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Recordings › Jinn Possessions: Myth and Reality in Islam by Sh. Akram Nadwi & Mufti Abu Layth · 20 Sep 2017 › Segment 21 of 25

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Could strange symptoms blamed on jinn have medical explanations?

hadeeth ahadith ahaadeeth hadis hadees ahaadith muftis imaan eemaan eeman faith jin jinnat jinni sihr sihar jadu jadoo kala jadu sorcery duaa duas duaas supplication deen al-din ad-deen ad-din

From face blindness to foreign accent syndrome: the 'jinn of the gaps'

LessonRecorded 20 Sep 2017Debunking Myths On: Jinns, Magic, the Evil Eye, and SuperstitionsSegment 21 of 25 in the recording2017-09-20-S21

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This segment1:37:52 to 1:45:48 · 7 min 56 sGeneral teaching

What this part covers

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Yes: face blindness, mirror-touch synaesthesia, phantom limbs, alien hand syndrome, the Capgras delusion, hemispatial neglect, aphantasia and foreign accent syndrome are all documented conditions that the past could only call demons. Blaming the unexplained on jinn is a 'jinn of the gaps'; the Prophet's hadith on cures says go and find the knowledge.

In more detail

Mufti Abu Layth lists neurological conditions and asks how people in the past would have explained each: prosopagnosia, or face blindness, in which the facial area of the fusiform gyrus fails so that a person recognises a voice but not the face, found in some two percent of people from birth and in stroke patients; mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which one feels the touch or pain one sees another receive; phantom limbs that still hurt after amputation; alien hand syndrome, in which a limb seems to act of its own will, which 'the jinn controlling it' would conveniently explain; the Capgras delusion, in which a loved one is believed to have been replaced by an identical impostor; hemispatial neglect after a stroke, in which half the world is not processed, so that patients eat half a plate or draw half a clock; aphantasia, as in a man who lost the ability to visualise anything after surgery; exploding head syndrome, hearing a loud bang that is not real; and foreign accent syndrome, in which people wake from an incident speaking in an accent they never had, which neurologists still cannot explain. Not knowing the cause, he says, does not mean the cause cannot be known: atheists accuse believers of a 'God of the gaps', and this is a 'jinn of the gaps'. He closes with the hadith that Allah sent no disease without a cure, known to those who know it and unknown to those who do not, which he reads as a command to go and find it.

Position stated

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Mufti Abu Layth says the many neurological conditions science now describes, from prosopagnosia to foreign accent syndrome, show that attributing the unexplained to jinn is a 'jinn of the gaps' fallacy, and that the Prophet's hadith on cures tells people to seek the knowledge.

In his words

“in this phenomenon this is like the Djinn of the gaps like the moment we don't know anything it's the Djinn”

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Transcript

machine1:37:52 to 1:45:48 · click a time to seek · dotted terms open the glossary
1:37:16

this that human beings are very easy misguided into superstition so rukia and these things have been set as a scaffolding with a large name to guide people to a pure Iman so it is a scaffolding it's like a Zimmer frame to help you walk until you can walk it's that kind of to help you along the way because you need you see when people said oh Brahma like to the Prophet or what about superstition and he told them to do all along my Latoya Ella Trudeau Kuala Huayra ilaha illa

1:37:54

Allah have a look he could have just said relax there is no totally or there is no you know especially you don't need to worry about it why teach them a dua that - one which has almost a ritualistic rhythm to it because the mind clings to rituals and people need that to become strong in their Iman so with this I want to just give you some examples of some conditions psychological disorders now check these out and just think in the past trying to examine these now there's a condition

1:38:30

known as you've got prosopagnosia yeah now this is a condition known as face blindness it can happen to people who are stroke victims or they could happen due to mental health sometimes and they say maybe two to two-and-a-half percent of people in the world are born with it it is an inability to distinguish between faces so there's a section in what we said the fusiform gyrus which is known as the FFA the facial fusiform area which humans used to distinguish between faces why does your face not look like his face not look like like if you think about it like if you look at a

1:39:07

crawl right a crawl all their faces all look the same to us but to the crows they I'm sure they can distinguish so how do humans distinguish between human faces like we use this area in the brain now there is a disorder known as prosopagnosia where you can't tell the difference like if I hear your voice out oh my god that's you but when I look at you I can't I think I just can't recognize your face like I can see your face but I can't recognize it now that is and when that happens it happens

1:39:46

later on in like let's say with a stroke or something and you can imagine the whole chrome and how would people in the past say say well maybe magic has been done on to you maybe you've had the you know some something has possessed you there's something known as mirror-touch synesthesia now this is where you can actually feel what somebody else that you're looking at may be feeling so if right now let's say somebody hugged somebody else and if you suffered from mirror-touch synesthesia you would

