Preamble and Acknowledgements

This magisterial thesis is an exploration into, what I argue, are local forms of expression of illness and Islamic healing systems that are associated with them. This is done in the contemporary context of the German capital and its former lower-working class boroughs where the proportion of Muslim migrants and immigrants is high. It is a topic which has become much more complex than I would ever have imagined. At the beginning, I even doubted that finding sufficient material through ethnographic fieldwork would be possible. In a relatively short period of time however, I have found more material than is perhaps even feasible to include in one paper. Therefore, the work at hand is somewhat fragmentary. It touches upon various trans-national communities and individuals within them that are not always concretely linked. What I present is both an account (as this is my second major research project at the FU Berlin a field report has never been written) and an attempt at putting what I have heard and seen in approximately the last year into analytical terms.

There are many people to whom my gratitude must be extended. As always in the field of anthropology, it is the people from whom we have gathered our perspectives who are most important. Without them, the ethnographic project would be an impossibility. Most of the individuals in this paper will remain anonymous out of respect for the accounts they have shared from their personal lives. There are also many colleagues, neighbours, and family members whose insights and perspectives have been invaluable. Particularly, I would like to thank Annette Langner for exchanging knowledge from a parallel project here in Berlin. I am deeply indebted to Lisa Mackenrodt who reviewed the entire manuscript while providing helpful hints and constructive criticism. I would also like to thank Natalie Kemerer for her editing (as well as patience), and Malte Frye for his at times, crucial logistical support.

Contents

Preamble and Acknowledgements........................................................................................ii

1. Introduction............................................................................................................... 1

2. The districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg................................................................. 8

3. Worlds of djinn and other entities………………………………………………. 14

4. Muslim Healers………………………………………………………………….. 18

5. Healers and Spirits in the Context of Sufism……………………………………. 22

6. Healers and Patients in the Local Context………………………………………. 30

7. Yahya, Tuhammi and Mama Ji Sarkar: Three men, three cultures, three illnesses?…………………………………... 61

8. Cultural Constructions of Mental Illness………………………………………… 81

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………. 87

Glossary……………………………………………………………………………… 92

1. Introduction

The ethnographic undertaking pertaining to the completion of this magisterial work

has its roots at a time when public discourse in Germany was, and continues to be, very much

dominated by the problems of migration to a country which has traditionally not been seen as

destination for immigrants. As a result of these rather negative discourses, the migrant person

has been a priori “problematised”. While the good majority of immigrants to Germany

happen to be Muslim, issues such as Christian/Muslim relations, the formation of “parallel

societies”, the ubiquitous headscarf debate, and of course, in post 9/11 society, the potential

threat that a large Muslim minority could pose to national and international security, have all

become everyday topics in the media, in academia, on the streets and at the family dinner

table.

Some of these discursive bombardments might be dealing with legitimate concerns

regarding the future of a society, which has without doubt, undergone significant

demographic changes in the last few decades. The stranger of the orient is now the man

cutting Döner Kebap at the corner of any given street corner in any town of significant size.

At the same time, it is the fully covered woman walking the streets of migrant-dominated

working class districts around the country. Admittedly, experiments aimed at integrating

strangers who have remained strangers have failed and current discussions on the

establishment of a Leitkultur, aimed at avoiding a Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” have

fuelled a public paranoia and set up grounds for legitimate reason to worry. As politicians

and church leaders search for a representative Muslim voice to lead discussion and establish a

working structure with which to reach integrative goals, what is happening in the everyday

lives of both Muslims and non-Muslims is not surprisingly, an element which is much too

often overlooked.

The impulse for this thesis has come directly out of this topic du jour with a strong

desire (it is not my intention to exaggerate here) to contribute to the situation through

ethnographic writing and the search for a local Islam or local Islam(s) within this

smorgasbord of intellectual, media, and political activity. Having studied social anthropology

for many years, it is my strong conviction that this field can and indeed should be accessible

iii

outside of the university context and that its agency be applied in promoting greater

understanding between the people we study. Such idealism aside, the daily interaction

between people in a Western European society which has suddenly been confronted with

millions of Muslims arriving in the country during a relatively short period of time is a reality

which could and hopefully will provide rich insights for the anthropological discipline and the

study of Islam within the general social sciences. I am posited perhaps on an ideological

backdrop of talk on a “Euro-Islam”, the “Europeanization of Islam” or the “Islamization of

Europe”.1 Such formulations may or may not be of much relevance in the representation of

cultures which are changing, interacting, and ultimately (although not necessarily evident

from the outside), merging. I would argue that to coin such terms as European Islam and to

strive for their realisation verges on being superfluous. Looking from the inside, one might be

quick to discover that such invented phraseologies are already there. There is already a Euro

Islam. Islam is already being Europeanized and Europe is already being islamicized. Where

else then to turn but to ethnography, in putting macro-sociological studies on integration,

migration, and Islamic structures aside for the time being and looking at the ways in which

these transformational processes are occurring by going into the core of the communities

which are most directly effected by them?

As a follower of the late Clifford Geertz and some of the post-modernists in

anthropology, I aim to give a literary representation of local Islam(s) as lived and developing

in the lower-working class districts of Berlin. These are seen and feared as the ghettoes of the

Muslim masses, from where the threat of a radical Islam would presumably arise and surface.

Yet it was just recently that a terrorist plot of catastrophic proportions was foiled which was

centred in some West German villages as far away as one could possibly get from the

supposed migrant ghettoes. Moreover, two of the three people initially arrested were not

immigrants at all. They were actually Germans who had become Muslims. My point is that

while I conducted research in those places which elicit the popular imagination about Islam

the most, it would by no means be my intention to position these spatial arenas as being any

more representative of the way Islam is lived in Germany or Western Europe as any other

locality. At heart, the following contribution is a literary description of just one specific set of

interactions amongst people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and the ways in which their

realities are expressed through healing performative healing ritual.

1 This has been fired on by scholars such as Bassam Tibi (2002) and Tariq Ramadan (2002), who is attributed with having coined the term Euro Islam. It has led to the formation of programmes dedicated to research on Islam in Western Europe and the United States and Canada.

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This is by no means an easy task. One of the reasons I came to Germany seven years

ago was to continue my studies and not to do fieldwork here. I have lived in the area of

Berlin which we will get to know better in this paper, for this entire period. The migrant

ghettoes are also student ghettoes, if they can be seen as ghettoes at all. At the same time, I

might be considered a migrant myself, although Canada is hardly a country which is typically

associated with such appellations (people generally migrate to Canada). At the same time, I

am of German background and have been raised bilingually. My position in the research field

therefore is neither one of outsider nor insider. While I have lived for a long time on the very

streets that I study, I am not from here. So while as an anthropologist, I have not separated

myself from the society I live in to go to another and pull out material, the locale where my

fieldwork takes place is also not, strictly speaking, my own. It is easy, when speaking with an

Albanian healer in the very a house that I live in, to forget that I am an anthropologist and yet

it is next to impossible to forsake the “ethnographic lens” with which I have been trained. To

take the self-reflective approach here will be inevitable at certain points, as my interpretations

are more likely than ever to be entangled by my own subjectivities. At the same time, my

position in the communities that I have studied should hopefully be of some objective value in

providing facts and analysing what I perceive to be happening on the streets, in the mosques

and zawiya, and at the apartments of the healers who are to some, but not all, an integral part

of the Islam or islams that I intend to represent.

The study of Islam in anthropology or the idea of an “anthropology of Islam” was

once under more intense discussion than it is today. As a starting point, I would like to

review some of these theories, concepts and sources of conflict which arose in the 1970’s,

with publications by El Zein (1977), Eickelmann (1982) and then the works of Talal Asad

(1986) and Davies (1988). The discourse on the study of Islam in anthropology has been

centred around notions of “greater traditions” and “little traditions”, “scriptural traditions” and

“folk traditions”. Then the question arises as how to go about studying Muslim communities

in a particular time and place, where “finally, local islams are those rituals and texts, both oral

and written that are not known outside of a specific local context” (Lukens-Bull 1999:44).

The implication though, is rather restricted to those regions where Muslims form either a clear

majority or have had an historic presence which goes back through several centuries. In those

cases Islam, as a complex system of belief is an integrated element of a culturally specific

system of meaning. It would seem then that in Germany, the search for a local Islam would

be much more problematic. Oral and written rituals and texts, not known outside of certain

parts of Turkey, the Arab World or the Balkans have been “imported”, brought to new local

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settings where, in the Diaspora context, they are dependant upon their respective points of

origin in order to maintain meaningful interfaces in the lives of the people who have come

from those places. The rituals and texts which are not known outside of say, Pakistan, would

not be known in Britain were it not for the migrants who maintain solid links to their home

country. The implication is a rather static assumption that the symbolic systems of meaning

do not really change in the new setting and that the rituals and texts do not transform and

adapt to a new set of cultural circumstances. While in Britain, as Pnina Werbner points out in

her study on Naqshibandi Sufism, some groups have attracted British born members whereas

others have not, there is a distinctly British way of being Sufi:

Upstairs, in one of the buildings, was a hostel for the young boys learning to be hafez. The concentration of services for Asians in a single complex was impressive, providing training in needed skills, and helping to motivate the labour market. This was very much an English way of being a Sufi – acquiring charitable status, establishing a management committee and voluntary organizational structure, serving the community. (2006: 132).

What goes on inside the community organisation might indeed be exclusive to South

Asian Sufism, but the external structures bear striking resemblance to local cultural norms,

making it an “English way of being Sufi”. This perspective moves beyond ritual and text and

looks at the ways in which Diaspora groups re-structure and adapt to a particular set of

circumstances. Hence, whether in Britain, Germany or the United States, rituals and texts

might not always differ significantly from local sources whether in Pakistan, Turkey or East

Africa, but they can also not be completely the same. The social frameworks in which they

take place are different, potentially bringing forth new ways of interpretation and forms of

identity which are unique to the new locality. How then are cultural interpretations (of ritual

and text) forged in a situation of both uprootedness and stability at a new point?

The second concern that needs to briefly be addressed before commencing on this

exploration of Muslim healing systems in Berlin is the very way in which Islam in itself,

whether locally, regionally, or universally is studied by anthropologists. It is the framework

provided by Wyn Davies (1988), which takes Koran and sunnah as its base and then analyses

both Muslim and non-Muslim society in an undertaking which is seen as Islamic

Anthropology. In this study, we are dealing with both Muslim and non-Muslim society and

communities and individuals who come from places that are either historically Islamic or far

from it.2 We are also dealing with a wide range of cultural symbols in interpreting common

reference points. As Davies says (1988: 60): “The enduring framework of the Qu’ran and

sunnah are there to form our consciousness but the only way they enter human history is by 2 By „far from it“, I am referring to the formerly communist East Germany from which one of my informants comes. Its atheist and Stalinist atmosphere plays an important role in his search for identity as a convert to Islam.

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the exertion of Muslims in their daily lives”. In this case, we are dealing specifically with

notions of a living unseen world and a diverse set of human agency in negotiating with it. It

will be shown how different ways of interpreting one religious frame of reference is forged

both by discursive hegemonic regimes and by daily experience. In taking this approach, a

variety of “local Islams” come to the surface, which are nevertheless governed by one

universal frame of reference. None of the healers, patients, saints or Sufis who arise in the

following pages would be who they were without being able to reach to the Koran and sunnah

in legitimising their viewpoints and perceptions.

This all began when, upon editing the magisterial work of a close colleague that deals

with possession cults and healing practices on the Swahili Coast of East Africa, my curiosity

as to whether there would be similar institutions in a place where Islam has little historical

rootedness but which now has a large Muslim population was aroused. At the time, there was

a close Turkish friend who had been battling depression for quite a few years and believed to

have been under the influence of a black magic curse (büyü). He was planning a trip to

Turkey to consult with a healer whom a friend in Ankara had arranged for him to meet. He

had spent time in psychiatric clinics and participated in group psycho-analytical therapies,

which in retrospect he was convinced to have been beneficial. He was still consulting with

his psychiatrist on a regular basis and was taking prescription anti-depressants when he

undertook his trip. The source of his depression was confirmed by the healer as him having

been cursed by the wife of his uncle who had been jealous of his family. He returned to

Germany with a protective amulet (taweez) convinced that the curse had been reversed and

that his illness was coming to an end.

