Whitemagic,“goodjinn”,andbreakingsihrwithsihr

There is a phrase that comes up again and again in messages we receive: "It's not black magic, it's white magic." Or its cousins: "he only uses good jinn", "he doesn't do sihr, he just removes it", "the man who did it can undo it, so I went back to him". These sound like distinctions. In the Shari‘ah they are not. This article explains why, as plainly as possible, and then explains what you can do instead, because there is a lawful road out of sihr and it works.

Magic has no colour

The Quran speaks about sihr at length in one place, in Surah al-Baqarah, when it describes what the two angels at Babylon taught, and how people learned from them what separates a man from his wife. It does not divide magic into a harmful kind and a helpful kind. It says of the whole thing:

وَلَقَدْ عَلِمُوا لَمَنِ اشْتَرَاهُ مَا لَهُ فِي الْآخِرَةِ مِنْ خَلَاقٍ

Wa laqad ‘alimū lamani shtarāhu mā lahū fī l-ākhirati min khalāq

And the Children of Israel certainly knew that whoever purchased it [i.e., magic] would not have in the Hereafter any share.

Whoever purchased it. Not whoever purchased the bad kind. Sihr, by definition, is a transaction with the jinn and the shayatin, and that transaction always has a price: some act of disbelief or disobedience, whether it is a slaughter to other than Allah, insulting the Quran, or an oath to a devil. The magician who "only helps people" pays that price just as surely as the one who breaks up marriages. Often it is the same man; he simply has two price lists.

وَأَلْقِ مَا فِي يَمِينِكَ تَلْقَفْ مَا صَنَعُوا ۖ إِنَّمَا صَنَعُوا كَيْدُ سَاحِرٍ ۖ وَلَا يُفْلِحُ السَّاحِرُ حَيْثُ أَتَىٰ

Wa alqi mā fī yamīnika talqaf mā ṣana‘ū, innamā ṣana‘ū kaydu sāḥir, wa lā yufliḥu s-sāḥiru ḥaythu atā

And throw what is in your right hand; it will swallow up what they have crafted. What they have crafted is but the trick of a magician, and the magician will not succeed wherever he is.

"Wherever he is", say the scholars of tafsir, includes whatever he is doing. There is no doorway through which a magician walks and becomes a healer.

"Good jinn helpers"

The jinn, like humans, include believers and disbelievers. That much is true. But a jinn who serves a human, appears on command, and reveals hidden things is not doing so out of piety. Sulayman was given command over the jinn as a miracle specific to him, and he asked Allah for a kingdom that would belong to no one after him. Anyone else who claims a jinn "helper" has that helper on terms, and the terms are always some form of shirk. This is precisely what Surah al-Jinn describes: humans seeking refuge in jinn, and the jinn increasing them in burden.

The scholars of Najd, and Ibn Baz and Ibn Uthaymeen after them, were blunt on this point: seeking help from the jinn in matters of the unseen, or employing them to lift sihr, is from the work of the magicians, whatever the person calls himself.

The hadith on nushrah

Nushrah is the Arabic term for undoing sihr from someone afflicted by it. Jabir ibn ‘Abdillah reports that the Prophet ﷺ was asked about nushrah and said: it is from the work of Shaytan (Abu Dawud). Al-Hasan al-Basri is quoted in Bukhari's chapter heading as saying that none undoes sihr except a magician.

Read on their own these texts sound like a blanket ban, and some people conclude that nothing at all can be done for the bewitched. That is not what the scholars understood.

Ibn al-Qayyim, in Zad al-Ma‘ad, explained that nushrah is of two kinds:

• Undoing sihr with sihr. This is what the hadith condemns. The nashir and the afflicted person both approach Shaytan with what he loves, and in return he lifts the harm. This is forbidden without exception; Ibn al-Qayyim says it is what al-Hasan meant.
• Undoing sihr with ruqyah, seeking refuge in Allah, lawful medicines and supplication. This is permitted, and indeed encouraged. It is what the Prophet ﷺ himself received when he was bewitched: the mu‘awwidhatayn were revealed, he recited them, and the sihr was lifted.

Ibn Hajar quotes this division approvingly in Fath al-Bari, and it is the position of Ibn Baz and Ibn Uthaymeen. So the answer to "can sihr be undone?" is yes, and the answer to "can it be undone by a magician?" is no. Those are two different questions.

Why "it worked" is not an argument

People do report relief after visiting a magician. This is expected. The jinn assigned to harm you answers to him. He tells it to stop, or to stop for a while, or to move on to your sister. From your side, the symptoms lift. From Allah's side, you have paid a magician, and the sihr may well be replaced with something worse, or simply return.

The lawful road may take longer. It may take weeks of daily recitation, of getting your prayer in order, of morning and evening adhkar, of Zamzam and olive oil and honey and patience. But every step of it draws you nearer to Allah instead of further away, and when it lifts, it lifts by His permission, with nothing owed to anyone.

The lawful alternative

Nushrah by the Quran and du‘a looks like this:

• Recite over yourself, or have someone trustworthy recite over you, the verses the Prophet ﷺ used and the verses that speak of sihr: al-Fatihah, Ayat al-Kursi, the ends of al-Baqarah, the sihr verses of al-A‘raf, Yunus and Ta-Ha, al-Ikhlas, al-Falaq and al-Nas.
• Recite into water and drink from it and wash with it. This is established from the practice of the salaf and endorsed by Ibn Baz.
• Guard the morning and evening supplications and the adhkar of sleep. These are your daily wall.
• Ask Allah directly, in prostration, in the last third of the night. Sihr is a hardship, and hardship is where du‘a is answered.
• If the sihr is known to be buried or hidden somewhere and it can be found lawfully, remove it and destroy it, as the Prophet ﷺ did with the comb and hair in the well of Dharwan.
• Take lawful medicine for physical symptoms. There is no contradiction.

Ibn al-Qayyim also mentions, from the practice of the salaf, using seven green lote-tree leaves crushed in water with the recitation of Quran over it. This is a means, not a ritual; the recitation is what matters.

There is no white magic. There is Allah's cure, and there is Shaytan's bargain, and the second is never worth what it costs.