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Yourself and your limits
Is it jinn, or is it illness
Two questions that are not one question, and the cost of answering only the first.
Some of what people attribute to affliction is also what a treatable and sometimes urgent illness looks like. Get seen today, not next week, for any of these. Hearing or seeing what others do not, especially if it is new or in more than one sense at once. Not sleeping for several nights with energy that feels raised rather than drained. Not eating or drinking. Confusion that comes and goes, or a sudden change in someone who was well yesterday. Fits, collapse or loss of consciousness. Any new symptom after a head injury, a fever, a new medicine, or in pregnancy or after birth. Any thought of ending your life or of harming someone else, which is an emergency now. And if you have been told to stop a medicine so that the treatment can work, please speak to your doctor before you stop, because stopping suddenly is dangerous by itself whatever the cause turns out to be.
What this course teaches
Differential reasoning, held carefully
This course does not tell you what you have. It sets out how to hold two possible accounts at once without abandoning either, and what each one predicts, so that you can test rather than choose. The one practical rule is that time matters and waiting is itself a decision.
Why this one
The evidence is that traditional and religious healers give real help for distress and milder difficulty and little for severe mental illness, that working alongside clinicians beats replacing them, and that a longer time without treatment predicts a worse outcome. None of that settles what is happening to you.
What this course will not do
Any ruling on affliction, and any diagnosis. This course will not tell you it is jinn and will not tell you it is not.
Six short lessons for anyone standing in front of something frightening in themselves or in someone they love, wondering whether it is affliction or illness. It sets out what the sunnah actually affirms about the evil eye, sihr and ruqyah, using sound reports only, and it is equally plain about what those texts do not establish. It shows that the tradition never asked anyone to pick between recitation and a doctor, and it says honestly what the waiting costs. It will not tell you what is causing what you are living with, because nothing written down can.
Who this is for
Anyone who has been told it is the eye, or sihr, or a jinn, and anyone who has been told the opposite and found it dismissive. Families deciding what to do next. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences, and it does not assume you have doubts about any of this.
What this is not
This course gives no diagnosis and no fatwa, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a doctor. It contains no test, checklist or quiz for working out whether you or a relative are afflicted, and that is deliberate, because any such thing gets used as a diagnosis and buys delay. It gives no instruction on performing ruqyah on another person and nothing at all on any physical handling. It tells nobody to reduce, delay or stop a prescribed medicine.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. What people mean when they say it is jinnThe vocabulary is not folklore, and this course is not going to try to talk you out of it.7 min
- Two questions that are not one questionWhat is causing this and what will help this are different questions, and only one of them can be answered today.6 min
- What the sunnah affirms, and what it does notThe sound evidence, stated plainly, and the line where the evidence stops.8 min
- The tradition never asked you to chooseSeeking treatment is not a retreat from tawakkul. It is an instruction.6 min
- What the waiting costsNot a verdict on what you believe. A number about time, read honestly, including where it is small.6 min
- Signs that mean today, not next weekWhat to look for, what to say to a doctor, and what to say to family who disagree.5 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:102, 2:275, 10:81, 17:82, 26:80, 68:51, 113:1 to 5, 114:1 to 6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 2:275 and 68:51 are presented in lesson 3 as contested, not as proof texts. 17:82 is used for the basis of ruqyah only and never for the reading that a well connected believer needs no medicine, which sits badly against 26:80. The scholar reviewer settles the permissible range of use for all three.
- Kleinman A, Eisenberg L, Good B (1978). Culture, Illness, and Care. Annals of Internal Medicine, 88(2), 251 to 258. Used for the explanatory model idea, which is the mechanism of the whole course.
- Awaad R, Ali S (2015). Obsessional Disorders in al-Balkhi's 9th century treatise: Sustenance of the Body and Soul. Journal of Affective Disorders, 180, 185 to 189. A companion paper by the same authors on phobia in the same treatise exists in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 2016, but its DOI was not confirmed and it is therefore not cited here.
- Penttila M, Jaaskelainen E, Hirvonen N, Isohanni M, Miettunen J (2014). Duration of untreated psychosis as predictor of long-term outcome in schizophrenia: systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 205(2), 88 to 94. The correlations of 0.13 to 0.18 are published on screen together with the authors' own statement that the association was not significant for employment, quality of life or number of admissions.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 5678, 5705, 5735, 5736, 5740, 5763, 5766, 5768; Sahih Muslim 220, 2186, 2188, 2192, 2200, 2204; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2038, 2517. Only reports graded sound or good are used. The widely circulated report that most of the ummah die from the evil eye is not used, because its grading is disputed and it works against the purpose of this course. The report that the evil eye sends people to the grave is not used, because it was not graded in the research pass. Sahih al-Bukhari 3281, on Satan circulating in the human being, was available and was left out, because in its own context it was said to protect two Companions from a suspicion and it reads as a doctrine of possession when lifted out.
- Lim A, Hoek HW, Blom JD (2015). The attribution of psychotic symptoms to jinn in Islamic patients. Transcultural Psychiatry, 52(1), 18 to 32. No prevalence figure is put on screen from this review. It is a synthesis of published case reports and case series, which is a selected sample and cannot support a population estimate.
- Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, Masalih al-Abdan wa al-Anfus, on ailments of the body and ailments of the soul. Ibn Sina, al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, on melancholia. Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Zad al-Ma'ad, on sar' and its two reported causes. Ibn Sina is described as reported in the secondary literature and is not quoted, because the primary text was not consulted. Ibn al-Qayyim is named as contested and is not quoted, because the popular English renderings vary and the Arabic was not consulted. A scholar reviewer decides how far his two causes position may be leaned on.
- Marlow M (2022). The practices of a raqi (Islamic exorcist) in Stockholm. Contemporary Islam, 16(2), 277 to 294. Background reading for lesson 6. The practitioner studied recognised that some people who report seeing jinn are unwell in a way that needs a clinician, and responded by listening rather than by performing a session.