Initially, I intended to spend time in Turkey, perhaps going to the very same healer in

order to do fieldwork there for a period of several months. I wanted to see the extent of the

connections that such “traditional healers” would have had to the extensive Turkish

populations in Europe. I also knew that my friend, who had come to Germany some seven

years ago, was not alone as a migrant suffering from such an illness. Psychological illness

amongst migrants has been documented as being higher than in the rest of the population

(Assion et al. 2005). I knew that going to Turkey might not be necessary: But where and how

to find Muslim healers in Berlin? As I was pondering this very question one day while

drinking coffee in my apartment, there was a knock on the door. It was a couple with two

children, one of whom seemed to be having seizures. They seemed to be of Balkan origin and

they asked me if I was “Suleyman”. “I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong apartment”, I said.

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They showed me Suleyman’s card, which had a photograph of a man just past his middle

ages, with a long grey beard and a black cap (takke) indicating that he was a Sufi sheikh.

There was no indication that indeed Sheikh Suleyman, as identified on the card, lived

in the house. We looked for an apartment bearing his surname. There lived Sheikh

Suleyman, across the courtyard, in the frontal house of the Berlin tenement where I have lived

for several years.

Soon after that, more people came looking for the sheikh, and this time I knew where

to take them. I knew then, that going to Turkey would not be necessary. The second time

that I brought people to his door he asked me who I was. I told him of my idea; researching

“traditional healing” right here in Berlin. He told me to return in half an hour. This initial

meeting took place in August of 2006. After taking my name, date of birth and the same for

my mother, he told me to return in mid-September. It would be possible, according to his

calculations, for us to work together until January.

This happened to be a time of emotional and psychological turmoil in my personal

life. When I returned in September, he sensed that I was not at all well. I was given a piece

of paper with koranic surah written on it which was rolled into a cylinder. I was to pour tap

water through the cylinder every night for seven days and wash myself with it before

sleeping. I was naturally doubtful, but wanted of course to experience this individual ritual

first hand.

Things never did materialise after that as planned. I had unintentionally been put into

the position of patient and what was then a bizarre form of treatment, certainly worked.

While the period to spend an intensive amount of time with the sheikh had come, he was

suddenly unreachable. Day after day would go by without any sign of life in his apartment.

No more patients came looking for him and he was unreachable by telephone. With a new set

of circumstances in my own life and a greatly improved sense of mental health, I decided to

postpone the whole project and to register for the series of final examinations necessary in

attaining the degree to which this thesis is the final and most challenging task.

It was not until February of 2007 that I finally met Suleyman again. It turned out that

there had been some deaths in the Kosovo which had taken him time to attend to. It was

around the same time that I met Yahya whom I had seen at the local zawiya (Sufi meeting

place) of the Burhani tariqa, during my study of Sufism in Berlin (Schemeit 2003). I was on

my way to do some grocery shopping at the so-called “Turkish market” when we both

stopped in our tracks. We spoke on the street for several minutes in the damp and bitter cold

of the Berlin winter when finally I invited him to sit down for tea in the closest kebap shop.

viii

In the course of the next months a relationship developed which was both fascinating

and at times, extremely challenging. It was one which tested the boundaries between

anthropologist and “informant”, reminding me of Vincent Crapanzano’s work with a

Moroccan named Tuhami (1980). Crapanzano’s friend and informant was married to Aisha

Qandisha, a local camel-footed she-demon, while venerating various saints in hoping to

overcome the stranglehold which she had over him. Yahya became, over the course of a few

months, my personal tailor, “house sitter” while I was away in Canada, and a friend who

supported me not only in my research, but in my personal life as well. It soon became

apparent that I had found perhaps a local version of Tuhami: A man fighting a war inside of

him where djinn and saint fight for control of the psyche. He is an individual who by

European standards, is simply considered to be unstable or ill and thereby incapable of

earning a living. As he receives a small pension from the state, he is constantly confronted by

boredom and our relationship became one in which he was sometimes able to be kept busy.

What goes in the “Tuhami of Berlin” is something which is rarely, if ever, touched upon by

his doctors. His story forms in some ways, the very core of this thesis and provides an

invaluable source for the ways in which psychological illness is interpreted in a variety of

cultural settings, which ultimately, for the informant and his religious community, are based

in Islam but are subject to local variations.

As I have said, researching Muslim healers, patients, and the discourses surrounding

them was not easy. It might come as no surprise that there is very little literature available on

the subject. I came into contact with Annette Langner, a colleague who had conducted quite a

bit of fieldwork with a “possessed” Turkish woman whose quest for healing somewhat

parallels the journey of Yahya Pelle. The trans-nationality of the networks which slowly

began to become apparent posed linguistic difficulties. This particular “field” was one in

which at least five languages were spoken regularly: German, Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, and

Serbo-Croatian. Some of my informants gladly took the opportunity to practice their English

with a native speaker. The physical proximity to the field and my initial position as a patient

were elements that were difficult to overcome.

2. The Districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg

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This is Germany in 2007. It is a Germany which has been to some extent torn by

cultural differences. Like most countries in Western Europe, it is no longer completely

dominated by Christianity and within the last 40 years, the religious demographics have

changed quite significantly. In the early 1960’s, when the West German economy was

booming and there was an acute labour shortage (much of the labour force had either perished

in World War 2, or emigrated in the difficult years thereafter), the state called upon workers

from countries south of the Alps to supplement this shortage. While the history of Islam in

Germany predates this period significantly (Abdallah 1981), it was never until then that a

sizeable Muslim population began to take hold. The history of the Gastarbeiter phenomenon

is one which is relatively poorly documented, whether historically or ethnographically. My

Turkish assistant (who served at times as translator and interlocutor) told me one evening

during Ramadan that his parents had been recruited in their native Anatolian villages by

Turkish municipal officials, been put onto freight trains and brought to Nuremberg where they

were obliged to live separately to prevent the young couple from procreating. This would

have been in support of the idea that the foreign workers were to be in Germany for only a

limited time. While I could not find any documented evidence of such strange conditions in

the early years of Turkish migration to Germany, the story, whether it is factual or not, serves

as a useful starting point in illustrating a shared and collective trauma which characterises to

some extent, the aura of the communities in this study.

As I pointed out in the introduction, in recent years the apparent formation of “parallel

societies”, which depict a rapidly growing Muslim population, living in enclaves apart from a

loosely defined Christian majority has come under intense discussion. Yet when Turkish

immigrants were coming to Germany they were only allowed to settle in certain sections of

the towns and cities and in the context of Berlin (Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and the northern

counterpart, Wedding)3. A large majority of Muslims still live in those districts. Neukölln,

Wedding and Kreuzberg were the westernmost districts in the old, divided Berlin. Hence they

were “pushed up” against the Berlin Wall. While always having been working class areas

(and receiving migrants from other parts of Germany and Poland), it was during the 40 years

of division that they attained the heavy Muslim immigrant presence that they do today and

have become places where a plethora of different Islamic communities found in Germany is

most widely represented.

3 While I could not find any documented evidence of forced segregation, several people confirmed this to me. According to many Turkish individuals, Turkish citizens received a stamp in their passport which stated that they could only register in the three districts mentioned.

x

Islamic Fields of Neukölln and Kreuzberg

In approaching the various types of Muslim communities found in Germany,

Thielmann (2005) has adopted the work of Bourdieu and has called them “Islamic fields”.

The anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in the rural community of Bad Kreuznach found

numerous Muslim organisations to be active in the town. Each one was based upon

ideological and/or ethnic lines. The Islamic community Milli Görus, the “Sufi oriented”

VIKZ, and Diyanet (DITIB) all represent the Turkish speaking population exclusively

(Thielmann 2005: 153). Diyanet is run by the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs which

represents one discursive authority that advocates a laizistic state while controlling what is

said in the mosques. Milli Görüs has aroused a great deal of suspicion in Germany after

September 11, 2001 as an organisation which is potentially Islamist and thereby threatening

towards the country’s constitution (Pratt-Ewing 2003). In Bad Kreuznach, there is one

additional Arabic speaking mosque and a Persian (Shiite) one. Thielmann points out that the

different organisations rarely ever have anything to do with each other (ibid. 174). These

decisively modernist structures are essentially found throughout Germany. As Pratt-Ewing

shows (2003), they re-produce competing discourses found in their respective countries of

origin. As a result, the organisations focus not on ummah, but on national, individual

interests. Thielmann (2005: 171-174) compares the groups in Bad Kreuznach with a separate

organisation in urban Mainz which to certain individuals represents a “true Islam”, focussing

on the universal element of Islam, by for example, using German as a Lingua Franca.

Kreuzberg and Neukölln can perhaps be seen as a showcase for these kinds of

community structures. Within not more than five square kilometres of my apartment, there

are mosques run by the “secularist” Turkish government, Milli Görüs, the similarly oriented

Suleymancilar, and by some of the classical tariqa (Sufi oriented) organisations present in

Anatolia (this would be unthinkable in Turkey itself). There is one small prayer room

administered by a Bengali foundation. Then there are at least four much larger Arab speaking

mosques, one which is distinctly of Salafi persuasion and which has been raided several times

by police in the post 9-11 years. The recent construction of an Arabic speaking mosque at the

Görlitzer Park intersection in Kreuzberg has aroused both curiosity and controversy because

of its innovative architectural style. It is a typical four-story Berlin apartment block with four

minarets springing from the roof. During my research, a major intersection developed into

what I began to think of as “Little Mecca”. It was during Ramadan that a discount

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supermarket (masjid ar rahma) was bought by the largely North-African followers of a

popular Egyptian Imam renowned for his charismatic preaching style. Almost

simultaneously, the 7th Day Adventist Church next door was also converted into a mosque

(Haus des Friedens und der Integration), the one-time altar conveniently facing south-east.

On a Friday afternoon, this formerly quite ordinary intersection has become one teeming with

literally hundreds of worshippers of diverse backgrounds. The accompanying traffic

problems became so bad that the Imam mentioned above, urged people to come to the mosque

by public transport in order to set a positive example for the non-Muslim neighbours. Both

mosques have begun to offer German language courses which are funded by the Neukölln

municipality.

It may already be clear that the local Muslim community cannot be seen as one entity.

It is split along ethnic and ideological lines (Pratt-Ewing 2003, Thielmann 2005). Here

already, we can establish not one, but numerous imported local Islams. The diyanet mosques,

run by the Turkish ministry of religious affairs, are staffed by Imams sent by Ankara who

often stay for only two or three years, do not learn any German at all and are greatly

controlled by the laizistic Kemalist discursive regime. Milli Görüs and the Suleymancilar are

the ideological counterparts to what can ironically be seen as state religion. The Turkish

speaking mosques are not even recognisable as such by the outsider. As simple prayer rooms,

hidden from the main streets, they are often signified only in Turkish, so that non Turkish-

speaking people sometimes do not even know they are there. The Arabic speaking mosques

tend to be more focussed on the concept of ummah. The converted supermarket provides

simultaneous German translations of the Friday sermons through headsets.

After friday prayers on Flughafenstraße. The main floor of the apartment building housed a supermarket and the building on the left is a former Seventh-Day Adventist church.

Today, these boroughs have some of the highest rates of unemployment in all of Germany.

As working class districts they are today home to the Prekariat, a controversial term which

left-wing sociologists have used to describe a massive class of the chronically unemployed,

underemployed, or unstably self-employed. Daily life often consists of struggles with

bureaucracy, social welfare and employment offices.

Most of my research took place in the northern section of Neukölln and the adjacent

southern section of Kreuzberg. While the proportion of Ausländer (foreigners still after more

than 40 years) is high, the population of “native” Germans should not be overlooked.

