Chapter Five (Spiritual Ailments )

Spiritual Epilepsy (Jinn Affliction of Man)

Since old times, Allah made the jinn and devil use their power against the human beings either to seduce, obsess, or delude them. They are also capable of afflicting the human body with different ailments like epilepsy where the victim acts and behaves strangely without remembering doing that. This due to the control of evil spirits over his body and mind which the result of the old animosity between them.

Al-Hafez Ibn Hajar states in his book Al-Fath that the evil spirits among the jinn are the ones that afflicts man either because they like the human image or to harm him. The former is acknowledged and treated by physicians while the later is denied by most of them and the only cure is using through the help of the good spirits to fight the evil ones. Hippocrates also mentions this and says that the cure of the victim of affliction is useful if the cause is other than the spirits.
The issue of the jinn’s affliction of man has been researched by past and present scholars, especially the possibility of such thing to occur. Those who closely studied the matter confirm the fact that both the Glorious Quran and the Sunnah provide clear evidence that this can take place or that it has actually occurred. The ones who reject this idea altogether argue that the absence of consciousness means non-existence. However, who truly knowledgably people know that the famous scientific rule states that absence of consciousness does not necessitates non-existence. This means that not being able to see the thing you are looking for does not necessarily means that this thing is missing. The existences are much broader and general than the seen things.

His honor, Sheikh Mohamed Ibn Saleh Al- Otheimeen said that there are two kinds of epilepsy:
1-Epilepsy caused by muscle convulsion, which is a pathological ailment that physician can cure through medications.
2-Epilepsy caused by the jinn and devil, where the jinn gets into the human body, beat him up, and over throw him on the ground which renders man unconscious because of this affliction.

The jinn or devil over takes the human body and speaks with his tongue. Anyone who hears the words thinks that it is the man speaking while in fact it is the jinn. Thus his speech when he is awake is different from that when he is sleeping because it is the jinni speaking. Sometimes the jinni speaks out about the reason of his affliction and often he does not. Thus, the jinni affliction of man is mentioned in the Quran and Sunnah.