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eligible for incapacity benefit. According to Aziz, they had a happy life together for almost ten years. Then two years ago things started to go wrong. Hurriyet became dissatisfied with being the second wife and having to share her husband with another woman. On a visit to her mother in Turkey she received the magic that was later to inflict the jinn possession on Aziz. Years earlier Hurriyet's mother had used the same magic to take control over Hurriyet's father. According to Aziz, Hurriyet wanted a man as her father had been to her mother. She
What is it like to be a Muslim possessed by a jinn spirit? How do you find refuge
from madness and evil spirits in a place like Denmark?
As elsewhere in
Europe and North America, Danish Muslims have become hypervisible through
intensive state monitoring, surveillance, and media coverage. Yet their religion
remains poorly understood and is frequently identified by politicians,
commentators, and even healthcare specialists as the underlying invisible cause
of ‘integration problems’.
Over several years Christian Suhr followed
Muslim patients being treated in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital.
With this book and award-winning film he provides a unique account of the
invisible dynamics of possession and psychosis, and an analysis of how the
bodies and souls of Muslim patients are shaped by the conflicting demands of
Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states.
The book
reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work not only to produce relief
from pain, but also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the
cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain.
Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera,
both text and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to
destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, so as to allow
patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.
talk turned to jinn possession. The young men had recently witnessed several severe cases of possession, including the possession of their friend Feisal by more than twenty-six jinn of multiple origins and religious conviction, and the possession of a young Somali boy by the Danish female jinn Dorthe, her husband, and their dog Hugin. These harrowing scenes were a favoured topic of discussion. Frequently, they would try to make sense of them by comparing their own experiences with videos on YouTube. This evening I was allowed to record their discussion
of the jinn. 1 The first time I saw Feisal entering ṣarʿ was after a dawn prayer ( ṣalāt al-fajr ) in early 2011. At this point it was as if instances of jinn possession were breaking out almost everywhere around me. When I began this research project in 2009, I could hardly get anyone to talk about possession. Jinn possession, people told me, is something that occurs only in the Middle East. Jinn do not live in Europe. I should go back to Egypt to conduct this research as there I would find lots of this stuff, and magic, and people
psychiatrists and nurses dealt with this particular group of patients. Most of my observations of psychiatric consultations occurred between February and October 2011, when I was following the work of psychiatric nurses at the Team for Transcultural Psychiatry and Centre South at Aarhus University Hospital in Risskov. Having spent months among Islamic healers in the mosques, encountering the psychiatric system quickly became just as unsettling and exotic as my initial encounter with jinn possession years earlier in Egypt. Psychiatric diagnoses and
: ‘What kind of prayer is this?’ Abu Bilal explained to me that this is by no means proper behaviour towards a newcomer and that this was not how Abu Omar would normally behave. Obviously one should attempt to teach and help a brother perform the best possible prayer, but not in this way. ‘Something aggressive is inside him. I had seen it a long time ago,’ Abu Bilal said. When I look at some of the other stories of jinn possession, a similar pattern can be discerned. In the period before the outbreak of Aziz
from Lebanon told us that Aziz needed to stop his medication before he could do the ruqya .’ In this, Liliane counters the view of Aziz's psychiatrist Jørgen when he claims that the recitation of ruqya provokes a state of trance that is potentially dangerous to the patient. Liliane makes clear that ruqya is used not only in the treatment of jinn possession, but on an everyday basis for a variety of purposes, including small fevers, headaches, and wounds: ‘If you read the Quran for someone who hasn't got a jinn then nothing happens, no
clear, the human experience is often characterised by a high degree of separateness, the experience of ‘I’ not always being ‘me’ (see Nielsen, Mikkelsen, and Aagaard 2009 ). This might also be the case at the onset of serious disturbances such as psychosis, depression, schizophrenia, or jinn possession. Suffering is arguably part of the experience of not being whole. It may be that integrated treatment works simply because the communication between health professionals from different disciplines allows for a better understanding and a more