Whether German or Turkish, Muslim or non-Muslim, the reality of unemployment and an

xii

existence based on social welfare is inescapable4 On the most recent first day of school, more

than half of all pupils were of families dependant on the Hartz 4 welfare program.5 It should

come as no surprise then, that there are health issues which are deeply affecting these

communities. Whether we are dealing with Muslims or non-Muslims, it is safe to say that we

are dealing with marginalised communities. This should be kept in mind when looking at

spirit possession and ecstatic cults, as many (but not all) anthropologists (Lewis 1971, Boddy

1994) who have studied these phenomena have seen them to be inextricably linked to social

marginalisation.

The integration of the Ausländer is an issue which has been under intense discussion

recently, and associated health issues have begun to surface in the social sciences as well.

Recent studies on the incidence of schizophrenia amongst Turkish immigrants had found

there to be a relatively high occurrence but Haasen et al. (2000: 297) pointed to the possibility

of a large margin of error in making diagnoses because of cultural conceptions. In the files of

a local mental health facility, 80% of all cases had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. An Sufi

informant working at a Neukölln support centre which provides assistance for migrant

families in dealing with bureaucracy stated her impressions that a great percentage of people

in Neukölln, whether German or non-German were suffering from some kind of

psychological illness. But the high rate of schizophrenia is in her words, quite dubious. For

in the emic (Sufi Muslim) perspective, “seeing signs”, “hearing voices”, communicating with

invisible beings and so forth, does not necessarily signify illness. Muslim belief systems are

to greatly varying extents embued with notions of magic, saints, spirits (djinn), possession and

witchcraft. Such cosmologies and the healing systems associated with them have in

anthropology by no means been neglected (Boddy 1994, Crapanzano 1981, Giles 1999,

Lambek 1981, Lewis 1986) from the Muslim world alone. These world views have inevitably

migrated along with the Muslim diasporas in the West6. Yet exactly there were notions such

as spirit possession clash with bio-medical systems, there has been an acute lack of attention

turned towards it. From Zar cults to pirs and Sufi healers, anthropologists have approached

such topics with a great deal of fascination in the “exotic” context, whether on the islands of

Mayotte (Lambek), the Sufi brotherhoods of Morocco (Crapanzano) or the Zar cult of North

Africa and the Middle East (Boddy, Doumato). Yet when people migrate, the spirits with

4 While I was researching my wife was becoming frustrated because I was spending so much time speaking with unemployed Muslims in mosques. I responded that she should not forget that this is my work. 5 Tagesspiegel, September 8, 2007. Hartz 4 welfare payments consists of a mere 360 Euros a month of spending money. Rent and health insurance are covered by the state. Recipients must pay utility bills out of the above sum. 6 I attended a conference entitled “Travelling migrants, Travelling Spirits” held at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Michael Lambek was the keynote speaker.

xiii

whom they converse inevitably move with them. There has been a considerable amount of

attention turned now to African pentacostal churches, and the networks forming through those

Diasporas (Luig et al 1999). Work on the European Muslim context is scant, apart from a

rather extensive ethnography on West African marabouts in Paris (Kuczynski 2002). There

has been some attention in Germany towards the so-called Mittelmeersyndrom, where bio-

medical doctors falsely diagnose immigrants due to linguistic and cultural barriers (Ernst

2000).

On the other hand, attention towards immigrant health issues has been prevalent in

trans-cultural psychology and psycho-analysis. One study found that 11 out of 20 Turkish

psychiatric patients had also consulted with “traditional healers” (Röder 1986).

Magico-Islamic fields of Neukölln and Kreuzberg

If there is one place in Germany where the presence of “traditional” healing, saints and

spirits is immanent, then it very well might be Neukölln. At the Islamic cemetery at the

largest Berlin mosque on the limits of the borough, there is the tomb of Ali Aziz Efendi, a late

eighteenth century Ottoman diplomat to whom sainthood is ascribed. It is here that on

Thursday nights, Muslim spirits are said to gather for dhikr along with their human

counterparts who have been given permission from God to attend. There are some who make

regular pilgrimages to Ali Aziz’s grave, making supplications and stopping to extend their

blessings to the first Muslim to have received an Islamic burial in Germany (Abdallah 1981).

Ali Aziz Efendi is seen by those who perform ziyaret and see his tomb as a sanctuary as the

patron saint of the area.

As we shall see, there are people in Neukölln who believe at least to be possessed by

djinn, and there are people who offer treatment for such cases. At the local

Urbankrankenhaus, there is even a healer to whom mysterious cases are regularly referred to

by medical staff7. It is by no means my intention to portray the district as either some kind of

magical landscape or a community plagued by poverty, unemployment and urban decay. I

wish only to offer the perceptions which were attained in conducting fieldwork in this

locality. In searching for insights on these topics, reality is inevitably distorted or inflated.

On the one hand, daily life in the district is portrayed as a constant struggle with adverse

conditions. The stories that are told are of economic failure, social frustration and shattered

7 Personal communication with Annette Langner in June, 1997.

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hopes of upward social mobility. At the same time, “the saints of the neighbourhood” become

present when one is searching for insight on possession, illness, alternative healing practices

and Muslim conceptions of health. In chapter 6, I will be introducing three local settings in

which these “folk” religious elements are prevalent.

3. Worlds of Djinn and other Spirit Entities

The word djinn shares a common root with the Arabic word , meaning “hidden,

unseen or veiled”. Stemming from the same source are the words majzub (one who is

possessed or insane) and jennah (the unseen garden, paradise) (Hentschel 1997).

The djinn can be seen as spirit beings similar to those described in studies on

shamanism, voodoo, or other animist belief systems. Islamic cosmology is divided into four

distinct realms: human beings, angels, shaiateen (plural for shaitan, satan), and finally the

djinn (Hentschel 1997). An entire surah is devoted to these beings who are made of

smokeless fire. These particular koranic verses differ rhetorically from most surah in that at

certain points the djinn themselves are addressing the people:

Amongst us are some that submit their wills (to Allah), and some that swerve from justice. Now those who submit their wills-they have sought out (the path) of right conduct. (Koran, Surah 72:14)

They can be perceived by a limited number of people, remaining invisible and hidden

to most. They are by no means to be confused with the spirits or ghosts of deceased human

ancestors, yet their attributes resemble human societies to a great extent. While the djinn are

said to live for many thousands of years, they eat and sleep, marry and fight amongst each

other, adhere to ideologies and are divided into ethnic and religious communities.

Crapanzano, for example, has outlined the types of djinn found amongst the Hamadsa

brotherhood of Morocco, while Giles (1999) has done the same for the Swahili Coast of East

Africa and Lambek (1981) for Mayotte.

xv

For the most part, the djinn exist separately from human societies, interfering little in

the daily lives of people. One informant said that they were sitting and drinking coffee just

like us. It is then, as Crapanzano notes (1981:24), when they have been “insulted” that they

begin to cause problems, befalling people in either a) influencing their health and well-being

or b) possessing them altogether. The djinn are said to be active at night while spending time

in certain locations which might be considered dubious in Muslim cultures. They prefer areas

with moisture, frequenting toilets, alongside creeks, streams and rivers, in old ruins or in

slaughterhouses (Hentschel 1997: 44, Stein 2000). They are seen as sensitive beings, and any

intrusion unto their territories is risky. Stein (2000) mentions one woman who came into a

psychiatric clinic in Casablanca who could pinpoint the moment her depression began to take

hold. It was after having “inadvertently scolded” a djinn living in her bathroom pipes.

Insulted and full of vengeance, the djinn took possession of her body. The woman became ill,

subsequently seeking treatment not with a “traditional” healer but in a “modern”, Western

psychiatric facility. Djinn can also interfere in the lives of people by marrying humans or

interfering in their relationships (Crapanzano 1980, Hentschel 1997).

Amongst these beings, there are Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Pagan djinn. In the

Moroccan context, the latter are seen as being the most dangerous (Crapanzano 1981). In the

local German context on the other hand, Christian djinn were identified by some as being the

most dangerous, inspiring one of its victims to beat his wife. The Koran mentions djinn who

when hearing the Koran being recited, became Muslims. This might be seen as blueprint in

the Muslim context for the notion of beings who take on human ideological, religious and

ethnic categories. Belief in djinn is hence universal in Islam, whether in modern orthodoxy,

Sufism, or amongst possession cults such as Bori and Zar. The degree to which human

involvement (or vice-versa) is seen as prevalent differs radically however. While in modern,

orthodox practice, the djinn remain as largely unseen, abstract entities, in the possession cults

studied extensively by anthropologists, they tend not only to take on human characteristics,

but are also elaborately described and put into social, political and ideological categories

which strikingly mirror those of human society.

On the Swahili Coast of Tanzania, there are djinn of every group present amongst

humans in that region (Giles 1999). There are Maasai spirits who are seen as fierce, warrior-

like beings. There are European djinn who are fond of beer and cigars and while once being

associated with colonialism, they now much more mirror stereotypes of the Western tourist of

today, taking on a liking for parties and discos (Mackenrodt 2006). In the context of the

Swahili Coast, Giles has constructed an extensive social-cultural system of spirits which

xvi

clearly resembles that of human society. At the same time, it has been argued that ethnic,

religious, and gender stereo-types are reinforced through such constructions (Krings 1999).

Such intricate pantheons of spirit beings (or djinn) are found to differ significantly in

each local context. As a starting point in the Muslim world, evidence based on Koran and

hadith are reason enough for the belief in the existence of such entities to take hold.

However, the way that these worlds are envisioned and interpreted varies considerably from

culture to culture. In the Hausa context of West-Africa, “European” Turawa spirits are

militaristic and are characterised as male soldiers, commanding “his fellow European Spirits,

but sometimes even the spectators or onlooking bori adepts to perform all kinds of military-

like drills” (Krings 1999: 54). Their “paraphernalia” includes “sunglasses and ballpoint pens

(ibid. 54). In the local Bori Cult, social, economic and linguistic change is reflected in the

ever-growing pantheon of local spirits. As people migrate, acquire new languages and

cultural traits, so do the djinn.

It seems to be in the context of the “possession cult”, that deeper “knowledge” of the

spirits themselves is present. They develop complex personalities, carry emotional baggage

and become intricately entwined in the daily lives of the people who have been initiated into

their cultures and societies. Whether in the context of Bori, Hamadsa or Zar, it is possible to

ascertain that indeed the individuals on the human side of the equation have developed

correspondingly complex relationships with their spirit counterparts. Aisha Qandisa lives

through the actions of the fraternities which call upon her to treat her victims (the fraternities’

patients) justly (Crapanzano 1981). To restore the health of the patient, sacrifices must be

made, or in the Maussian sense, humans must engage in trade with the djinn. While the

human world and the spirit world are normally separated from one another, when there is

interference from one of the two sides then a series of interactions takes place which unifies

both parties:

There are different ways in which possession is dealt with, depending on the specific

set of cultural constructions and attitudes towards faith:

Spirit possession commonly refers to the hold exerted over a human being by external forces or entities more powerful than she. These forces may be ancestors or divinities, ghosts of foreign origin, or entities both ontologically and ethnically alien. Some societies evince multiple spirit forms. Depending on cultural and etiological context such spirits may be exorcised, or lodged in relatively permanent relationship with their host (or medium), occasionally usurping primacy of place in her body (even donning their own clothes and speaking their own languages) during bouts of possession trance (Boddy 1994: 407).

In some cases, there are attempts at exorcism, resembling what has been seen in the

classic film. Negotiating with the spirits is the more desirable approach in Sub-Saharan

Africa and it is one which frequently leads to the possessed individual becoming an initiated

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member in the respective therapeutic cults which have been mentioned. Patients become

healers in appeasing the spirits. Djinn such as Aisha Qandisa are tamed, if one wills, to work

for the human individual. Health is restored to the afflicted, and a new relationship is forged

with the spirit. From a very Freudian sense, Crapanzano links the Hamadsha possession cult

with sexual tensions in the psyche, which has been deeply criticised by El-Zein (1978).

