Atruestory:thehealerwhose'Muslimjinn'capturedhim

A raqi of long experience relates this as one of several real cases he knew personally, in detail — a story that shows where the road of “jinn help” ends, even for a good man.

The healer

His method

His method was more forceful than that of others who claim jinn helpers. Where they negotiate, and promise the patient that “the Muslim jinn will do such-and-such”, the account relates that this man would recite the ruqyah verses in full — perhaps repeating them — then order the jinnī possessing the patient to leave, or else. If it refused, he said to his companions: “Take him out — or kill him.” The patient’s body would drop, the possessing jinnī might scream, and then the patient would wake up well, by Allah’s permission.

The warning

The raqi relating this story warned him, just as raqis are warned today. The man replied that the eldest of his companions was four thousand years old; that he had been sitting in a tree on the night the Prophet ﷺ met the jinn; that he had memorised the Quran in seven readings; and on, and on. He trusted them completely: he would ask them about patients’ conditions without so much as the mother’s name, and they would answer him.

The slide into error — and shirk

What follows is what usually happens to those who take jinn helpers:

• He began reporting matters of the unseen, like a fortune-teller, and the results were often false.
• When he made du‘ā against an oppressing jinnī and its helpers, people came to believe that he had the power to expel jinn.
• Asked about it, he admitted that while he was calling on Allah, his heart was fixed on what his companions were about to do.

Worse still

He began to call on them instead of Allah, and to put them before Allah in hardship. Once, caught in a crisis, he cried out to their chief and elder with a call of desperate appeal — istighāthah of the kind that is shirk. The raqi asked him afterwards, and asked him to answer truthfully: “Why did you not cry out to Allah, instead of calling your sheikh? Is it because you are certain that Allah’s help may come or may not come — but your sheikh’s help always comes, as he has accustomed you?”

The man said yes. The raqi asked him: “Then what is left of your tawhīd?” The teller leaves that question where it stands. The road begins with free help, correct information, even lessons in tawhīd; it ends with a man who trusts the jinn’s help more than Allah’s.