ABOUT 20 years ago, I witnessed a terrifying demonic possession of a woman in my neighbourhood. The tuition teacher in her 40s was in a trance, muttering several languages unknown to us all that night.
For a moment, she went wild when a spiritual healer read Quranic verses to her. In another minute, she was reticent and pleaded for help to get "the thing" out of her.
The spiritual healer, assisted by four others, told her husband
that a few hundred demons or jinns had been possessing her. He was informed that the jinns' strength was enormous and that they refused to leave her body.
The healer spoke to the jinns in Arabic, Javanese and Bahasa Melayu through the woman, who responded violently. He asked: "Who had sent you?" and the woman growled in an unrecognisable accent: "My Master."
While the horrifying conversation went on, several hufaz (people who memorised the Quran) engaged in the rukyah (reading a collection of Quranic verses used to expel evil spirits) continued reading Surah Al-Baqarah until she collapsed.
It took the healers two months to heal the woman, who later moved away with her family from the neighbourhood for fear that her "nemesis" would send another round of evil spells to her home. To this day, no one knows who cast the evil spells on her.
Demonic possessions or similar incidents frequently occur in Malay society. We often hear of mass hysteria involving school- girls. The worse are evil spells purposely "sent" by a begrudging individual through a bomoh (shaman) to destroy another person(s).
In many cases, the spells were sent with the intent of splitting a married couple or destroying a person's happiness. A begrudging individual can send sihir santau, a type of black magic, by spitting lightly into the wind to "poison" a person.
The victim will experience restlessness and vomit blood, rusty needles and nails, as well as human and bamboo hairs.
Preacher Ustaz Datuk Kazim Elias recently admitted someone cast sihir santau on him. It was not the first time he suffered from unexplainable illnesses. Even medical doctors can't explain his condition.
On June 13, Harian Metro reported that sorcery was widely practised by certain quarters in modern Malay society. I was shocked to find that out of 94,000 patients treated for "spiritual illnesses" in 2019 at the Pusat Rawatan Darussyifa' Islamic healing centre, 44,000 were believed to have been victims of sorcery.
Its head of research and development, Datuk Abdul Rashid Mat Amin, said most patients were women who sought spiritual cleansing at 90 of its centres.
There's always the grey area between medical science and sorcery as many are sceptical about black magic. Some say there's no scientific evidence to prove that sorcery invariably involves mysticism and supernatural beings.
Muslims believe in jinns and other spiritual beings as they are all the creations of God. When a person experiences demonic possession, many don't it take lightly; he is taken for rukyah treatment. It takes one to witness a horrifying demonic possession to believe it.
With the surge in Covid-19 cases over the past two years, more are suffering from "spiritual illnesses", including psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, that some rukyah practitioners believe stem from "disturbances from spiritual beings".
Sorcery is now a criminal offence in Kelantan and it is one of the new offences listed under the Kelantan Syariah Criminal Code (I) Enactment 2019, which came into force on Nov 1.
The law defines 24 new offences, including falsely claiming to be a prophet, attempting to renounce Islam, necrophilia, bestiality, having tattoos, disobeying parents, gambling, under-weighing of goods, and homosexual activities.
I wonder how will the authorities arrest and charge people practising sorcery, especially sihir santau. The wrongdoer can cast an evil spell even without the help of a bomoh. It's hard to prove a crime that involves mysticism and occultism.
Rashid's revelation suggests that there are many "sick people" in this time and age. Not in the number of victims, but the people who indulge in black magic.
I often hear divorces are caused by sorcery and that there's a third party who casts the evil spell to split the couple. There are also men who sent mandram (evil spell) when women rejected them for marriage. Oh dear, what kind of world are we living in now?
The writer, a former NST journalist, is a film scriptwriter whose penchant is finding new food haunts