These types of, I argue, medical systems in dealing with possession, where the djinn

have developed complex personalities and the people have formed reciprocal, working

relationships with the spirits which bring both illness and health seem to be exclusive to

Africa. It is widely accepted that the Zar Cult, which is prevalent on the Arabian Peninsula

and Iran, is of African origin (Doumato 2002). Seen also as a form of syncretism, such cults

are usually denounced by mainstream or orthodox Islam. Outside of the African context then,

the ways that “traditional” healing deals with djinn is much more black and white. The spirits

are much less ambiguous, mysterious beings with whom there is no compromise. Exorcisms

are more likely to take place, and the relationship between healer and spirit is one where the

former puts the latter under intense pressure to leave the patient’s body, or in some cases, to

change its ideological disposition to be in conformity with Islam. To do any differently, e.g.

to make sacrifices to the djinn, is strongly condemned as a form of shirk (polytheism): Hence

“group therapies” (Crapanzano 1981) such as the Zar Cult are completely marginalised if not

punishable by death in the Wahhabi-dominated areas of the Arabian Peninsula (Doumato

2002). In North-East Africa on the other hand, the Zar Cult flourishes alongside male-

dominated, patriarchal (but generally less puritanically zealous) arenas of religious practice.

The afflicted hence, tend to be women and homosexuals, who as Lewis (2003) has argued,

use these arenas to live out repressed agencies in spiritual as well as socio-cultural domains.

One of the goals of my research was subsequently to make an ethnographic “survey”

of djinn cultures in Berlin. As previously mentioned, complex notions of unseen societies and

ways of interaction with them, are reserved to some extent to the African and especially Sub-

Saharan context (Boddy 1994). As the diaspora Muslim communities in Germany are pre-

dominantly Turkish, with some significant Balkan and Arab minorities, it might be expected

that there would be a lack of extended local pantheons mirroring human ethnic, ideological,

and religious groups. Moreover, primarily discussing the Turkish diaspora, Pratt-Ewing

(2003) explains that many migrants in Germany have an “ambivalent relationship to Islam”,

being “largely structured out of the particular (and in some respects peculiar) position of

Islam in the discursive construction of Turkey as a secularist, modern nation”. Positioned

between the contested hegemonic modernities of mosque associations run by the Turkish state

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and the legalistically oriented Milli Görüs, the conditions for “folk traditions” within an

Islamic framework might not be seen as being particularly favourable.

The djinn of over here then are much less vivid beings, who in the sessions of the

djinn hodja do reveal their identities, dates of birth, or religious affiliations. However, they

seem to exist largely independently through the median of their inflicted hosts who do

become ill and do seek treatment, usually through the urgings of family or friends. I believed

that, in a country with as many ideological and totalitarian experiments as Germany, it might

have been possible to find conceptions of Nazi or Neo-Nazi, Marxist and Stalinist, Gestapo or

Stasi spirits. If in Tanzania, formerly colonialist Djinn who now frequent discotheques and

drink beer, and in Nigeria, beings of similar background inspire their hosts to act

militaristically, why wouldn’t there be Fascist spirits here, causing people to act inflexibly and

even hatefully?

One hypothesis would be that, were there greater proportions of Muslim migrants

from Sub-Saharan Africa, local pantheons reflecting the region’s socio-cultural heritage

would gradually develop. We are dealing with a society which in many ways has yet to come

to terms with a rather dark and sinister history, while simultaneously it is still coping with

contemporary expressions of xenophobia, racism and discrimination. The Ausländer remain

Ausländer, even if some of them have been in Germany for three generations and many have

become German citizens. The high rates of depression amongst second and third generation

migrants are brought into connection with educational, professional and social disadvantages

(Assion 2005b: 138). Corresponding spirit entities might hence be found, were there more

complex possession cults such as the ones found in North-East or West Africa. It will be seen

thapter six, that there may be concepts of Ottoman and Prussian spirits in Neukölln.

4. Muslim Healing

What constitutes healing in an Islamic context is of relatively uniform content,

whether on the Arabian Peninsula (Doumato 2000), Senegal (Kuczynski 2002), Pakistan

(Pratt-Ewing 1996), Bosnia (Bringa 1995) or East Africa (Mackenrodt 2007). While cultural

realities evidently differ from place to place, context to context and notions of illness and

healing are undoubtedly transformed somewhat in each region, there is a uniformity of

methods which has its intellectual base at Al-Azhar University in Cairo (Hentschel 1997). I

was almost astounded that the practices of an Albanian sheikh in the context of contemporary

Berlin were very close to what was described in the literature mentioned above.

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Muslim healers are medical doctors in some ways and psychiatrists in other ways. At

the same time, they can be seen as teachers, spiritual guides, scholars (alim’), sorcerers or

saints (wali). They may also be considered as diviners, being able to look into the past and

future, giving prognosis on a patient’s external life circumstances. In all of these, the healer

can be seen as an intermediary between the human realm and the unseen dimension of djinn,

angels, spirit beings and in Sufi circles, of deceased saints:

Les marabouts sont donc les mediateurs, les interpretes d’etres surnaturels peuplant l’univers, nommes esprits, anges, ou plus couramment genies [...] la puissance qui leur est reconnue explique la necessite de leur intervention (Kuczynski 2002: 160).

If the marabout, hodja or ruqya is indeed an intermediary or an interpreter of the

“supernatural”, then it is through the Koran that mediation occurs. The Koran is applied in

treating someone who has fallen ill through the involvement of malevolent spirits, black

magic, or the evil eye. While one of my informants claims to have direct contact with a

benevolent angel-like spirit being, thus being seen as a spirit median himself, the Koran does

not lose its centrality in healing practice. Scripture is most commonly used in connection

with water. Pieces of paper upon which Koranic verses are written are brought into contact

with water and then drank or applied to the skin of the patient. Sometimes the paper is

swallowed by a sacrificial animal which is then ingested after having been slaughtered. The

use of water and Koran is common throughout the Islamic world. In some cases, water that

has come into contact with a healer or saint is used in treating the ill. In Sufi contexts, I

witnessed hadra participants breathe into a bottle of water which is then drank by an afflicted

individual.

Another way in which the Koran is used is through the writing of amulets (taweez)

which are commonly encased and then worn around the neck or the right upper arm. The

djinn are said to be warded off in this way and they are often employed as preventative

measures rather than as treatment. The use of koranic audio recordings has begun to emerge

in the contemporary setting. While one method of combat against malevolent spirits or djinn

has always been recitation of Koran, today this is sometimes done with the assistance of audio

recordings, which the patient listens to through headphones.

As an intermediary between human and unseen realms, it is often the healer’s job to

know the demands of the djinn or other malevolent spirit beings. This often implies the use of

sacrifice or the offering of certain objects. Hence, animals might need to be slaughtered or

goods might need to be exchanged. This clearly presents a problem in a society where the

slaughter of animals is strictly forbidden outside of licensed commercial use. Hence, if

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necessary, this occurs outside of the city, in the countryside surrounding Berlin, where the

chances of being caught are minimal.

The healer can also, as mentioned, take on the role of diviner. Sheikh Suleyman

worked extensively with numerology and astrological methods in order to determine the cause

of a patient’s illness, and then to determine a cure. Using these methods, the healer’s position

can cease to be of purely medical function. Individuals come to him in order to find insight

on the future or to attain knowledge on past hardships. In this way, the healer may also be

seen as a clairvoyant and might fit in with “esoteric” or “new age” practices in Western

society today.

There are of course, also more scientifically verifiable medicines which the Muslim

healer has at his or her disposal. They are also herbalists, some of the medicines having been

passed down through hadith, while others might be communicated through the spirit median.

It is worth mentioning that bio-medical psychiatric medicine also began to develop in the

early Islamic context. According to Payk (2005: 23), Europe’s first modern psychiatric

hospitals were found in Andalusia during the Islamic presence there. The line between

“traditional” and “modern” healing is evidently not that clear-cut. Payk (ibid. 24) mentions

some of the medicines used in those historical contexts, some of which are similar to the ones

discussed here.

The range of practices themselves might not be of significant relevance for the central

arguments of this paper, but I have attempted to outline exactly what constitutes “Islamic

healing” and what the people involved with such endeavours are doing on the corporeal level.

In order to define what constitutes of Muslim healing and the cultural and social backdrop on

which it occurs, it would be useful to use the typology developed above as a guideline. If we

take into account what is described in the literature across the Islamic world, and compare

these to our own findings in the migrant districts of Berlin, then we see a marked uniformity

amongst these different cultural contexts. While in West Africa for example, marabout

practices carry a wide range of local influences (Kuczynski 2002) , the methodology outlined

here is nevertheless common there too. Doumato (2002) documents Koran/water healing

rituals on the Arabian Peninsula quite extensively and shows how modernisation through

Christian missionary activity and 20th century Wahhabism marginalised what were seen as

superstitious and folkloric ways of dealing with illness. If however, we make cross-cultural

comparisons from within the ummah, then we may come to the conclusion that in fact, these

are distinctly Muslim practices which form a medical system that transcends temporal and

spatial constructs. It is here that it becomes possible to speak of “Muslim healers”, or an

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Islamic medical system. It is based on knowledge that is evidently reproduced across a

plethora of cultures through one religious system.

This does not necessarily exclude non-Islamic practices from a Muslim healer’s

system of work. From the literature, the most evident proof of this is once again, Africa

where pre-Islamic practices are often integrated, and where one speaks of an “Islamisation of

African cults or an Africanisation of Islam” (Luig et al. 1999: xv). A certain level of

syncretism can also be seen in Rifa’i Sufism (introduced in chapter 5) , a major global

religious fraternity which has both Sunni and Shiite sub-groupings and adherents. Rooted in a

tradition of healing, the order has been influential in various regions throughout the Islamic

world, blending local and Islamic beliefs.

There is rather unanimous consent that those individuals who offer treatment for the ill

without demanding any form of payment are the “genuine” ones. None of the healers I

encountered in Neukölln took any form of explicit payment. They search income outside of

their vocation as healers, by for example, selling textiles at the Kreuzberg bi-weekly market

or searching for jobs elsewhere. One of the healers in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, aspired to the

position while others, much like in documentations of shamanism (Eliade 1951, Lewis 1966)

were pressured into their vocation by spirit beings. They had become ill in their youth and it

was when they had “mastered” the spirits, that they began to help others.

One problem that arises is in coming to a definition and an appropriate use of

terminologies in discussing the practices and functions of the kinds of healers in this study. In

a context where numerous Muslim cultures meet, it was often difficult to find one unanimous

term for the types of individuals I was looking for. There is the Arabic term roqya. On the

other hand, Turkish informants would not know what I was talking about when I asked them

if they knew anyone who was a healer, faith healer, traditional healer, exorcist or so on. One

of the Turkish healers who specialises in treatment against djinn, is known as a djinn hodja.

As we shall see, for some people the relationship they have with their healer escapes any

specific form of definition at all. He is simply an individual to turn to in times of adversity.

Unlike visiting the “family doctor” or the “psychiatrist”, going to Sheikh Suleyman is simply

going to Sheikh Suleyman, if the individual even attaches a title. We shall also see however,

that the relationships people have with their healers is clearly one of doctor/patient and that

the medicines and rituals which are carried out often have healing effects in one way or

another.

What looks like “traditional” healing, whether in the Muslim context or elsewhere, is

given a wide diversity of labels. Practioners of any kinds of medical systems which have no

xxii

clear scientific validity are called folk healers, shamans, exorcists, diviners, witchdoctors,

clairvoyants, magicians, seers, and herbalists. Paul Hinderling (2002: 39-41), discusses this

issue and points to the fact that such terms are often misappropriated and removed from their

cultural setting of origin. Moreover, such terms tend to marginalise individuals who are to

some extent or another, specialists or experts in particular systems of healing which are

“magical-religious” as opposed to “para-scientific”. The suggestion is made that “traditional”

healers are called doctors or therapists in their own field. In this Magisterial thesis, I use the

term “healer”, based not on what patients call the people to whom they go in situations of

adversity or acute illness, but on the relationships they have with those individuals and the

effect they have in their daily lives.

5. Healers and Spirits in the Context of Sufism

Sufism is an arena in which an Islam embued with “spiritual” elements is lived despite

of fundamentalist or secularist discursive attacks against what is seen as folklore or magic.

