Jinn, psychiatry and contested notions of misfortune among east London Bangladeshis (original) (raw)
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Anthropology & medicine, 2013
An interview study of 44 Bangladeshi patients and relatives in London demonstrated simultaneous trust in psychiatrists as well as in the widespread use of healing amulets. At the same time, local Islamic clerics and traditional healers were seen by many with some degree of suspicion. The authors offer an interpretation in which local healers and their methods are regarded ambivalently: the more distant biomedical framework fits with the newer modernising 'High' Islam (literate, scripturalist, puritanical, unitarian, urban, clerical, perhaps masculinist), as opposed to Hindu-inflected traditional Sufi Islam in Bangladesh (peasant, popular, syncretic, saintly, magical, ecstatic and possibly more sympathetic to women's experience).
Jinn and Its Effects on Muslim Society
Muslims believe that there are unseen beings called jinn. Their world exists in parallel to that of the human world. Indeed, these creations are powerful, move fast, and can easily change shape. Due to the mixture of this belief with local cultures, most Muslims believe that jinn are responsible for many psychological, mental and physical diseases and they are even responsible for social problems. As a result, religious healers present themselves to deal with this perceived phenomenon and treat its effects on the individuals and groups. This present review provides a general overview of this belief, the effect of jinn on humans and the way they treated them.
Human behavior and the clinical psychology is a complex and diverse specialty area within psychology. It addresses a breadth of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders, integrating the science of psychology with the prevention, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of a wide variety of complicated human problems. The challenge lies in the evaluation of these sicknesses in the light of Religion and the Modern Science. As defined by Littlewood, possession is the belief that an individual has been entered by an alien spirit or other Parahuman force, which then controls the person or alters that person's actions and identity. To the observer, this would be manifested as an altered state of consciousness. The Jinn possessing the human body has been discussed long before the recent time. About the occurrence of this kind of modern types of incidents, the Islamic scholars, and some of the scholars in the field confirmed and ascertained the fact that Jinn can possess the human body with proofs and facts from Islamic divine sources (the Qur’an and Hadith).
Anthropological Quarterly, 2001
Divination is more dialogical than some diviners or anthropologists have made it appear. I analyze the transcript of one Bangladeshi divination event, comparing it with a dozen others performed by one diviner, Delwar, revealing how tenuously he manages to assign a single meaning to troubles, especially when clients openly compare his declarations with their intimate knowledge of those troubles. I explain how divinations could appear to be texts rather than emergent products of interaction. Diviners entextualize their declamations, doing their best to keep context at bay. Anthropologists who concentrate on textual products of divination-like Delwar's declamations-have made divination appear to enable groups to manage conflicts by transcending personal intentionality. Such representations elide troublesome interactive processes in which declamations emerge, meet potential rejection by clients, and are always vulnerable to recontextualization as clients might return to the diviner as events shift their perception of earlier divinations' accuracy. [divination, dialogism, entexualization, conflict, South Asia]
Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 2013
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The experiences of Muslim therapists working with clients presenting with Jinn possession in the UK.
2019
The Muslim population of the UK is increasing; hence researchers have explored the prevalence of the belief in Jinn possession and the impact that has in understanding mental health. However, there has been relatively few to none accounts of how Muslim therapists using a psychodynamic approach in the UK context work with Jinn possession in therapy. This study used a qualitative approach to explore the experiences of six Muslim therapists. Transcripts of semi-structured interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Three super-ordinate themes were found 1. being in two world 2. meaning making and integrating 3. Islamic faith as an integral part of healing. The results highlighted that Muslim therapists are able to use their knowledge of psychodynamic theory as well as their Islamic faith to understand the unique meaning of Jinn. The study also illustrated the challenges and the advantages of working in a religiously similar therapeutic dyad while also being part of a secular UK environment.
"Divining TROUBLES or diVINing troubles? Gender, conflict, and polysemy in Bangladeshi divination"
Divination is more dialogical than some diviners or anthropologists have made it appear. I analyze the transcript of one Bangladeshi divination event, comparing it with a dozen others performed by one diviner, Delwar, revealing how tenuously he manages to assign a single meaning to troubles, especially when clients openly compare his declarations with their intimate knowledge of those troubles. I explain how divinations could appear to be texts rather than emergent products of interaction. Diviners entextualize their declamations, doing their best to keep context at bay. Anthropologists who concentrate on textual products of divination— like Delwar’s declamations—have made divination appear to enable groups to manage conflicts by transcending personal intentionality. Such representations elide troublesome interactive processes in which declamations emerge, meet potential rejection by clients, and are always vulnerable to recontextualization as clients might return to the diviner as events shift their perception of earlier divinations’ accuracy. [divination, dialogism, entexualization, conflict, South Asia]
Religion and spirituality are increasingly associated with mental health, yet spirit-related practices, beliefs and experiences (SPBEs) are regarded with more suspicion. This suspicion is misplaced, and worryingly so, since, I argue, it shuts down a potentially therapeutic avenue in relation to anomalous experiences such as hearing voices and sensing the presence of the dead. A presupposition of this argument is that anomalous experiences are not inherently pathological but can become so as a result of the way they are interpreted and reacted to.