e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

Diagnosis: Possesed - 1

I am spending a day in bed today as I declare defeat to the will of the flu. I tend to have bad episodes of it after flying. It started a week ago, got gradually worse until it peaked during the weekend with fever, sweats and myalgia. Today, when I thought I got over the worst of this annoying regular visitor, it took my voice with it as it left. I am now officially mute but hopefully not for long.

My grandfather is a very old man. He is older than anyone I know. He is well build for his age; looks with a constant squint of his right eye, remnant of a hard life spent under the sun, bald except for two small thin patches on either sides of his head, and has a thick, trimmed white beard. He has a friendly smiling face but a very strong presence.

Like many of his generation, he does not believe in medicine. You don’t go to a doctor if you are feeling sick, you go to a Mutawa who uses techniques like touching the site of pain, reading verses of the Quran and telling you that you are going to be OK and that the source of the problem have been neutralised. Sometimes, he would even prescribe “Mahow” from the Arabic verb “Yamhoo” which is to erase. It is a form of Ruqya. Saffron is dissolved in water, and the mixer is used to write specific verses of the Quran on a plate. The writing is then cleaned (erased) with water and the fluid mixture collected in bottles and is believed to have healing properties. The process can be done at the Mutawa’s end where the patient gets ready processed bottled water or, alternatively, the patient can take the plates home with him, and produce the water fresh at home as needed.

A Mutawa, or any of the other types of traditional doctors, can also prescribe “Wasm” or “Kayy” as a way of healing. A small metal stick is heated until its red and then thrust into the skin of the patient to a depth of 0.5-1 cm for few seconds then removed. When you burn a site, the gate theory probably explains why you get pain relieve -or possibly the fact that you are inducing an immune reaction that neutralises the cause of the problem, be it an infective agent, or an autoimmune process. I have a doctor friend who thinks its similar to Chinese needles – I’ve never been a great fan of things I do not understand but it is fair to say that some people swear that it works. In fact there is a saying by the prophet that loosely translate to “Kayy is the last of all medicines”

My grandfather’s body is dotted with small burning spots extending from the top of his skull, all the way down to his foot. He accumulated them over his long years. A combination of burning, recitation of the Quran, and ruqyas have always done the trick for him and treated him from all sorts of things; common cold, constipation, migraines, gastritis, food poisoning, jaundace, etc.

A little over a decade ago, his usual combination of medications stopped working. He developed strange symptoms. He went off his food, could not recognise people, and developed mysterious pains all over body and lost a lot of weight very rapidly. He agreed to seek the help of hospital medicine. A whole battery of lengthy investigations revealed nothing. Doctors failed to explain why he was the way he is and declared him healthy for his age.

As is always the case in our culture (back then at least), people started whispering that he is bewitched. Those whispers became loaders and more united until a formal recommendation to undergo an unorthodox and bizarre procedure was made. A “Mawled” was to be held. A special form of exorcism. There is no question in Islam that Jinn exist. There are numerous direct verses of the Quran to support that. Weather or not these creatures can posses humans is a source of controversy amongst religious scholars. If you accept that they doexist, then you should be prepared to at least toy with the idea that exorcism is one of the possible solutions. Those who believe in it, have all sorts of weird believes and rituals. From my superficial understanding, there are two broad types. The first is done by an individual priest on an individual patient with the explicit purpose of extracting the creature from him. The other type is done by a group of men to negotiat a deal with the creature, which could possibly include an extraction. Both types have a religious theme and involve a lot of Quranic recitations and sometimes poems of religious nature. A third type exist that is unsanctioned by the religious establishment and is called “Zar” which involves a lot of drums, dance, music and heightened sensory experience that is supposed to bring the creature to the surface where you beat it, burn it and force it to leave the body it is possessing (it gets even more bizarre). When the creature you are trying to extract is a Muslim of high status (called “Sheik” and the pleural is “Meshayek” rather than Sheiks) you need to perform “Mawled” and that is what we decided to do after numerous recommendations by the know-how’s of the field.

To be Continued…
(update: second part here)

PS: This post is dedicated to Kate and everybody else working with Takatof.