Genies in Medicine Bottles: The Rise of Islamic Public Health Exorcisms

The relentless growth of multiculturalism across twenty-first-century Europe has had many unexpected consequences—one of the most unexpected being the sudden explosion in belief in genies.

Known in Arabic as ‘djinn’ (singular = djinni), genies are repeatedly mentioned in the Quran and are a required element of belief for all good Muslims. This explains how, last month, a case was able to come before a British court in which a London imam was convicted for the crime, hitherto wholly alien to UK shores, of pretending to be a genie, thereby tricking a series of underage girls into having illegal sex with him in the back of his car.

Imam Abdul Halim Khan exploited his respected position in the Bangladeshi-filled East London suburb of Tower Hamlets to abuse schoolgirls as young as twelve. Between 2004 and 2015, he would wait for the parents of children displaying behavioural issues to approach him seeking a spiritual cure. Informing patients djinn were to blame, his apparent modus operandi was to tell girls to close their eyes before making poltergeist-like knocking sounds on his car windows. Then, Khan would announce a genie had entered his body before demanding entrance to the children’s own bodies in his turn, thereby to magically ‘cure’ them of their misbehaviours. Once the treatment was over, Khan warned victims that, if they ever told anyone what had happened, the djinni would come and get them. 

Similar pretences worked upon adult female victims, too. Khan falsely told one she had contracted ovarian cancer. The only known cure was an urgent injection of tumour-combatting genie fluids, to be made directly into the affected area with his own special trouser-needle upon the back seat of his vehicle, Khan diagnosed. His patient believed it. 

Aladdin sane? 

Many readers’ initial reaction will be just to think these females were stupid. Yet the more likely explanation is that Khan’s dupes were simply adhering to their own deeply ingrained cultural norms. 

In the Muslim world today, belief in djinn is widespread amongst all classes of society. In one 2012 survey, as many as 84% of Bangladeshi-resident Muslims believed in such Islamic demons, this being precisely the region where the Muslims of Tower Hamlets had their own main origin. 

Despite the public constantly being lectured about immigrant communities’ wonderful ability to instantly drop all their pre-existing culturally incompatible customs and integrate seamlessly with their new host countries, in actual fact, this does not seem to be true at all. Quite the opposite: white natives are now increasingly urged to integrate with the incomers. In Tower Hamlets, staff at the local state-funded NHS medical trust are specifically trained to treat mentally ill patients who claim to be exhibiting signs of djinni possession sympathetically—that is to say, trained to act much like corrupt Imam Khan once did, except without raping patients themselves at the end of it all.           

Finding their imported beliefs apparently confirmed by officialdom in such sycophantic fashion, maybe it should be no surprise that, according to one 2011 study made by the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, a greater proportion of Muslims living in the highly ‘diverse’ English city of Leicester believe in djinn than Muslims living back home in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka do, at 80% compared to 73%. Furthermore, 52% of Leicester-based Muslims surveyed believed mind-possessing genies could be held responsible for cases of mental illness, compared to only 44% of Dhaka-based ones, where doctors must still be more sceptical. 

Depressingly, academic medical textbooks like 2022’s Islam, Migration and Djinn: Spiritual Medicine in Muslim Health Management are now being published, advising that European medics must take genie-possession seriously, as “In a globalised world with manifold forms of forced and voluntary migrations, djinn are likewise on the move, interfering in the human world and affecting the mental and physical health of Muslims.” Not only Muslims themselves are migrating to the West en masse, it is implied, but so are their accompanying satanic, health-wrecking genies. 

One UK medical paper counsels doctors to be aware that, amongst their new foreign patients, the following wide range of ailments may justifiably be blamed upon the influence of malign djinn: “schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, behavioural changes, personality changes, epilepsy, blood-pressure problems, fever and bruises.” That last one there sounds particularly useful to abusive Muslim husbands and fathers, does it not? With such a wide range of illnesses on offer to be chosen from, it’s a wonder nobody has tried to blame the COVID epidemic upon such devilishly infectious creatures. Except, it seems, one Muslim medic now has.        

