih, for example, supposedly had no bones in his body, and could be ‘rolled up like a gown’. When Mohammad first started experiencing his so-called revelation he suspected he was turning into a kāhin and to show why its enough to compare an oath of the kāhin Al-Khuza’i with an early chapter of the Quran: