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It came as a shock to many of us that a little Muslim girl had died after being severely caned as part of an exorcism ritual yesterday.
The 9-year-old girl was repeatedly beaten during the ritual ostensibly meant to would drive away an evil spirit. The mother had apparently thought her daughter had been possessed by a demon and took her to the home of a female exorcist so a ritual could be performed to drive the spirit away. According to the Police Spokesman the exorcist first put oil on the girl and then began to repeatedly hit her with a cane. When the girl lost consciousness, she was taken to a hospital, where she sadly passed away- another innocent young life nipped in the bud due to ignorance.
The incident took place not in some remote district but in the town of Delgoda about 25 miles away from Colombo and most surprisingly in the Muslim community which is not usually known to practice rituals that involve severely beating possessed persons such as the Yakaeduras do in some remote villages. According to the Police, the death of the little girl was not the first death from this ritual, and it may not be the last.
It is true that we are required to believe in the existence of Jinn in Islam, but this does not mean that we assume a person can be that easily possessed. If eyewitness accounts are to be believed the child had even cried out in heart-rending words to the woman not to beat her, which shows she was in her senses and probably suffering from some other affliction very probably a treatable medical condition. Backstreet exorcists like this should never be allowed to practice as there remains a very real danger that they will depart from Islamically acceptable methods of driving away such spirits and pose a health or life threat to people thought to have been possessed, whether real or imagined.
According to our best scholars, there is a way to deal with possessed persons and that is by reciting the Qur’an and speaking to the possessed person if needs be with a request for the possessing entity to depart in the name of Allah. Ibn Qayyim in his great work on the Medicine of the Prophet, Tibb An-Nabawi relates that Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah once told him that he had read the verse of the Qur’an: Afahasibtum annamā khalaqnākum abathan wa’annakum ilaynā lā turjaūn (Did you think that We Created you in jest, and that You would not be brought back to Us?) in the ear of a person and that the spirit that possessed him answered by saying “indeed” extending her voice (mocking the Qur’an). When told to depart, the She-spirit replied “I will leave him in your honour” and he said “No, but as an obedience to Allah and His Messenger”. She said “Then I will leave him alone”. The patient then woke up and started looking around, saying “What brought me to the presence of the Sheikh ?”.
Even today in most parts of the Muslim world, it is the Quran that is used to treat possession. To depart from this and seek other means of relief is surely the way to damnation. It has taken yet another innocent life. How many more this demon of ignorance will take is the big question.