Mathematical genie-us

Ben Halima Abderraouf is a French-Tunisian travelling Islamic healer, known as ‘The Djinn-Catcher,’ due to his bizarre method of ‘catching’ djinn by summoning them down to temporarily possess the body of his glamorous female assistant (at least I presume she’s glamorous, under the mandatory religious face-covering). He then quizzes the spirits upon their nefarious influence over world affairs before, their usefulness exhausted, dismissing them back to Jahannam again. Alternatively, sick people can come and visit; Abderraouf will conjure genies into their quaking frames and then attempt to either convert the illness-causing entities to Islam or else kill them with prayers and what sound like repeated karate-chops to the neck until the evil being’s astral head falls off. 

On his website, Abderraouf offers a long list of Quranic verses to recite against each known breed of germ-genie, each specific supernatural malady requiring a specific supernatural medicine. Amongst others, he offers a curative verse for different bacterial strains of djinn which are in love with their victim, try to bribe the exorcist with riches, falsely pretend to be Muslim to get the doctor to go away, have been summoned by wizards, or appear in the form of “a bizarre animal or with a multitude of heads.”  

Born in Tunis in 1967, Abderraouf moved to France in 1986, initially to study engineering, but had already been an Islamic proselytiser since the age of fifteen, later founding a French-Islamic publishing house, Le Figuier. In 1993, during a missionary trip to Pakistan (where I think the natives were already Muslim) Abderraouf was surprised to find his wife becoming possessed by a local genie, this proving his fateful introduction to Al-Ghayb, or ‘The Unseen World’ of Islam. By 1995, he had quit engineering for spreading the Word of Allah full time, establishing a network of spiritual healing centres across Europe and North Africa, where he diagnoses patients’ sins and prescribes prayers to make them better. 

What is the scientific basis for all this? By his own broken-English account, Abderraouf is an “Olympic mathematical champion”, thereby allowing him to perceive that:

In life everything is mathematics. For example anytime I see women ready to make a salad, taking a cucumber, cutting it lengthways into two, then cutting again each part lengthways into two and then taking each piece one by one to slice it. As a mathematician you see straight that there is an obvious factorisation which will allow you to save 75% of the time: first you need to start by cutting the cucumber into two but not totally, leaving the bottom, then you do the same to cut it into four, leaving the bottom, now you grip the four pieces with one hand and you slice them with the other. I never understood why people can’t see it immediately.

If the wonders of maths could be applied to solve the eternal problem of efficient kitchen cucumber-slicing, thought Abderraouf, then why not likewise the equally pressing problem of pan-European genie possession and paranormal illnesses too? By summoning djinn into his assistant’s mouth, interrogating them on film, and posting absurd footage to YouTube, Abderraouf has even managed to ‘prove’ that genies collaborated with mad scientists from America to create the COVID pathogen and plant it in China to massively reduce the global population on behalf of the Freemasons.  

The catchers in the rijk

You would think the natural response to cases like these would be either to laugh or wonder just what the hell our leaders have foolishly imported for us. Yet the actual response by some European liberals is to blame ordinary white citizens for growing rates of immigrant genie psychosis in the first place. 

According to Dutch-American psychology writer Erik Raschke, for example, schizophrenia is a natural response of Muslims who are ‘forced’ (by themselves, as they’re the ones who came here of their own accord in the first place) to live uneasily within white-normative nations, where their very ‘Muslimness’ is seen as aberrant. Thus, they try half to fit in, half to retain their heritage, end up going mad, and start blaming djinn for it all—but the true devils responsible are the hellish white men who supposedly oppress them. 

Raschke has investigated and praised Dutch organisation the Parnassus Group which, like the NHS in Tower Hamlets, provides djinn-friendly care to Muslim mental patients, treating genie-psychosis as “both a psychological problem and a social, spiritual and cultural ailment.”

Visiting unregulated Muslim healing centres across Holland and allowing them to suck genies from his blood using weird cupping devices, Raschke met Dutch djinn-catchers who had treated people with “green goblins in their neck and ancient black devils curled in their guts”, becoming so sympathetic to sufferers’ plight that he has seemingly penned a pro-immigrant sci-fi novel about the subject, concerning “the day of 9/11 taking place in the eleven dimensions of String Theory” and “the quantum mechanics of modern discrimination”.

Yet the true problem here, more likely, is not European society discriminating against such culturally irreconcilable people but endlessly pandering to them, even to the absurd extent of spending taxpayer cash on training public health officials in how to treat imaginary cases of genie possession or foreign lunatics thinking they might have goblins living in their necks.The whole thing sounds like a complete waste of public money, but it appears too late to stop it—the genie is already out of the medicine bottle, and you’re the one who’s going to end up paying for it.