Descending with angels

Islamic exorcism and psychiatry: a film monograph

Christian Suhr

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526145918
• eBook ISBN: 9781526140333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated for jinn possession and psychosis in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. Through rich filmic and textual case studies, he shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. The book reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work to produce relief from pain, and also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both text and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, which allows patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.

1
Invisibility and Islamic healing in the West

WHAT is it like to be a Muslim who is possessed by a jinn spirit? How do you find refuge from madness and evil spirits when you live in a place like Denmark? In this book I analyse some of the ways in which Muslims in the West have sought to protect themselves. During fieldwork conducted over several years, I followed Muslim patients while they were being treated in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital. Some of the Muslims I worked with found healing in psychotropic therapy, but many turned to Islam to find protection from the jinn as well as from intrusions by secular state institutions.

My intention has been to specifically explore the role of the invisible in their experiences of mental illness and spirit possession, and as such, this book belongs to a long tradition of studies aiming to understand the invisible in human life. Illnesses such as psychosis and possession occupy an ambiguous position in the borderland between the visible and invisible. Such illnesses are sometimes expressed through visible signs, but the cause of illness and the experience of suffering are often invisible.

Psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism offer different ways of giving the invisible a recognisable shape. Yet both psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism also operate through a disruption of the immediately visible, thereby intensifying the experience of uncertainty and invisibility, of being powerless and in need of help. Both psychiatric healthcare and Islamic exorcism rely on a dissolution of human perceptual agency in favour of submission to external and essentially invisible healing agents – namely, psychotropic medicine and God. In this way, psychiatric treatment and Islamic exorcism raise questions about the limits of human perception and the human capacity for healing.

Readers familiar to Arabic may find the use of the concept of exorcism to be peculiar. In Arabic, the term the people I worked with would use is al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya – lawful incantation – the common practice of reciting prayers and Quranic verses for healing and protection not only from jinn, but from all kinds of maladies ranging from headaches to severe illness. In analysing a maraboutic approach to the expelling of jinn, Mohammed Maarouf (2007) prefers the concept ‘eviction’ to avoid the projection of Western ideas of evil on Muslim practices of healing. In a recent book on ruqya in Morocco, Stefania Pandolfo (2018: 265–6) also avoids the concept of exorcism to stress that the Quranic cure never completely eliminates the jinn since its harmful invisible power in complex ways ‘is internal to the human soul’.

For the people I worked with, the struggle with the jinn is also an ongoing and difficult endeavour. Yet they insist that ultimately the jinn has no business in a human body, and if it is discovered they will do their best to get rid of it. In using the term exorcism (in Danish eksorcisme or åndeuddrivelse), I am relying on my interlocutors’ own efforts to translate and explain their practices, which they recognise as being different from, yet also having important commonalities with, other traditions of exorcism and a common origin in the healing practices shared by both Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (see also Philips 2007). The adoption of the concept of exorcism among many Muslims in Europe as a description of the cures of the jinn could quickly be explained as an effect of Westernisation. Yet it can also be understood as a way of situating the Quranic cures in dialogue with other traditions and as an identification of certain similarities that warrants the use of a common term. One ambition of the project has been to understand how the people I worked with perceive the differences and commonalities of their approaches to healing in relation to other traditions.

My analysis of the invisible in Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry comprises both this written commentary and a film. The results take the form of a film monograph (Connor, Asch, and Asch 1986). With a camera in hand I have used film as a means to approach the invisible in ways that differ from what has been standard in much writing within the social sciences. In addition I have used the particular sensibilities of the camera as an analytical tool in the theorisation of ritual and healing. Like healing, the production of film can be understood as a practice that despite its visible form essentially has invisible aspects of human life as its principal object (such as experiential and emotional developments within subjects). The aesthetic techniques of both healing and filmmaking can be understood as a sustained process of image-making and image-breaking. Between the cracks of these images the invisible may emerge as an externality beyond the reach of perception. Inspired by theories of cinematic montage, the book and film explore how disruptive techniques are used in healing to destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, so as to allow patients to submit to external powers beyond their own control.