1:40:23

actually feel being hugged you would actually sometimes feel pain like if I saw somebody getting hurt I would feel that pain under this you can google phantom limbs sometimes people have lost their limbs and yet they can still like they've been amputated in an accident or something and they can still so they've lost their arm but they can still feel the pain in their arm there's huge Studies on this and how that works in the brain how would you answer that in the past there's actually there's one speaking or alien hand syndrome when you

1:41:01

feel your hand or your part of your body is possessed by an eight and acts involuntarily somebody could just say well that's easy because the jinn is controlling it well but I mean see this is that your view fits all here's an interesting one this is known as the Capgras delusion right where you pee where people feel that a loved one somebody close to them is actually replaced by an impostor and you think this is and this happens to people often sometimes with paranoid schizophrenia or if they've had brain injury you actually feel that it's the

1:41:41

same like it looks just like the same person but you actually believe 100% that that is an impostor he knows the same things but it's an impostor and you can actually search the cases that have happened in real life the Capgras delusion now here and this is is another interesting one hemispatial neglect happens sometimes after a stroke or other kind of brain injuries or lesions hemispatial neglect is where half of the the world half of perception becomes blind - you can't you just can't

1:42:20

it just doesn't get processed so you don't see half like it's not that you don't see like you can see but you will not see what's on that half so you will just see this half so these people will sometimes only eat half a plate if you give him a plate they'll only eat from that half or if you showed him a clock and said can you copy the clock they will copy it from with the numbers twelve to six only and they don't see the others how would you explain that if you lived in the past and here's an interesting one as well ah Fantasia now

1:42:59

this was an interesting one that and it happened there was a famous case of a 65 year old man who went for he'd gone for some angioplasty surgery and after it this was a side effect that he lost the ability to visualize anything you just can't picture up anything in your mind anymore like right now if if I want to think of an elephant if I want to think of a phone or a car in your mind you can think of it he could no longer think of and you can't visualize any images now you can imagine how that so easily

1:43:37

people would just say well maybe somebody's done check on you well somebody's or a demon has possessed you I mean just think in the past trying to answer these difficulties things like there's actually one known as an exploding head syndrome which causes no harm no pain but you can just occasionally hear a really loud bang inside your head but it doesn't harm you it's no pain but you just hear like a bang you think and you can definitely heard it but it's not real and one that

1:44:16

you can actually this one you can actually see on YouTube you can go and search several cases an interesting one the foreign accent syndrome just really fascinating it's a speech disorder sometimes develop spontaneously or sometimes after an incident something's happened where they just wake up or they're regaining something it could be an accident or whatever and they develop a foreign accent so you've got the case on YouTube with the lady speaking in it Tiny's accident and somebody in a French accent they've never been to front somebody in a southern accent they're from northern England I mean the solar

1:44:54

son speaking the southern accent in explain x-plane even today neurologists don't know why it happens but it happens due to see not knowing something doesn't mean see this is what atheists use so often to attack people of religion or what they call the God of the gaps or the moment you don't know anything oh it must be good and and in this phenomenon this is like the Djinn of the gaps like the moment we don't know anything it's the Djinn oh we can't explain it must be the gym let the Djinn of the gaps so it's it's it's not just because we don't know the answer it doesn't mean we can't know the answer answer the hadith that you heard earlier

1:45:34

on that the Prophet said mantle allowed Minda in Allah Angela Lucia and in rewire the Prophet said I Lima home and Alamo jahiliya home and Jael those who know that she fire will know it and those who don't know it won't know it meaning go out find it like you can so it's interesting to see all of these kind of things put yourself in the past where you are faced with this like if you had a person just all of a sudden with multiple personality disorders or they call today dissociative identity disorder is right now how do you how do you explain that like people all of a sudden I'm somebody

Paragraphs overlapping 1:37:52 to 1:45:48. Full text on the recording page.

Cite this segment

Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.

Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2017-09-20-S21, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/7z8yu8kr83y/s/21/ (accessed 1 November 2026)

APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2017, September 20). Could strange symptoms blamed on jinn have medical explanations? [Video, segment 2017-09-20-S21, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/7z8yu8kr83y/s/21/
Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2017. "Could strange symptoms blamed on jinn have medical explanations?" Video, segment 2017-09-20-S21, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded September 20, 2017. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/7z8yu8kr83y/s/21/
BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2017-09-20-S21,
  author = {Mufti Abu Layth},
  title = {{Could strange symptoms blamed on jinn have medical explanations?}},
  year = {2017},
  month = {9},
  date = {2017-09-20},
  howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/7z8yu8kr83y/s/21/}},
  url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/7z8yu8kr83y/s/21/},
  organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive},
  urldate = {2026-11-01},
  note = {Segment 2017-09-20-S21, auto-transcribed, may contain errors}
}
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