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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.
built up a conglomerate of analytical arguments and perspectives not entirely dissimilar to the vision described by Borges. While weaving in and out of Islamic exorcisms and psychiatry I have considered these treatments from multiple sides and angles. It seems as if these perspectives and the multiple and often disconnected fragments that constitute the experience of fieldwork have come to fit as nuts and bolts within an overall theoretical framework – an argument about exorcism and psychiatry as being essentially about the same thing, namely the dissolution
agency, sometimes even too much of it, but both psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcisms seem mainly to be about redirecting the agency of patients and disrupting their capacity to destroy themselves. As pointed out by Mahmood ( 2005 : 8), the understanding of agency in academic debates is often framed within the idiom of resistance: ‘the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles.’ In making this claim, Mahmood addresses a number of feminist studies that like
suffering are often invisible. Psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism offer different ways of giving the invisible a recognisable shape. Yet both psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism also operate through a disruption of the immediately visible, thereby intensifying the experience of uncertainty and invisibility, of being powerless and in need of help. Both psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism rely on a dissolution of human perceptual agency in favour of submission to external and essentially invisible healing agents – namely
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
freely as they want. I hope nothing has followed me on the way home from the mosque. I know I shouldn't be afraid of the jinn. As I start to write this fieldnote my left index finger begins to vibrate. I know this feeling from before, but I don't like that it starts now. It stops. Thank you, God. Cinema fist I have suggested the term self-sacrifice as somehow useful in understanding healing in psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism, but I have not specifically discussed how such
with respect to medical motives, but also the construction of sacred reality with respect to religious motives’. This book and film examine the similarities and differences between how healing is pursued and understood in psychiatric healthcare and by Muslim shaykhs in Denmark. A key insight of my research has been to discover the ways in which the ‘sacred’ and what, with Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Kierkegaard, I have referred to as the ‘invisible’ play a role in both Islamic exorcisms as well as in psychiatric healthcare
. I have tried to take seriously in precisely this way, but still I have been unable to actually see a spirit. Invisible spiritual substance appears to abound in some of my film recordings of Islamic exorcisms, yet all I can see are the visible facades. Below the facades things are happening, but the footage does not allow me to grasp precisely what they are. A few times I did have some strange experiences, but not of such a definitive kind that I could say afterwards that this was in actual fact a spirit. One evening, just before falling