‘If you go into the kitchen at night the Jinn will come and get you,’ my mother would say as she tried to prevent my night time sojourns for treats into the kitchen, when I was a little boy. At bedtime she would tell me fairy tales of talking birds, princesses and magic rings. The stories were rich with the imagination of the Arabian Nights and the memory of Sherezade dripped from them like the rose fragrance in my mother’s rice pudding, replete with the promise of satisfaction.
However, the tales of Jinns also terrified me. I thought since my mum was telling me stories where pretty girls were kidnapped and spirited away by Jinns in the middle of the night to find themselves awaking in cities hundreds of miles away, standing in the midst of strangers, only in their night clothes; this might also happen to me. The fact that I was not a pretty girl made not one nightmare’s worth of difference. When I was older the ghost stories from school and films like Poltergeist, Omen and The Exorcist overtook my imagination, swamped my brain. They made me sweat and sleep with the lights on. I was literally paralysed with fear at nights. I could not get up and go to the bathroom and I would cover my head with the duvet. I would not walk alone at night or even sit at my desk with my back to the room; this was not just a childish phenomenon, all through my university years I could not read at my desk and I continued to sleep with the lights on. It never really occurred to me why only tanned people had Jinns and why white people were not afraid of them but had their own ghosts.
I wore amulets and used charms written out by my mother, incomprehensible hieroglyphs, which I secreted in the inside pockets of my jacket.
It was not just bucket loads of pilau rice and lamb kebabs that made the journey to Scotland regularly. The food would disappear down my gullet but the fear would remain, as if stuck there. I would share the food with my friends but not my thoughts.
There are societies today, far from just those that claim to be pagan, where people come to Holy Men asking for miracles. They cry and beg for sons. They weep and put their heads on the feet of the Holy Men, subjugating their frontal lobes, the essence of their intellect, in prostration to the miracle worker. Death of the idols is far from achieved, some pray to a black goddess, to return so she can reinvest her evil empire over the world and take power again, so unempowered are they in their real lives. Even a powerful evil is better than a helpless nothing.
I regularly get leaflets through my door ‘All your problems, bad luck, evil spells, business, children, marriage problems due to curses or black magic will be solved by the Holy Man: Mr John Moses Mohammed. Money back guarantee.’
Truly ignorance has no religion.
I will never forget a patient of mine, a woman in her mid-thirties, who developed a tumour in the roof of her mouth. I advised her to have it operated on and let the surgeons look after it. Instead, at the behest of her family, she travelled to seek a cure in the middle of the desert in Pakistan from a Holy Man, who had been gifted powers from God. For a fee of three thousand pounds, The Holy Man, repeatedly over the course of many days burned the inside of her mouth, her cancer, with a white-hot iron rod.
I got called two months later to her home as an emergency. She died with her eyes bulging, writhing in agony. Choking on her own vomit, fitting, her whole body making fish like spastic movements; the tumour had spread to her brain. I tried to resuscitate her and shouted at her husband to call an ambulance. Her three children, a four-year-old boy and two girls, six and seven, ran in and out of the room, screaming. And I felt like doing the same. I sat in my car, after the ambulance took her body to the hospital, and wept.
This kind of reliance on Holy Men has been on-going for millennia. There is nothing new in human nature since humans first lived in collective groups. There has always been something in us that allows, in fact needs, to believe in powers and things beyond our senses and intellect. Perhaps it is the need for hope; perhaps it is the desire to live beyond ourselves, our frail and mortal bodies that soon are to fail and turn to decay. The decay will eventually return to stardust, after all that is what we are made of, nitrogen, magnesium and phosphorus; for most it will be a fizzle and for a few the decay may become an all-consuming firework that leaves an iridescent light for others to think by.
The more I work in Psychiatry the more I realise we are prone, perhaps programmed, and we certainly seem determined to keep making the same mistakes again and again. It is intelligent and educated people who have a greater tendency to believe the pictures projected onto the false veil, like cataracts, which blinds them to the truth. Just like an uncle of mine whose wife was having problems conceiving. He travelled on foot over mountains of the Hindu Kush to find a Holy Man who had command of Jinns. The next year his wife gave birth to a boy. ‘See!’ he exclaimed to me, at the birth of his son. ‘See! You and your science could never achieve what The Holy Man who controls Jinns has achieved.’ My uncle is a doctor. As Voltaire would have it, those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
As humans we make the same mistakes. Over and over again. When human thinking was unevolved and the Enlightenment not even a twinkle on the dark horizon of ignorance, people would go to witch doctors and Holy Men. We make the same mistakes again and again. In romantic love, in the decisions we make and in politics.
We are enamoured by false images, by politicians that promise miracles but are empty from within. That is why creative psychopaths have been so successful in controlling the masses: Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao Zedong. Demagogues and rabble-rousers are still winning today, like Abu Umar, in my novel, The Butterfly Hunter. We want to externalise responsibility and need to give up control.
Leaders, politicians or Holy Men can only control us because we first create magical thinking within us. It is easier to make fertile the idea that idols will come to life and solve our problems, so the same gods we first create then we prostrate to them. Humans have an undying hope that the idol will breathe and fight and it will defeat our enemies: The Magic Idol.
For many years now I have had no nightmares. I have not worried about being kidnapped in the middle of the night or that I might magically turn into a pretty girl and a Genie would fall in love with me (are there no girl Genies? If there are why do female Genies never fall in love with boys?) Or that I might be possessed by devils or need an exorcism.
The Genie and the Ghost have fought long but I was the one who finally killed these two imposters. They had created The Magic Idol. But I realised that The Magic Idol was inside me. I gave it a face with my terrors and my lack of logic gave it animus. I had brought the idol to life so I was the only one who could slay it. The enemy is within. The false beliefs and fog of fear were caused by my irrational thinking.
Since these many years I can sit at my desk comfortably and work. I never need to turn around. And since I murdered The Magic Idol I sleep with the lights off.
——
Dr Max Malik is a medical doctor and an award winning writer, as well as an established expert on ‘The Clash of Civilistions’ and also a commentator on international relations between the West and the Muslim World.
Other articles by Max Malik
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