LIVING WITH THE JINN

Anger. Bitterness. Depression. An outsider.  These are some of the feelings and emotions I had lived with for as long as I could remember; I never questioned why although there was no root cause, I just knew this is who I was.  Always feeling empty and alone like I didn’t fit in even within the confinements of my own family.  I was known as a ‘laraaki’ – a girl who is always fighting with everyone, I accepted this title and gave up on ever being truly happy.  Had I only known that this was because I was possessed, I would have not felt so hopeless and maybe taken Islam and Allah swt more seriously back then.

I had only been married to my second husband for a couple months when it all began; one afternoon as I tried to explain my depression to him and how my eyes and soul felt dead within me his expression started to change.

“I’m talking to my wife, not you on the outside but my wife inside.  Baby I love you and I’m going to help you Insha’Allah.”  I stared at him incredulously and started to open my mouth to protest but he shook his head, his eyes pleading for me to stop.  He led me to the sofa and sat me down and gently turned my face towards his parted lips and then he began to recite the adhaan, the call to prayer.  Let me stop you here, dear reader to give evidence that the adhaan scares away Shaiytaan and therefore should be recited if one fears someone is afflicted with the jinn:

It was narrated on the authority of Abu Hurairah that the Prophet (saw) said: “When the call for the prayer is given, the Shaitan takes to his heels, passing wind loudly so that he will not hear the call to prayer. When the call to prayer is finished, he comes back. And when the Iqamah is said, he again takes to his heels, and after it is completed, he returns again to interfere between the (praying) person and his heart, saying to him: ‘Remember such and such, remember such and such,’ – things that he had not remembered – until he does not know how many (Rakahs) he has prayed.” (Sahih)

As my husband recited I found myself getting angry that he was insinuating something so absurd, I had simply been describing my feelings to him and he, like most people could not handle my morbidity so he conjured up a different reason for my bizarre comment which I actually deemed to be quite poetic in a freakish kind of way.  I refused to recite the supplication for Allah swt’s protection from Shaiytaan because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me.  The incident ended there but many months later my husband told me my eyes had turned black, my lips doubled their size and my voice came out different, sounding like that of a man or a devil’s like they show you in horror films.  He said he had been scared for me and had no doubt in his mind that what he had witnessed was very real and very un-human like.

The incident passed and life continued like normal until one evening as we were both sat in the kitchen arguing, he once again witnessed something: he saw a starkly white face of  a male being who was around 7 feet high with no hair whatsoever –  looking in through the glass in garden door, at me.  My husband demanded a torch and ran out into the garden, he came back shaken telling me he could find nothing and that nothing could have run that fast.  His appearance seemed to have diminished somewhat, his face pale and his hands trembling with an uncontrollable shake.  I sat him down and put a blanket round him, trying to soothe him and reassure him. 

Abu Hurairah (radi Allahu anhu) reported that the Messenger of Allah (sal Allahu alaihi wa sallam) said, “Do not turn your houses into graves. Shaitaan is barred from any house in which Surat al-Baqarah is recited.” [Sahih Muslim]

We played Surah al-Baqarah and he rang up a rakhi he knew for advice who told him it sounded like my husband had indeed seen something jinni-related, most likely a hallucination that they wanted him to see.  We were advised to keep playing Surah al-Baqarah and to read it too, do all of our daily adhkaar and dhikr, to read our Salah on time and read the sunnah prayers not just fard, to remember our duas when entering and leaving the home and entering and leaving the toilet and to make lots of astaghfar.  The fear I felt that night, not knowing what was around whilst not actually seeing anything myself – I cannot describe.  I didn’t feel safe and rang my mum and asked her to take the kids with her home for the night, she told us to come too and at first we declined but then we agreed.  This was the beginning of the event that changed our lives for ever.

The rest of the story up to the present time is too long to go in to (maybe I’ll write about it in a book if anyone is interested!) but we took this opportunity to research a lot into this; I realized there isn’t actually that much out there on the topic.  Every case is different and there are so many questions I had.  We saw countless rakhis, alhamdulillah none of which did any dodgy shirk stuff, read endless books and sites and watched many lectures.  Two that I must mention here are Ibn Taymiyah’s essay on the jinn and Abu Ibraheem’s talks entitled “Diaries of an exorcist” which can be found on YouTube.  I really enjoyed the videos mashAllah because they included many case studies and explained how rukhiyah should be done and how rakhis should only step in at the last minute and not be turned to initially if it can be helped as we should do the healing ourselves as this builds up our reliance on Allah swt and not on anyone else.  He also mentions people not to approach and urges that we make sure we are doing everything we should be and are not doing anything haram.

