When Freud knew about hypnosis from Breur, he was very excited indeed. In a matter of seconds, hypnosis can change a person’s personality and one could converse with this “other personality”. Freud later abandoned hypnosis because it doesn’t work all the time. However the experience he had by using hypnosis on his clients led him to develop the theory of the unconscious mind.
Today, we have various videos on YouTube where a different personality emerges not under hypnotism but after the recitation of ruqyah (Quranic incantation). The main difference is the interpretation of this “other personality”. Freud would consider it as the unconscious mind but those doing ruqyah will consider it to be the jinn. One thing in common in the excitement when the “other personality” takes control of the body. For the sake of argument, I will refer to this “other personality” as the jinn.
Sometimes the conversation with the jinn can go on and on and the practitioner may start to ask the jinn all sorts of questions e.g. how long it has been there, what is was doing inside the person etc. The information from the jinn can sometimes be taken by the practitioner as conclusive evidence of the nature of the problem e.g. black magic (sihr) was done on the person.
Bringing up the jinn can sometimes be seen as an achievement in ruqyah. Sometimes this sense of achievement is also being shared by the client. A client who goes from one practitioner to another may compare the performance of the various practitioners in terms of whether the jinn can be made to possess the person and speak during the ruqyah session. Is this really a measure of the efficacy of the ruqyah?
Using “conversation with jinn” as a measure of the efficacy of ruqyah session is plague with problems. The excitement can possibly degrade a person’s intelligence. By listening to the jinn explanation, those around may start to believe everything that the jinn says. In a normal conversation with a normal human being, a person will try to filter out facts from fiction. However when listening to any criminal liar jinn inside a person’s body, someone listening can easily lose the discretionary power of their mind. He/she will listen attentively to the jinn and may even accept everything that the jinn says. The jinn, knowing that the listening humans have lost their discretionary power, can freely tell lies e.g. claiming to be 10,000 years old, someone did black magic to the victim, there is some magical items buried in the garden etc. These moments of excitement, if available on video, can later be posted on YouTube to prove the efficacy of the ruqyah session.
However, all those conversation have nothing to do with the efficacy of the ruqyah session. It is impossible to measure efficacy of the ruqyah session simply by conversing with the jinn and without measuring the impact on the person’s health at a later point in time. The conversation with jinn is more like watching a movie staring Mr Jinn and those presence may be very absorbed in watching it. The difference is that everyone knows that the event is real, unlike movies. What they missed to realise is the amount of crap and lies that comes out of the jinn’s mouth.
There are other better ways of measuring efficacy of any therapy. For example, we can use the medical model by measuring the symptoms before and after therapy. With this model, we can safely say that a therapy has given therapeutic benefit to the client if there has been a reduction in the symptoms regardless of whether there has been a conversation with jinn or not. It is important to realise that clients seek therapy because they have some symptoms and expect therapy to reduce or remove all of those symptoms. Since the symptoms are something that can be measured by the clients, they will be more able to judge the effectiveness of any therapy regardless of whether there is any conversation with jinn.