By spiritual here, I refer to the veneration of deceased saints (pirs) and more vivid notions of

unseen worlds in which non-human entities such as angels and djinn play roles of varying

extents in the lives of its followers. Like possession cults, Sufism has always been subject to

condemnation in orthodox circles and in more recent history has been under scrutiny in

competing modernist discourses.8 Attempting to come to a definition of Sufism would be a

rather redundant exercise as first of all, there are hundreds of different tariqa with origins as

diverse as the Islamic world itself:

The challenge of definition has been met with some enthusiasm in recent years. Sufism has been presented in the West as a vehicle for the spread of Islam, an ascetic and contemplative piety, an organizational basis of resistance against invaders, a means of psychiatric treatment, and a powerful force in religious and social reform, to name just a few of its aspects (Johansen 1996: 2) (my italics).

For all intents and purposes, I will be focussing on the healing elements of the

tradition while not neglecting, in the following, to come to some kind of consensus as to what

Sufism is, or at best what it is perceived to be. This can be done only in centring the personal

figure of the pir around the elements mentioned above. It is the pir (saints) who organise

resistance against invaders, provide psychiatric treatment and give the layout for the

attainment of ascetic and contemplative piety. In most cases, they are tied to a spiritual

lineage (silsila) which reaches back to the prophet himself. From a Geertzian perspective,

they are culturally embued with charismatic baraka, and it is through ritual bond that the 8 See for example, Pratt-Ewing (1996) or Johansen (1996).

xxiii

adept (murid) takes with his or her sheikh that this source of (prophetic) empowerment is

transferred to the followers.

Critical in a discussion on sainthood and baraka however, is the conception of

karamat. A saint, more affectionately called weli9 in the emic perspective, or in the specific

cultural contexts of the Maghreb and West Africa, marabout, is only considered as such if

indeed his or her intimate connection to divinity can be proven through extraordinary action.

Karamat can occur either during the person’s life or after he or she has passed away.

Examples of such actions, whether they be considered miraculous or not, will be shown below

and will surface again throughout the rest of this paper. If a saint’s baraka can only be proven

through karamat, then there are legends, myths, and possibly even factual events which

confirm his or her intimate connection to God. While it is not my intention to present the

reader with a local Berlin hagiography, ultimately a Sufi healer (such as Sheikh Suleyman)

must legitimise his position through the baraka that has been passed down through the lineage

of his tariqa.

The Rifa’i

The Rifa’i is a complex and heterodox tariqa of many groupings and sub-groupings,

which surfaces throughout the classical Islamic world and transcends Sunni, Shiite and even

Alevi distinctions. It is known for its bizarre and controversial ecstatic techniques including

the insertion of sharp and burning objects in the face and chest, the swallowing of hot coals

and even the stabbing oneself directly through the chest. Reminiscing on Crapanzano’s work

on the Hamadsa (1980, 1981) a possession cult which has grown out of Sufism, we find

similar practices amongst a brotherhood which is ascribed with healing powers and is

considered by the people of Meknes, to be therapists. The Rifa’i order is also known for its

healing powers which in this particular belief system are passed down through the miracles of

its founding pir who inherited the gift from a legendary encounter at the grave of the prophet

at Medina:

In the year 555 A.H., when he was 43 years old, Hz. Rifa'i went on hajj. He didn't wear the usual travelling clothes of sayyids (the relatives of the Prophet, saws, could be recognized by their clothes). There is a certain section of the Prophet's (saws) tomb in Medina that only blood relatives of the Prophet (saws) may enter. The guard at the door would not allow him in, as he wanted to know the proof that Ahmed ar Rifai was related to the Prophet (saws). Ahmed ar Rifai was sad and yelled towards our Prophet's (saws) tomb, "As-salaamu alaykum, ya jeddi (Peace be on you, my ancestor)." Our Prophet (saws) answered, saying "Walaykum salaam, ya waladi (And peace be on you, my son)." Muhammad's (saws) hand came out of the tomb and our Pir kissed the

9 Weli means „friend of Allah“, one who is intimately tied and in close connection a strictly monotheistic concept of divinity.

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Prophet's (saws) hand. When people saw this miracle, they went into a state of wajd (ecstasy) and began stabbing themselves with their swords and knives. When the ecstasy passed, there were people lying all over the floor covered with blood, so Ahmed ar Rifai returned them to their normal health. After that, our Pir was famous for possessing this gift.10

Hence the order has been ascribed with attributes of both healing and resistance to

pain, while the diversity of pilgrims found at Medina during the hajj season is reflected in the

current day trans-sectarian build-up of its followers.11 At the same time it takes on syncretistic

tendencies, absorbing local, often non-Islamic belief systems and cults. The baraka of

prophetic descent, which in this case manifests itself as a form of resistance to corporal pain

and the ability to heal is then passed through ritual bond onto the followers. The effect of the

legend, having taken place at the global nexus of the trans-national ummah, crosses borders

that are otherwise impenetrable. The result is a somewhat syncretistic, global healing network

carrying with it specific forms of ecstatic ritual which can only be performed by the spiritual

descendants of the people who witnessed the event.

Ahmad ar Rifai’s tomb is located in a small town outside of Baghdad and the zawiya

there has been a major centre of pilgrimage for centuries. The regime of Saddam Hussein

improved the transportation infrastructure for the pilgrims, making the tomb more accessible.

Since the occupation of Iraq, travel there has obviously become extremely dangerous and the

entire tariqa has become even less centralised. There are four major Rifa’i branches with

many other sub-groups.

Hence while there are numerous sheikhs in Berlin and its rural surrounds, there is no

one definitive local leader and one can speak of numerous networks which often have little if

any connection to each other. The zawiya of Sheikh Suleyman Efendi is located about 80 km

southeast of Berlin in the picturesque Spreewald area, which is known for its Slavic speaking

Sorbian minority and has always been a getaway for city-dwellers. Not more than 25 km

away, is the Trebbusser Mevlevihane, and the adjacent Institut für Islamstudien/Sufi Archiv

Deutschland. Nestled in the centre of the small Eastern German village of Trebbus, the

zawiya is widely regarded as the most valuable resource for Sufism in Western Europe.

Sheikh Abdallah Hallis was initiated as murshid (Sufi teacher) by several tariqa, including the

Rifa’i. The building, which was once used as postal carriage depot, houses a mosque with

two tombs of deceased murid, an extensive library and archive (especially housing rare

Ottoman manuscripts) a social room, and numerous guestrooms. Within the mosque there are

also two rooms that are used by the murid as spaces for lengthy meditative seclusions

(halvet). I had the opportunity to visit this local centre of Sufism during the second phase of 10 www.qadiri-rifai.org11 It is consensus amongst the Rifa’i that those people who witnessed the event and were healed of their wounds, went back to their respective communities having become followers of the saint.

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my research, where the sheikh advised me to consult with Enes Hodja, a healer in Kreuzberg

who has recently been the focus of television and radio documentaries on his treatment of

possession cases. When I replied that I had already spoken to him and that he had been rather

aloof with me, he told me to return to him and to send his regards. The following Tuesday I

went to the Kreuzberg market with my assistant and an interview could easily be arranged.

While Abdallah Hallis is primarily known as the regional caliph of the Mevlevi Order,

the international tariqa known well in the West because of its “whirling dervishes”, he is also

a Rifa’i sheikh, as he was initiated as a teacher in this group as well. Yet the two Rifa’i

caliphs, practicing and living within a short drive through the countryside of one another,

have never met. I had received invitations by Suleyman to come his place in the Spreewald.

When I persisted in taking up on the offer, Suleyman began to be more interested in the two

of us travelling to Trebbus together than having me come to his zawiya. Later he told me that

he did know the sheikh who was effectively almost his neighbour but that he did not have the

same powers that he had. Although he knew that Sheikh Abdallah was a strong teacher of

Sufism, he was not in “contact with the angels”.

The distinction is made here between two levels of charisma which intertwine but are

not necessarily one and the same. Both sheikhs are initiated teachers in the Rifa’i tariqa

tradition. Both are able to lead dhikr rituals for the local murid of their respective branches

within a wide assortment of rather distinct and culturally defined versions of the same global

cult centred around one founding pir, Ahmed ar Rifa’i. While Sheikh Abdallah is known for

his seminars and workshops on ecstatic techniques and their healing elements, he does not

share the same vocation as Suleyman. The former, while respecting the latter for his

knowledge, is not embued with the same conception of charisma when dealing with for

example, people who believe to be under the influence of malignant djinn. The healing

specialist and the Sufi sheikh are two separate callings. Suleyman is both.

The Rifa’i are often criticised sharply because of the self-mutilation practices which

have also been their trademark and “claim to fame”. What seems to be often overlooked is

the healing attributes which are transferred through the legend. On one level, there are some

people who told me that they had been brought back to the religion by having come into

contact with Rifa’i Sufism. Then they eventually denounced their form of dhikr as bida’

(innovation in religious matters).

In the Kosovo, Rifa’i Sufism is integrated with Alevi teachings, interpretations and

practices. At the very same time, one Rifa’i (and Sunni) living in Berlin told led me that he

led a militia during the Lebanese civil war. Resistance to corporal pain, healing attributes,

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and miraculous feats are all elements which allow the order to thrive in a wide diversity of

regional and local settings, while moral interpretations and stylistic local variations are left

quite open.

It is interesting that in the course of my research, at least one person who had come

into contact with a Rifa’i healer converted to Islam. This individual had for a long time

occupied herself with Islam. She had been in relationships with Muslim men, had read the

Koran and gone to mosques. Living in Neukölln, contact to Islam and the confrontation with

the Muslim other might have come naturally. She had thought about becoming a Muslim

before, and the very fact that she would consult a sheikh might also be an indication of this. It

was, amongst other things though, the healer’s success and her impressions of him which led

her to make an ultimate decision on an issue which had been pre-occupying her for quite

some time.

The Burhaniya

The Burhaniya, while being a cult of much less global proportions, is centred around

saints of much more regional significance, who however, have also become charismatic

figures within Europe. Known only in North-East Africa as recently as thirty years ago, the

charisma of its leaders is of as much local German significance today than in Khartoum or

Southern Egypt. Stefanie Dresch (2004) has shown how the followers of Sheikh Maulana

Ibrahim and his predecessor, Sheikh Mohammad Uthman are venerated as saintly figures by

the great number of German converts in the tariqa. In addition, according to Schleßman

(2003) the figure of Salah Eid is one which plays not only a significant role in the

establishment of the tariqa in Germany but also of Sufism in general.

Dr. Mohammad Salah Eid was an Egyptian born journalist, publicist and translator,

who dedicated himself to the work of inter-religious dialogue, working with the Protestant

Academy of Berlin. He is said to have found his way to mysticism during his imprisonment

because of alleged links to The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and his animosity towards the

Nasser regime. In the 1970’s, it was Salah Eid who formed the first circle of Burhanis in

Kreuzberg and it was his association with Muhammad Uthman which propelled the eventual

official establishment of a zawiya in Neukölln. Salah Eid died suddenly in a car crash in 1981

and was buried behind the mosque of the Islamic cemetery, close to Ali Aziz. Unseen dhikr

rituals are also said to take place there as well. The grave is visited not only by Burhanni

themselves, but by members of other tariqa as well. A Turkish adept of the Qadiri Order

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whose sheikh resides in Turkey and is without a practicing community, started visiting the

tomb of Sheikh Salah Eid as his murshid had been in close contact with him. It was soon

thereafter that he found his way to the local Burhani zawiya which has become kind of

surrogate community.

There are communities of Burhani throughout Europe and North America today.

According to Dresch (2004), groups in other European countries are dominated by immigrants

from the Sudan and Egypt while in Germany the majority of murid are converts to Islam and

Sufism. Many of them are “second-generation Muslims” (the children of those who

converted). There are more zawiya than in any other country (including the Sudan), with dhikr

meetings taking place in at least ten German cities, including smaller towns such as Pforzheim

and Ashausen. There is a rural retreat in the Lüneburg Heath which is used especially for the

annual hawliya of Mohammad Uthman. Often mentioned in the literature (Dresch 2004: 13,

Spuler-Stegemann 2002: 139), is a prophecy of the sheikh about forty Germans who, after

travelling to Khartoum would return home and spread Islam. The prediction is seen as having

come to fruition, as a number of Germans did in fact, travel to the Sudan after having met the

above mentioned sheikh.