Subhanallah, it was and still is hard, people don’t believe you when you tell them, they told me my husband had made my life worse by bringing this into my life  and wouldn’t accept that I had had my own jinn in me since I was young.  The Jinni take their time appearing sometimes, and possession can happen for many reasons like black magic, revenge for destroying their homes or families and even out of infatuation.  I was told it sounded like my jinn was an “aashiq” jinn who was infatuated with me and so lived within me.  My husband had had black magic done on him which he had both ingested and that was buried in a graveyard.  The magician had sent the jinn(s) inside him and they couldn’t leave until they had accomplished their mission: to murder him.  Apparently the jinni had teamed up when we married, my jinn wanted me to commit haram so for as long as I wasn’t practising Islam it kept quiet, it would have eventually made an appearance.  It hated the fact that I got married because that restricted it somewhat in its abilities (or so it told me) because our marriage was halal and therefore pure.

Initially I only saw my husband in a state of possession during rukhiyah sessions with our rakhi; to be honest we stupidly weren’t really following his instruction properly and that is probably why things got worse.  The jinni started to make an appearance more often, first whilst he listenend to rukhiyah at home and then one day when we had had an argument and I was crying. It was terrifying, my husband had his head in my lap and I got up to wash my tears off my face, I came back to him in a sujood-like position, unmoving.  Suddenly he started vibrating and I could tell his body was quaking with silent laughter.  I’m not the type to get scared easily but I was emotional that day and I ran out of the house and locked him in.  I rang up the rakhi hysterical, screaming he would kill me.  My blood turned cold as I watched my husband through the garden door approach me, he came into the kitchen with his hand to his head asking why I had run away and very confused.  I told him to stay away and then he just collapsed to the floor.  Fear for him now replacing the fear for my own safety, I went up to the door, my heart pounding in my chest, and peered in.  He was lying on the floor, his body convulsing as he was fitting; this just added to my screams of horror and I became hysterical.  I backed away to the drive, my eyes on both places he could come from: the back of the house or the side if he came from the front.  I saw him approach me from the side calling to me asking what was going on, I told him to stay away and ran through the alley to the main road and to my mum’s house who lives 2 minutes away.  That was my first encounter with his jinni but not the last.

Since then, many things have happened and things have gotten much worse; after he was taken over many times, my husband was told he was not allowed to live with me because he was a threat to my life, the jinni had openly declared my death would be at their hands because I caused problems and gotten in their way by tricking both them and my own jinn.  Apparently my jinn left me and entered my husband as it now joined forces with his jinni so that they could cause him to go mad by making him hallucinate.  People just didn’t get why I stayed, they said the problem was all him and I bet his family said the same to him.  I couldn’t leave him though; he was fighting because of me, to be with me, why should I leave?  Just because he was ill?  That’s not what I think Islam teaches at all, I loved him, I couldn’t let him face this alone, that wasn’t what a wife was in my eyes, that’s what a selfish person was.  Besides, I knew how it felt to be lonely and I would never wish that pain on anyone.  I wasn’t stupid though, I knew I had to protect my children too so I would meet him outside my house in public when the kids were in school.  It was heart-wrenching, we had only been married a few months ago and already I had to be distanced from husband because of something not in my hands.  I guess we were a bit like Romeo and Juliette, well that’s certainly how we were behaving but I couldn’t express enough how he was my strength and the only one who understood me and believed what was happening and that I too, was his strength, it made our love grow strong and firm.

The problem seemed to come in when we would argue, he would get upset and the shaiyteen would use his weak state of mind to take over; this was their game plan to have us fight so I would leave.  I felt so guilty every time I saw him suffer because of me but at the same time I had a hard time controlling the inexplicable rage I felt.  The day my husband got taken over and nearly killed me whilst trying to rape me I learned patience the hard way, he was so distraught when he found out what happened and kept asking why his clothes were off and what he was doing on the bed with me.  Looking into his eyes, I forgot my own pain and soothed him instead; he really was like a baby, so delicate and fragile, so easy to break.  That was the day I tricked the aashiq jinn and when it decided it wanted me dead.

We had no support from anyone except maybe our mums and a couple of other people like my sister and his friends, even though my mum never believed I had a jinn in me: she said I had always been this way.  It hurt me so much knowing no-one fully believed me, even my husband was spared the torture of seeing how he behaved when possessed, he didn’t know what was going on and didn’t always believe my theories of their latest antics.  Whenever he got possessed now, his jinni would come on the phone and take great pleasure in trying to hurt me, telling me they wanted me to go crazy so I gave up and let them in and they could then rip my head off my body and drink my blood.  I know it wasn’t clever, but I was angry now, angry at the world for abandoning me once again, angry at these shaiyteen who sought to ruin my marriage and my home and angry at my husband for not fighting harder and leaning on me emotionally.  I started retaliating, winding the jinni up, telling them they were puppets for their master the magicians, I told them no matter what I would never leave my husband and that they had given me more reason to fight. 

