If'Muslimjinn'helpwereallowed—sixconditionsthatcanneverbemet

Most raqis who practise “seeking help from the Muslim jinn” rest their case on three things.

The case for “Muslim jinn” helpThree planks, all of them answered in this series.

• The words of Ibn Taymiyyah
• Ibn ‘Uthaymīn’s transmission of his fatwa
• The claim of pressing need

A raqi of long experience answers them not with theory but with what he has seen in years of treating patients. Suppose, he says, we granted for the sake of argument that help from a Muslim jinnī were permissible. Six things would still have to be verified before anyone could act on it, and in practice they never are.

1. 1Whether the jinnī can help at all
2. 2Whether he is Muslimand how anyone would confirm it
3. 3Whether he is truthful
4. 4How contact is madeand what they ask for
5. 5Whether it is the same jinnī as before
6. 6What stops him turning on the raqi

1. Whether the jinnī can help at all

Does he have the ability to fetch a person’s sihr, or to kill the jinn occupying a patient’s body? He writes that most of those he has known in this practice have no helper who can bring anyone’s sihr. Instead the affair drags on and on: endless “battles” with the sorcerers’ jinn. The helpers cannot finish off the sorcerers’ servants in the body; the raqi keeps reporting, “We killed some of them, so-and-so many remain”, and he says the same thing every time.

2. Whether he is Muslim, and how anyone would confirm it

This is extremely difficult, and no one should say, “I know because I hear them recite Quran, or hear them at prayer, or hear their tasbīh.” That may be true and it may be a lie. This raqi — and many others with him — has seen jinn occupying human bodies who recite Quran. There are even Muslim jinn who serve sorcerers, for pay or because the chiefs of their clans torment them into it. Shayṭān’s entrapment of a person is patient and gradual: he can appear in the form of a devout worshipper who prays and recites. Whoever doubts it should read what Ibn Taymiyyah recorded of the states of those who sought jinn help through particular devotions.

The devils will even lift a man up while he prays: one of them spreads his prayer mat in the air, prays on it and recites, while devils carry him; they will even carry him to Hajj. They can enter sacred places and places of worship — Shayṭān comes to any one of us in the prayer itself to spoil it and strip away its humility, and he may command a man to many good things while coveting one evil thing from him.

And then: how do we confirm a jinnī’s Islam? You can vouch for a human if you have known him a long time as a man of the congregation and of sound creed; otherwise you would not testify for him. Does the raqi know the reality of his helper’s creed, which may be corrupt? He relates that he has seen it with his own eyes in many cases, and other practitioners have seen the same: a jinnī screams that he is Muslim, then under pressure admits, “I was lying — I am a Jew,” or something else. So the claim “my helper is Muslim” carries no weight. He may be; he may not be. And that alone collapses the whole practice.

3. Whether he is truthful

Their default is lying. Ibn Taymiyyah noted that jinn may lie even while calling people to Allah. How then do you confirm a helper’s honesty? He may be truthful, and he may lie, and this has happened among the helper-users of every stripe. What happens in these clinics: the raqi passes on to his patients whatever the jinn tell him — whether the sihr was “found”, where some lost item is, and so on.

4. How contact is made, and what they ask for

By what channel does the raqi reach his helpers? Summoning them through another patient or a family member (a human being whom they possess for the purpose, which is harm in itself)? By telephone? By calling out to them once or several times until they come? Through messages, or in dreams? Every one of these routes carries its own dangers.

And their demands. Someone will say, “They ask for nothing.” They do ask, he says. It may be incense burned for them whenever they attend, “because they are guests”; or food set out “in hospitality”; or bedding laid for them; or practices they insist are “necessary for the treatment”: the set-count litanies of the Sufi orders, by which the “servants” are supposedly summoned. One student of knowledge who had gone down this road was told to tie knots and blow on them while reciting Sūrah al-Falaq, and to use needles in particular ways — and he argued that all of it was free of shirk. They will always ask, even if only after years, after the raqi has been drawn in, helped and hooked. Once he is attached to them and cannot manage without them, the requests begin, always dressed up as part of the treatment, and by then he cannot pull back.

5. Whether it is the same jinnī as before

How does the raqi confirm that today’s helper is the one he first dealt with? The jinn’s power to take forms and to mimic voices is well attested. He has seen real cases of this, and gives one: a man whose companions were Muslim jinn who used to teach him tawhīd, while he taught people tawhīd. Raids would fall on his companions from the disbelieving jinn and their sorcerers, and then impostors would take his companions’ places, mimicking them, feeding him information and “helping” him, mixed with lies. He would only notice after he had already passed lies on to his patients, or after his own family had been harmed. He would then stop the practice for a while, until someone came saying, “We were captured, we escaped, we have come back to you.” Whirlpools and mazes, he calls it: a life the helper-users end up living, whatever the beginning looked like.

6. What stops him turning on the raqi

The jinn’s nature is not human nature: they are quick to anger, violent when they strike, and there is a streak of aggression and injustice in them. Who guarantees the “helper” will not turn on the raqi himself? Especially since most of these helpers are former servants of the sorcerers (Jews, Christians, or fornicators and open sinners) who announced “I have become Muslim” and offered help, and the raqi accepted, though the jinnī knows nothing of Islam but its name. He was never raised on it, never learned tawhīd, never studied the religion — and he has stepped straight from conversion into the battlefield against the sorcerers. He may well apostatise, relapse, and fail under pressure. And even a jinnī who is a believer: what is his temperament? Some have assaulted the very raqi they served, because of some slip in the shared arrangements of the treatment.

These, he says, are the points he wished to add to what the scholars have written — several of whose fatwas and essays follow in this series.