The charisma of Mohammad Uthman is quite pervasive amongst his followers. A

book that has been compiled of German-born followers recounts their meetings with the

sheikh (Langenkamp 2004), and the ways in which he was influential in their conversion

processes. Prophecies such as the one mentioned above are perhaps supported by such

literature. He was also known for his extensive knowledge of the djinn. Hentschel (1997: 12-

13), who conducted fieldwork on healers in Cairo, mentions in his introduction that some of

his informants were followers of Mohammad Uthman and that he himself as a researcher had

received personal lectures on the unseen world. The author points out that when he visited

one of the Burhani healers, he himself became “conscious of the presence of the spirit world”

(ibid. 13).

The order aroused suspicion in Egypt for what Schleßman calls its “novel wonder”

(2003: 139) and its headquarters was eventually moved to Khartoum. Some of his followers

reported that even after his death, Mohammad Uthman was in contact with them and

continued to provide them with practical advice. Such psychological connections will be

illustrated in the following chapters, with the story of one Berlin Burhani who is constantly

fighting an unseen war which involves a non-descript, malignant dinn and Maulana Sheikh

Ibrahim, who I introduce below.

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Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim, the son of Mohammad Uthman, is widely credited with

having spread this branch of Sufism even more extensively outside of its original context. His

charismatic influence is one which is especially prevalent in Germany. The annual hawliya

that commemorates him took place in Berlin during my research. It was a three day event and

members from all over Western Europe attended. The climax of the weekend was the

Saturday evening when the largest hadra of the year took place. Before the ritual however,

the gathering assembled to listen to reflections about the life of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim and

the memories of him that many of the followers had written down to read to the audience.

The emotional responses of the listeners demonstrated the way in which the sheikh is said to

live on through his followers.

Festive atmosphere at the hawliya of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim, after the communal dhikr ritual.

The Naqshibandi-Haqqaniya

The third tariqa which needs to be touched upon briefly is the Haqqani branch of the

Naqshibandiyya. Like the Rifa’i, the Naqshibandiyya are a trans-local, global network with

not one, but numerous sheikhs. Like the Burhani, the Haqqani branch have an extensive

following in Germany which has been documented by Schleßman (2003). Pnina Werbner has

written an extensive ethnography of another recently arisen branch of the Naqshibandiyya

which has expanded out of Pakistan and in Britain has, among its followers, reshaped the

metaphorical local landscape:

Another transnational movement anaylsed in the book is that of jinns or evil spirits, now said to populate Britain in vast numbers, living ‘among the people’. Healing is an integral feature of all Sufi orders, crucial to the redistributive economy of the lodge. The saint, alive or dead, is regarded as a great healer. He is able to see and command invisible spiritual beings, fiery jinns and other dark malevolent influences (Werbner 2003: 27).

Interestingly, the djinn of Pakistan live in the forests and mountains whereas in Britain they

are seen to live amongst the people, as “clearly the Pennines were far too English to attract the

djinn” (ibid. 233). In Pakistan, benevolent djinn live near the central zawiya and assist

Zindapir, the founding sheikh in healing afflicted individuals. In this Naqshibandi

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perspective, the djinn have migrated along with the people, but there are no stories of good

spirits in England.

The Haqqani branch of the global Naqshibandi order is rooted in Cyprus. Sheikh

Nazim, who is the founder of the sub-grouping is also known to “see” the spirits. Some of the

“djinn stories” which I heard in Berlin were retold from episodes which occurred in Cyprus.

Sheikh Nazim has called for the re-institution of the caliphate along the lines of the former

Ottoman sultanate. While in Germany, a majority of his murid as well as his regional

representatives are German converts (Schleßman 2003), yet the group takes on distinctly

“Neo-Ottoman” characteristics and like other Sufi groups with a high percentage of converts,

strives to ideologically re-construct the former links between Prussia and the defunct

sultanate. The regional Haqqani centre is the Osmanische Herberge (Ottoman Inn), about 100

km to the south-west of Cologne. The inn serves as a place of retreat for murid from across

Europe. The sheikh there is Sheikh Nazim’s main caliph in Germany.

The Osmanische Herberge is perceived as place where djinn are sent to disturb the

harmony and spiritual contemplation of the murid who stay there for several weeks at a time.

One of my informants who spends every holiday at the centre, told me of one summer where

every evening after sunset the children who were there would begin to behave erratically.

While during the day they were calm, it was as soon as the evening prayers had been

completed that they would run around frantically, annoy their parents to no end and break

things. Since then the sheikh has asked that none of the murid go into the surrounding woods

after dark.

The parallels between the two Naqshibandi sub-groupings, one from Pakistan and one

from Cyprus, might be apparent. Yet in Germany, the djinn are said to inhabit the forest

while in Britain they stay amongst the people. In Berlin, benign spirits are said to linger at the

cemetery of the Sehitlik Mosque on the boundary of Neukölln and the neighbouring district of

Tempelhof. The Haqqani presence in Berlin is multi-faceted and the “neo-Ottoman” theme is

played out in the capital city as well. The ethnographic particulars of a Neo-Ottoman group

associated with the Haqqani in Neukölln are presented in chapter 6.

6. Healers and Patients in the Local Context: Three Case-Studies

Suleyman Rifa’i

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Sheikh Suleyman’s one bedroom apartment in the heart of Neukölln does not differ in

any visible way from any other flat in the neighbourhood. On the first floor of a typical block

of apartments (usually one four story building with two or three separate wings), it is neither a

place of residence nor is it used commercially in any kind of conventional sense. There is a

constant stream of people visiting the flat. Some of them are Muslims while others are not.

Many are Kosovo Albanians, while many other Serbs and Bosnians, Turks and Germans.

Some are devoutly religious, while others do not practice any particular religion at all. Most

of the people I met who had consulted the sheikh, did indeed live a few blocks away and had

learned of him through word of mouth.

He has been in Germany since 1972, coming as a Yugoslavian Gastarbeiter.12 He is a

merchant by trade. First he worked in a department store for 8 years as a security guard. On

some days he would catch up to twenty shoplifters. Thanks to his “third eye”, he was able to

recognise any potential thieves as soon as they entered the store. Later he worked as a cable

inspector in a nearby factory until the early 1990’s. This was of course, right after re-

unification, when many workers were replaced by cheaper labour from the former German

Democratic Republic. It is clear that the years of division were better days. He made a good

amount of money. On top of that he had his patients, sometimes 300 or 400 a week. As he is

now officially unemployed, most of his time is spent attending to his clientele as well as to the

large social network connected to the tariqa. Although he does not explicitly take money for

his services, it is doubtlessly not without its financial advantages. Many people do make

donations, sometimes quite sizeable ones.

The small apartment has one large room and a smaller one which is intended as a

bedroom. The living room is the de facto waiting room for the patients. It is somewhat like a

doctor’s office except that there is no secretary and no assortment of magazines and

newspapers at the patient’s disposal. Often there is another person in the room who is either a

personal friend of the sheikh’s or one of his murid. These individuals serve as personal

assistants to the sheikh, attending to the everyday affairs of renting and running an apartment.

For instance, during one visit there was a Rifa’i murid putting together a new dresser in the

waiting room, while assuring the waiting patients that the sheikh would be with them soon.

At other times there was a friend of the sheikh’s, offering cigarettes and making sure that

people were comfortable.

12 Tito’s Yugoslavia was the last country with which the West-German government made a labour contract. No new guestworkers arrived in West Germany after 1973.

xxxi

On the wall there is a large portrait of Imam Ali and a photograph of Suleyman and his

sheikh, Haydar Murteza13. The small bedroom in which the consultations take place is no less

makeshift. There is another colourful portrait of Imam Ali, and a copy of the sheikh’s ijaza

(healing certificate), issued at Skopje. After his trip to Vancouver in the early fall of 2007,

there was also a collection of cheap souvenir stickers bearing the Canadian flag alongside the

religious iconography. During one visit, he was alone and installing cable television in order

to escape the boredom when no one was around. He was having marital problems which

meant that often he was actually sleeping at the apartment. His wife and seven children live

in the south-end of Neukölln, while his zawiya in the rural Spreewald area (ca. 100 km to the

southeast), served as his principal residence as well as a meeting centre and place of

communal dhikr for his murid. His mother, while visiting from the Kosovo for several

months, was staying there until the fall. The house in the small village of Leibsch, was then

closed down for the winter.

As I have said, much of the time he is travelling. Unfortunately, I was unable to join

him on any of his trips, although he had invited me to the Spreewald on weekends and to the

Kosovo during the month of muharram. In a funded project this would of course have been

more likely to materialise. His positions as murshid, healer, and his family obligations, meant

that he would quite literally be there at one moment and gone the next. My initial excitement

of having an individual of such multi-functional significance living at my doorstep eventually

subsided. Being in close proximity to his practice did not necessarily mean that it would be

easy to spend an extensive amount of time with him. On the other hand, I was able to meet

some of his patients by assisting them when they could not find him. Our relationship

developed quite realistically into one of neighbour and friend, while I felt that I had become a

part of the neighbourhood network centred around him.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Rifa’i tariqa, is one which is especially

well known for its knowledge of healing. While it becomes apparent in the work of Pnina

Werbner (2003) that the position of murshid in South-Asian Sufism is by extension one of

healer, the charisma of the saint in the Middle East or the Balkans is not necessarily reflective

of medicinal power. In this case, we are looking at an individual whose ijaza, even though it

is displayed in his room, legitimises only his work as a leader within the tariqa. His career as

a healer though is separate from his role as caliph for the Rifa’i in Germany and other

Western European countries. It is the result of a transcendent “mystical calling” having been

initiated through the type f spirit medianship found much more frequently in studies on

13 Masulovic (1992) provides a structural analysis of the Rifa’i centred around Haydar Murteza in Skopje.

xxxii

Siberian shamanism (Eliade 1951, Lewis 2003) or in African possession cults than in the

Muslim cultures of the Middle East or South-Eastern Europe.

It was at the age of twelve (growing up in Kosovo and Macedonia) that something

began to happen that would influence his future life on a profound level, making him an

individual who, quite simply, is different from everyone else. At puberty, when presumably

wanting to play football and meet girls, he began to have visitations from the ambiguous and

mythical figure named Khidr who in cults found across the Islamic world is “the last minute

rescuer from disaster, a dues ex machine, when all other assistance, natural and supernatural

has failed” (Walker 1973: 286). This caused a spiritual and psychological crisis which was

difficult to endure. The teenager would fall into depressions and began having a difficult time

in his formal education. It was only through the tutelage of Sheikh Haydar in Skopje that the

“green man” which was attempting to communicate with him was identified as the benevolent

helper spirit, known in the Koran as a prophet and also to Sufis as a guardian and spiritual

guide14. This phase is seen as the sheikh’s education and initiation as a healer. He says that

Khidr taught him everything during his teenage years. The involuntary vocational training

continued until he was 20 at which point he began working as a healer.

Fourty years later, he is based in Neukölln and the Spreewald and travels almost

incessantly. His job as a Rifa’i sheikh takes him to several of the larger cities in Germany

such as Cologne and Frankfurt to attend to communities there and to perform communal

dhikr. During the summer, dhikr which include the notorious self-mutilating practices of the

Rifa’i tend to take place at his zawiya and murid from other cities are more likely to make the

trip there. His travels also come as a result of his practical healing work. His card displays

separate telephone numbers for callers from Switzerland, Austria and Denmark. People call

for help from those countries (and he claims to hear their calls whether they phone the

numbers or not), and trips to Copenhagen, Vienna or Zurich are not at all infrequent. His two

week trip to Vancouver was also for the purpose of attending to a Bosnian man there who was

suffering from Diabetes. The trips are financed with the help of the tariqa and from donations

received by patients. Khidr’s instructions also tell him where to go and when. As the

benevolent spirit is able to travel anywhere and everywhere, his mobility might be seen as

reflective of medianship.