The times he did get taken over in public, he would try to walk away from me; they wanted to send him out to the sea to scare him.  I would grab hold of his beard and threaten to drag them around like a dog on a leash and I would take advantage of knowing they wouldn’t cause a scene in public and recite on him as much as I could and keep reciting the adhaan in his ear whilst holding him in what seemed a loving embrace until he came to his senses.

The oppression we faced with my own brother calling the police on him and stirring until I was threatened with social services (and they did come, and there is now an on-going case with them), and my father threatening to have my husband locked up and the injustice from others – I can’t explain fully as there are too many incidents.  How lonely my poor husband must have felt, that his whole family except his mum thought he was crazy and mine thought he was deranged and psychotic; nasty hurtful comments, people interfering, ending up hundreds of miles from home, cold and wet, not knowing how he got there, hearing he had hurt his wife, confused and scared and being told to push harder and fight harder when he must have just wanted to hide away; I can only imagine how it felt for him.  For me it was tough too, scared for your own sanity, battling depression and oppression, the weight of carrying my husband and worrying endlessly every time he disappeared, ringing round everyone, begging for help only to hear they were too busy or so what if he hadn’t returned my calls, watching their faces as they mocked me and jeered and told me it was my fault if my children got taken away, fighting my own nafs – it was hard.  It took a toll on my marriage,  I only had so much strength and patience, things got so bad that I couldn’t ever let my husband see I was upset or even anything less than happy because otherwise he would take the hurt so deeply himself that he got taken over.  His rakhi told him to fight better and control his emotions but I wanted to shout that this was a testimony to his love for me that he got so hurt because I was sad.  I hid it as much as I could, always making him laugh and smile, joking around, pretending to be carefree and bubbly, planning romantic afternoons and picnics, showering him with affection and kisses and love: I babied him and somewhere between trying to protect him and give him a reason to fight I neglected the children somewhat.  I felt so guilty when my mum told me I was doing this and now had another challenge, managing 2 children and a mentally sick one too.  Suddenly I had so much respect for carers of terminally ill patients and mothers that looked after handicapped children, I felt like I was in a similar situation.  Everyone kept telling me it wasn’t my job to look after my husband but I couldn’t make them understand that I was his strength and his weakness and that I gave him a reason to fight.  I had told him so many times to make Allah swt his reason to fight and he said he was doing that, but wanting them dead so me and him could be together again gave him the push he needed.  My husband needed me whether that was right or wrong, and I would do that much for him because he deserved it because he was amazing in my eyes and I fought the world, my family, his family, our friends for him, defending him trying to promote awareness for what life was like for us living with this terrible thing and what life was like for him and how he was innocent of the cruel allegations made about him and was a victim, vulnerable, not the oppressor but the oppressed.

And this, dear readers, is what this article has been about, promoting awareness.  It is hard to diagnose jinn possession especially when you have no knowledge and to be honest most people don’t because maybe this is not widely spoken of.  I have heard many times my husband should be admitted to a mental facility, that people have been known to speak in 2 voices at once but one question has always remained unanswered: what kind of mental disorder makes a person react every single time the perfect and pure ayats of the Qur’an are recited so much so that he looks like he is writing in agony and burning in pain?  As Muslims we have to believe in that which Allah swt tells us and we are told that this is possible as there are ahadeeth on it. 

Mine and my husband’s situation is still on-going, the danger is ever present and we have been told that though the end is near, it gets so much worse before it gets better.  Like I have said there is much I have not included like the conversations that took place between the jinni and me and the incidents that happened and even what we learnt from our research; there is much good literature out there which uses proof from the Qur’an and Sunnah to back it up and isn’t just hearsay.  It is beneficial to educate ourselves in this matter because it’s one part of Islam that people do not know much about, I was living with it for 15 years and I didn’t know what was wrong with me except that I never felt like I fit it because the jinn wanted me to feel that way so he could have me turn away from Allah swt and to him instead. There is no support for people suffering from this illness usually and they instead face hatred, pure hatred normally influenced by the shaiyteen.  Judging and disregarding comes naturally but looking into the realms of possibility seems hard because we are so stubborn in our belief that is based on what we think rather than what we know.  This has been my attempt to spread a little awareness on the subject.  I ask the readers to make dua for me and my husband and our families and that you make dua for the whole Ummah too.  I hope this inspires you to tell others of what you have read and to look into the matter yourselves and educate yourselves; for understanding our deen further can only be a good thing.  Asalaamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakhatahu.

One sister’s story that I put in my own words.