The idea for the project came from previous fieldwork in Kafrat al-Gabal, a suburb of Giza, Egypt, in 2004–5 (Suhr and Bahnsen 2005). While studying sales strategies among camel-drivers at the Pyramids plateau, I lived in the house of a local family of three brothers, their wives, children, and parents. Shortly after my arrival, the wife of the newly wedded youngest brother became possessed by one of the invisible spirits called jinn. Several months proceeded with numerous attempts to cure the woman by way of Quranic recitation, exorcism, prayer, and ritual purification with holy water and honey. I tried hard to convince the family that we should go to a psychiatrist, and also offered to pay for such a consultation as I was increasingly disturbed by the young woman's outbreaks of highly transgressive behaviour, severe fevers, and incomprehensible utterances. While a part of me persistently rejected spirit possession as a proper explanation, I could not help but begin to protect myself from these malicious forces with small home-made supplications to a God I had never and did not want to believe in. Having been raised in the Danish countryside with a good deal of religious scepticism, I felt uncomfortable experiencing how suddenly invisible spiritual forces, evil eyes, and magic slipped into my world.

Driven by a combination of disbelief and curiosity I decided to apply for a scholarship in order to explore the role that such invisible entities could play in the lives of the Muslims in my hometown of Aarhus, Denmark. My fieldwork for this book was slowly initiated in and around the mosques of Aarhus in March 2009 and has continued with several prolonged breaks until the present day. The most important part of the research, including the recording of more than 100 hours of film footage, intensive participant observation, and hundreds of conversations and interviews was carried out in collaboration with people from the mosques between April 2010 and October 2011.

My reasons for moving the project from Egypt to Denmark were primarily practical. As the father of young children, it was more convenient to do long-term fieldwork closer to home. Yet in Denmark new challenges, complexities, and fields of invisibility began to open up. Many of the Islamic healers and Muslim patients I met had personal experiences of or strong opinions about the Danish welfare system, and especially Danish psychiatric healthcare. Indeed the psychiatric system was a primary reference point through which the benefits and dangers of Islamic exorcisms were evaluated. I decided to extend my fieldwork to take a closer look at how Muslim patients experienced the psychiatric system, and to explore the ways in which psychiatrists and nurses dealt with this particular group of patients. Most of my observations of psychiatric consultations occurred between February and October 2011, when I was following the work of psychiatric nurses at the Team for Transcultural Psychiatry and Centre South at Aarhus University Hospital in Risskov.

Having spent months among Islamic healers in the mosques, encountering the psychiatric system quickly became just as unsettling and exotic as my initial encounter with jinn possession years earlier in Egypt. Psychiatric diagnoses and methods of treatment I had previously taken for granted as self-evident truths proven by science now appeared strange and unfamiliar. Jinn possession and paranoid schizophrenia had become equally effective ways of evoking the limits of the visible and knowable within my horizon of experience. This book and the accompanying film explores the ways that Muslim healers, patients, nurses, and psychiatrists experience and understand the healing practices they engage in, and provides the story of my encounters with the invisible in the psychiatric institutions and mosques of Aarhus.

The invisible in social science and Islam

Intellectual life has for a long time been obsessed with the invisible. Whether defined in terms of actual vision or in the form of hidden ideological, economic, psychological, magical, or religious structures, the invisible has often, as Bruno Latour (1993: 38) points out, been regarded as that which is waiting to be uncovered and made visible. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1988[1844]) proclaimed that the invisible was to be found and exposed in the social processes occurring ‘behind the backs’ of individual agents. According to Sigmund Freud (1980[1899]), the invisible forces governing our lives could also be discovered in unfulfilled desires hidden within the ‘unconscious’ of the human psyche. In structuralist anthropology, the invisible was located in universal structures existing before and beyond the individual, directing the tangible form of various social phenomena from kinship alliances and myths to ways of carving a stone (Lévi-Strauss 2001[1978]).

All of these grand social theories revealed that ‘facts’ are not inscribed on the faces of the objects we encounter, but lie beyond the visible world. Often the ambition of social science has been to provide people with an enlightened vision to liberate them from the invisible forces governing their lives, as in the Marxist struggle to expose ‘false consciousness’ or in the attempt of psychoanalysis to uncover the ‘unconscious’. However, efforts of this sort risk eradicating the essence of the invisible by substituting it with the visibility of pre-established ideas and theories of what it contains.

For the people I worked with in the mosques of Aarhus, belief in the idea that something exists that cannot be seen and cannot be made visible, and that human life is predicated upon such an absolute impermeable invisibility, is a matt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of film scenes
• List of figures
• Series editors’ preface
• A guide to the book and film
• Note on translation, transliteration, and informed consent
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Invisibility and Islamic healing in the West
• 2 How to take jinn possession seriously
• 3 Jinn exorcisms on YouTube
• 4 How to become a patient
• 5 Healing through sacrifice
• 6 Ruqya, psychotropics, and montage
• 7 No healing here
• References
• Index