Wherever he might be at a particular time, his day begins very early. At one point he

was telling me that he had no time whatsoever because he had three or four hours of personal

dhikr meditation to do every morning before sunrise. He was busier during the cold and dark

14 See Walker (1973) on regional Khidr cults, especially in Turkey. The work of Patrick Franke (2000) gives an extensive overview on the appearance of Khidr in the Koran, where he is an assistant to the prophet Moses.

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fall and winter months when there were more patients. Seasonal unemployment and

depression means more work for a healer in Neukölln. It is not long after sunrise (which in

the winter is quite late in Berlin) that the steady stream of afflicted individuals coming to the

flat begins.

Telling Muslims about a sheikh living in my house claiming a connection to Khidr

brought mixed reactions. On the one hand, an individual who claims to be in contact with an

entity which in Islam carries angelic and prophetic attributes is immediately thought to be a

saint. One Turkish man was convinced of Suleyman’s legitimacy upon hearing that he

“knew” Khidr. Others wondered if that was possible in these “modern” times. Suleyman

himself claimed that he was one of the eight biggest saints (qutb) living on Earth at any

particular time, who could be found in any culture and who are not necessarily Muslims. The

identity of these particular saints, without whom the world would be plunged into darkness is

unknown to the great majority. He knew that several of the other qutb were living in India

while at least one was in the United States. Some of them were Muslims while others were

Christians and Hindus. There are 40 additional, but lesser qutb scattered throughout the

World while at any given time there are said to be 124,000 minor saints in every corner of the

globe.

Belonging to an elite circle of saints which transcends religious boundaries is reflected

perhaps in the sheikh’s personal conviction to treat anyone, regardless of faith. He would tell

me again and again that there were actually no religions at all, and that all the saints were

devoted to the same God. While as a Muslim he is convinced of the Shiite persuasion in

terms of political and historical debate, there too he would emphasize that there really was no

difference. The surprising diversity of people who seek his help in an equally diverse set of

problems, might also then be reflective of a particularly inter-religious attitude, which is

undoubtedly also shaped by the tariqa which he represents.

In any case, the sheikh does not accredit his abilities to himself. This might be

indicative as to why he does not take any explicit monetary payment of any kind. His actions

are attributed to Khidr and to God. A typical consultation involves a preliminary assessment

where the patient is asked his or her date of birth and the name and birthday of his or her

mother. The sheikh then recites certain koranic formulas on his prayer beads (tesbih). At this

point, he is “calling on” Khidr with the concern of the individual at hand. Diagnosis of a

health issue or insight into a practical concern (such as marital problems) then follows. The

procedure usually does not take more than a few minutes. A particular therapy is then

prescribed if necessary, with detailed and concise instructions on how to administer what

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usually takes on the form of a Koran/water treatment. In most cases, the piece of paper must

be disposed of in a clean, running body of water after the individual ritual has been

completed. We shall see below that this final stage in the ritual holds intense meaning.

The types of ailments and problems brought to the sheikh are perhaps as varied as the

cultural and religious backgrounds of the people themselves. There are of course, individuals

plagued by djinn. In such cases the preferred avenue is to have Suleyman go to the homes of

the afflicted. One afternoon in the fall, a Pakistani woman and a Greek woman (orthodox

Christian, he pointed out) came to him together. They were cursing and screaming loudly,

acting rudely and poorly tempered. It didn’t take much for him to get the djinn out of the

women and they quickly regained their composure, becoming “normal” again.

Such episodes inevitably arouse the suspicion of the neighbours and in the past had

caused problems with the landlord. The fellow tenants are however, much more concerned

with the techno DJ two floors above, who practices his trade at intense volumes with the

windows open for hours on end. It is worth adding that for Sheikh Suleyman, the djinn travel

from place to place, so they do not change their forms in the local context. In this

interpretation, they are imported concepts and the spirits do not differ from their respective

points of origin.

Most consultations are decisively less dramatic than the episode mentioned above,

although the everyday dramas that patients experience in their lives should not be

underemphasised in any way. Most of the time, people are going through an array of

problems in their personal lives which seem to be never-ending. The father of one Turkish

family decided to consult the sheikh when for months and months on end, his wife, his son,

and he himself had been “going crazy”. The eight year old boy had been diagnosed with

Attention Deficit Disorder and his progress at school was poor. He was hyper-active and

disobedient. The entire family began to fight constantly. Finally, the father, having heard of

Sheikh Suleyman through word of mouth, decided to try this avenue. When he arrived at the

apartment, he realised that the healer was a Shiite (judging from the images of Imam Ali) but,

while it did arouse curiosity, it did not turn out to be an issue.

Frustration in one’s love-life is another reason to visit the sheikh. After having called

upon Khidr, he is able to make a clear and concise statement as to whether the individual in

question is good for the patient or not. Twice I was there when he told a patient that they

should forget about the respective objects of their desires (this occurred without him hearing

any major details about the relationships). A photograph of the person in question (who

would likely be absent from the session) is a helpful tool in making such a synopsis. In both

xxxv

cases, the difficult relationships which had plagued the individuals for many months came to

resolution quite quickly after the consultations.

Maria and her granddaughter

Maria has been in Germany for a good 30 years, coming as a Gastarbeiter from Serbia

in the days when simple work was plentiful and migration meant the promise of a better life.

She worked as a cleaning lady for the greater portion of the earlier years. Some forty years

later, she is struggling with unemployment and has been abandoned by her husband, who has

apparently returned to Serbia. Her granddaughter, Anna, has a six year old son and is a single

mother, living off the 360 Euros a months from the Hartz 4 social welfare programme and an

additional 200 Euros in child-support money.

Maria has known Suleyman for a good 15 years. She refers to him simply as

Suleyman and she did not give him any other kind of title. Both she and her granddaughter go

to him when they have difficulties of various kinds. They told me of undergoing Koran/water

therapy during traumatic episodes. They also consult him when they are having bureaucratic

difficulties in the constant struggle to survive in one of Germany’s poorest, most crowded,

underemployed and difficult neighbourhoods. Living on social assistance means of course,

constant trips to the Arbeitsamt (employment office), Sozialamt (social welfare office), and

for non-citizens or people with permanent residence statues, to the Ausländerbehörde

(foreigners office). Such visits can be frustrating and counter-productive. Even in Neukölln,

where immigrants make up a good percentage of the population one encounters racism, and

German bureaucracy (especially in Berlin) is rather infamous for its stubborn and inflexible

officials. For Maria, whose mastery of the German language is not particularly good, a trip to

the employment office is an intimidating affair. It is therefore preceded by a consultation

with Suleyman. He writes a taweez which she or her granddaughters take with them to such

bureaucratic endeavours. That way the visit is successful every time. Failed relationships are

another reason to consult with the sheikh. They told me of one sided love affairs where the

man eventually developed feelings for the admiring woman after she had put prescribed

potions into the his drinks once or twice a day, while she herself performed certain tasks

suggested by the sheikh. Interestingly enough though, both women were single and were

looking for new partners, which they hoped the sheikh could help them with.

They claimed to know Suleyman very well and emphasised his strength and abilities.

What is interesting here is that they are Orthodox Christians from Serbia and consult with a

xxxvi

Muslim healer from the Kosovo. The older woman emphasised that there really was no

difference between Serbs and Kosovars, Christians and Muslims. Incidentally, one reason she

felt comfortable with the sheikh and was confident in communicating with him was that she

was able to speak in her own language. Boundaries which might exist at home are of less

relevance here thanks in part to the use of Serbo-Croatian as a lingua franca. Maria did not

have any knowledge of healers before she came to Germany. She grew up in Tito’s relatively

well-functioning Yugoslavia, came to Berlin during her twenties and was successful here at

first. It has only been since the early 1990’s (the advent of massive unemployment, especially

for the former guest workers), that she has been in need of the kind of assistance which the

sheikh offers. She, like most people, learnt of Suleyman through word of mouth and claims to

know him well. Yet she does not have a name for the kind of person he is, or the particular

kind of assistance which he provides. He is simply someone who helps under adverse

circumstances. As the sheikh would point again and again, it is only when people have

problems that they will try anything.

Latifa

Latifa, in her mid twenties, and of German background actually came into contact with

Sheikh Suleyman when she had expressed interest to friend in becoming a Muslim. The

friend, knowing the sheikh, brought her to him on the same afternoon. When Suleyman saw

Latifa, he immediately sensed that she was uneasy. He told her that her life was chaos and

that nothing was going right in her relationships and in her financial and educational careers.

She was quite astonished at the accuracy of his descriptive presumptions. There had been an

array of failed relationships with Turkish, Arab, and men of Balkan origin. She had come to

Berlin from Cologne because of one of her boyfriends but she was also escaping a difficult

childhood and family conflicts. According to Suleyman’s analysis, it was one of these men

who had cursed her. Mysterious marks that resembled bruises had been appearing on her

body for several years. Never having finished high-school, she was constantly in financial

difficulties and at the time of her first consultation was in the middle of a difficult, see-sawing

relationship with an Albanian boxer. Shortly before the initial session, she had also given up

on an attempt to attain her Abitur as she felt that her teachers and fellow students were

mobbing her.

She was prescribed a Koran-water therapy which she was to apply for a period of

seven days and seven nights. The instructions were to dispose of the piece of paper with

xxxvii

surah written on it into a clean lake or river after the completion of the ritual. A second

therapy followed in which an incident occurred that ultimately steered her in the direction of

taking the step in becoming a Muslim. One night she unintentionally entered the bathroom

with the paper. Suddenly she felt a dark and threatening presence in the room with her. She

screamed “Allah”, lay down on her couch and then called Suleyman on his cellular phone.

Although she was not a Muslim, a ritual which at first seemed superstitious attained a greater

aura of realness.

In the course of the following months, a relationship developed that seemed to go well

beyond the category of patient and healer. At first, it appeared that the healer was courting

her. This was extremely bizarre although she did say that she would immediately marry him

if he weren’t almost 40 years older than her. He invited her for dinner, bought her roses, told

her that he loved her and invited her on vacation with him. Later she believed that he was

merely demonstrating courtship to assist her in eventually identifying sound characteristics in

the search for a partner.

Later on, she again found herself in a difficult relationship. This time the man quickly

moved into her apartment from Cologne but soon began to threaten her. She consulted with

the sheikh another time as a result. He advised her to try to get rid of him, to return to school

and to “do her thing”. A few nights later, the domestic situation became acute and she

realised she would have to leave her flat after her boyfriend had become violent. Needing a

ride to transport her cat, she called Suleyman as there was no other person available with a

car. He was attending to guests from out of town at the bus terminal near her place so he

picked her up within a short time and brought her and the cat to a friend’s house.

The results of the sessions were positive in all aspects. The mysterious bruises which

had baffled her doctors for several years disappeared after the first treatment. The

troublesome relationship with the boxer was quite soon resolved. For two years he had come

to her when he wanted and had left him alone when she needed him. He would disappear for

weeks or months on end, only to return to her and then leave again. f

Ja ich hab ihn immer für mein Seelengefährten gehalten, aber das hat sich dann wohl als das Gegenteil entpuppt. Genau wie der Scheich mir auch gesagt hat: Das ich die Finger von ihm lassen soll, das er nicht gut für mich ist. Er war definitiv nicht gut für mich. Ja, die Klarheit, die Erkenntnis, dass dieser Man gar nicht ist was er ist, oder all das was er vorgibt, nur zu seinen Nutzen ist. Es hat sich genau halt rauskristallisiert, dass er keine Absichten (...) also dass er nicht diesen Kontakt zu mir hält, um irgendwelche ernsten Beziehungen oder Gefühle für mich zu hegen egal in welcher Hinsicht, sondern dass es rein aus Nutzen und Macht ist und Ego und Gelegenheit (...) und günstig (...) vielleicht war auch mal Liebe, aber jedenfalls hat es sich ins Gegenteil verkehrt.

xxxviii

The most significant outcome of the therapies is a newfound ability to draw

boundaries in dealing with an incessant string of personal difficulties which have been

hindering personal success on every level:

Mittlerweile merk ich halt, dass diese Medizin von Scheikh Suleyman Sadiqu mir geholfen hat, meine Grenze zu ziehen. Also ich hab eine Energie in mir verspürt, dass ich nicht mehr so touchbar bin (..) ja dass ist wie ein Energiefeld. Man ist so gesichert. Man strahlt irgendwas aus. Man hat eine andere Energie irgendwie bekommen. Ich kann es nicht genau beschreiben.

