Abstract
Belief in the unseen and its connections to mental illness is a broad cultural phenomenon much contested among Muslim theologians in everyday life. For many, stories of affliction and possession by evil jin are discounted as mere superstition, but for others they serve as important explanatory concepts in dealing with severe life crisis and mental illness. Based on two extended patient cases from fieldwork among ruqya patients in West Yorkshire in northern England, this chapter traces the role of jin belief in struggles to handle life crisis.
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I would like to thank Liz Harris for checking the Urdu transcription in this chapter.
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Nielsen, A.G. (2021). Healing, Agency, and Life Crisis Among British Pakistani Ruqya Patients. In: Böttcher, A., Krawietz, B. (eds) Islam, Migration and Jinn. The Modern Muslim World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61247-4_7
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