At one of their meetings, the sheikh had asked her to express two wishes. Without

having to think it over, her first response was for clarity. Months later, this seems to have

come to fruition. The strange relationship comes to an end and with the practical help of the

sheikh and she is able to take concrete action in a new, similar situation.

Latifa had never been diagnosed with any form of mental illness. A persistence of

adverse conditions from childhood onwards had ultimately led to a lack of confidence and

physical symptoms of depression. Her journey towards clarity was also led by her

psychologist with whom for three years she had undergone intensive sessions of behavioural

therapy. The parallels to the koranic treatment and her subsequent friendship with the sheikh

are such that both healers had given her the same advice: to “do her thing”, to follow through

on her goals and intentions. This meant returning to school and completing her Abitur in

order to increase her chances of upward social mobility. It also meant staying in Berlin. She

had often contemplated returning to Cologne as the relationship that had pulled her to the

capital city had failed.

If the journey with the sheikh resembles in some form, the experience with the

psychologist, then this demonstrates an interesting parallel between what would seem to be

two drastically different systems of healing. One is based on “modern” bio-medical and

psychiatric paradigms while the other, seemingly superstitious and bizarre to the outside

observer, is rooted in koranic medicine and possibly in spirit possession. The outcome of

both treatments however, is remarkably similar. Both healers, although coming from

radically different backgrounds, want her to integrate and become a more active member of

contemporary and modern society. Moreover, the help that the sheikh offers seems hardly to

be otherworldly at all. He is there to perform the rather mundane task of transporting her and

her cat to safety. As with Maria, he is as much a social figure as anything else.

The prescribed ritual seems at first to be illogical and without rational basis. Running

water through a piece of paper that has Koran written on it and then washing oneself with that

water, is not something that even most Muslims would be accustomed to. The experience in

the bathroom however, renders it real and gives an aura of factuality to the whole journey and

xxxix

its accompanying belief system. The final stage of the ritual, where the piece of paper is

disposed of in a clean body of water, is deeply embued with meaning: x

Ja, die Medizin zu entsorgen war ein mächtiges Erlebnis, ja? Ich bin zu einem Ort, ich glaub das ist der Grunewald, gefahren (...) und dieser Ort, das ist ein Naturschutzgebiet am Wasser, wo zig weiße Schwäne und ganz viele verschiedene Vögel hinkommen und (...) ja, ich hab dieses Blatt mit der Koransure, also diese Medizin ins Wasser dort geworfen und ich bin mit den letzten Bus hingefahren, und auch mit dem letzten Bus wieder zurück, und bis der Bus kam, um zurück zu fahren (...) ist auch ein ziemlich dunkler Waldweg und keine Laternen und (...) also eine Bushaltestelle ohne Haus, ohne alles, ohne Bank nur so ein Schild für die Haltestelle, ja? Und ich hatte so ne Paranoia gehabt, dass irgendwie (...) es war so ne typische Szene wie aus dem Horrorfilm, ja, ein einsames Mädchen irgendwo im Wald und es fährt so ein Ranchrover, weißt Du so ein großer Kastenwagen vorbei und so eine dunkle Gestalt drinne, es war unheimlich. Ich bin die ganze Zeit hin und her gelaufen, „La Illah ha Illah la, Mohammad ar Rasul Allah“. Die ganze Zeit. Ich weiß nicht wie oft ich es gesagt habe. Bestimmt hundert Mal. Das kann man sehr oft in 20, 30 Minuten sagen, ja? Bis ein Bus kam. Und danach hab ich Frieden gespürt. Es war friedlich.

She became a Muslim six months later, speaking her shahada quite spontaneously on

the street one day with two friends as witnesses. This contributes to her newfound ability in

drawing boundaries, refusing for example, demands for sexual relationships outside the

framework of shariah.

Ottomans, Prussians and Marginal Healing:“Die Fezhane zu Preussen“ and Ali Aziz

If there is anything in contemporary Berlin that either is a possession cult in the classic

anthropological sense, resembles one, or has the potential to become one, then it is found in a

small shop in the heart of Neukölln. It could also be that my informants there were simply

“leading me on”, sensing my curiousness. Perhaps they were sensationalising, wanting to

offer me material that was not really there or they were trying to paint a “spiritualised” picture

of a part of town that is much better known for its social malaise and criminality than for its

magicians. Whatever the case may be, the following section represents a great deal of

imagery, is an account once again of affliction and social immobility and is intricately linked

to a specific local history in which the complex of saint, djinn, and human, works to construct

a version of the past and present which is both counter-hegemonic and subversive.

xl

It is a shop that is as mysterious as the subject matter itself. Like the trans-national

healer moving from city to city and country to country, the shop moved too, migrating from

street to street. It changed its location more than once. Eventually a business space was

found near the Sehitlik Mosque. This was desirable because of the proximity to Ali Aziz

Efendi. It was in this setting that I was told of the mysterious, unseen dhikr that take place at

the tomb of the aforementioned saint. I was told that if I were to a come to a dead-end in my

research, then it would be possible to make a telephone call to a secret number. The answeres

to simple, concise, yes or no questions could be found amongst the entourage of Sheikh

Nazim in Cyprus.

The shop has no name displayed on the outside. Its official name is “Fezhane zu

Preussen: Kaiserliche Nähstube”. For most people, it is simply an army surplus store. Most

of the customers are punk-rock oriented youths, looking for cheap winter coats and military

pants. It is the kind of shop which can be found in any other large, European city. Yet there

are unseen worlds which seem to meet and there is an ideology being produced inside which

only a select few become acquainted with. This takes place in the back room where the

owner is often sewing the defunct and illegal (in Turkey) Ottoman style fez.15

The fez here is a cultural symbol. Initially, the owner (Yunus Efendi) told me that he

wanted to distribute as many hats amongst the population as possible in order to help restore

the Ottoman legacy. He is in one way, a walking relic of the past. He is wearing his own fez

always, and his moustache extends far beyond his upper lip and curls around his cheeks. He

is “Neo-Ottoman”, trying to revive the spirit of the empire which dominated large parts of the

Middle East, Anatolia, North Africa and South-Eastern Europe for more than 500 years.

The shop is connected to a local sheikh (Eshref Baba) living a few streets away who

was initially given the task of setting up a community in Berlin to preserve Ottoman folklore

and customs by Sheikh Nazim of the Naqshibandi-Haqqani Order, based in Cyprus.16 A

group resembling a tariqa eventually sprung out of what was supposed to be nothing more

than a cultural organisation and its leader began to act as a . This led other Berlin Haqqanis to

discredit the group and to subsequently distance themselves from its sheikh, who had not

received any ijaza to teach Sufism. Eventually, even Sheikh Nazim refused to accept

monetary tribute from the group. The Neukölln Neo-Ottoman association is composed of

about 40 members, some of whom are esoteric new-age types of seekers working with quartz 15 The fez, a cylindrical red felt hat was standard headware in the Ottoman Empire. It was outlawed under Atatürk’s reforms of 1925 (Pratt-Ewing 2003).16 See Schleßman (2003) for detailed information on the Naqshibandi-Haqqani Order and its prevalence amongst converts in Berlin and Germany. I was told that its leader, Sheikh Nazim, was actively working for the restoration of the Muslim Caliphate. He was expelled from Turkey for this reason and lives in the Turkish-speaking part of Cyprus.

xli

crystals and geomancy, while others are Turkish immigrants, enwrapped in Anatolian “folk”

religion. They may come to the Eshref Baba in order to gain knowledge of the djinn. The

group openly advocates the introduction of shariah in the way that it was applied in the

Ottoman Empire. One informant, who distanced himself from the group and was loyal to

Sheikh Nazim, said that they were practicing polygamy. Although ostensibly an imported

cult, such practices are forbidden in Turkey and generally frowned upon even in non-Diyanet

circles.

The shopkeeper is loyal to both sheikhs and sharply criticises anyone who does not

share the group’s nostalgic sentiments towards the former Ottoman Caliphate. In fact, when I

requested that we call the telephone number of the djinn dhikr group, I instead received a

lengthier discourse on the supremacy of Ottoman civilisation and its connection to Prussia.

Anyone who believed the Ottomans to be a thing of the past was not worthy of being of being

called a true Muslim. The association was in contact with the descendants of the last sultans,

who were said to be scattered around Europe and were largely living in poverty. That

meeting ended with two military marches, one Ottoman and one Prussian.

The Fezhane zu Preussen serves also as a meeting place and special guests are brought

coffee, strong Turkish cay, and sometimes food brought by the owner’s wife. Especially after

Friday prayers, the shop is transformed into a social gathering. Stories of djinn and Sheikh

Nazim are told while gossip circulates. The “mad hatter” of Neukölln, as I began to think of

the owner, is also a healer in the most marginal sense. He does not consider himself to be one

and does not even claim to have any overt knowledge of such things. Yet on one of these

Friday afternoons, a Christian Nigerian man came into the shop who, amongst all the people I

have met in the course of my research, strikes my mind as having been the most genuinely

“possessed”.

Malignant spirits had been plaguing him since childhood, growing up in south-eastern

Nigeria. Having come to Germany illegally, he believed the djinn had misled him into

thinking that Europe offered a better life. In Germany, he was the victim of a stabbing attack,

had been in relationships with women that had destroyed him emotionally and while living on

social assistance, had accrued an immense debt. His apartment had been cut off of electricity

and heating because of unpaid bills. Yet even during summer heat waves, he would return

home to a freezing apartment. On hot days, he would feel cold while being outside and going

back to his house was no relief. The source of these problems, including the inexplicably cold

flat, could only have been rooted in the jealousy of an uncle back home. He had seen a

xlii

psychiatrist who was unable to make any kind of diagnosis. He laughed at the fact that her

only advice was to think positively.

Although he was not a Muslim, a taweez (koranic amulet) was quickly made which he

put in his shirt pocket. The shopkeeper warned him that the djinn would easily be able to

steal it and make things much worse if he were to keep it there. The “healer” quickly sewed a

leather case and necklace for the piece of paper so that the man could securely wear it around

his neck. He was to wear the taweez for 40 days and nights. If his problems had not receded

by then, he was to return to the shop for further treatment. He was also to pray for the

Christian prophets and saints (e.g., St. Peter). Finally, he was instructed to make

supplications to the saints of the neighbourhood.

The man’s composure improved considerably by the end of the sitting. He was

suddenly able to formulate much more coherent sentences and left the place calm and relaxed.

This was however, only the beginning of a longer relationship with the Yunus Efendi. A few

weeks later, the individual had become a Muslim and had taken a “400 Euro job” at the shop.

His tasks included serving customers when the owner was busy in the sewing room or

attending to guests. He served food and coffee to visitors and ran errands. He referred to the

Yunus Efendi as “master”. The shop-keeper was simultaneously helping him to sort out

bureaucratic affairs and wanted to assist him in paying off his debts. He was also trying his

best in getting the man (Samuel) to begin practicing Islam. The shop-keeper became his

employer, guide and healer. The “patient” however, could not stop drinking alcohol and did

not find it necessary to pray five times a day. Yunus Efendi was quite distraught at Samuel’s

apparent lack of commitment in following shariah. By the fall, the djinn seemed to have once

again gotten the better of him. He was now in prison, having been detained for attempted

murder after an incident at a neighbourhood pub. The owner of the shop was frustrated about

this unfortunate turn of events, attributing the regression to the patient’s unwillingness to

pray, fast and avoid alcohol. There was only so much he could do though, and in the end, he

told me, it was each person’s own responsibility to live up to religious obligations.

Samuel was replaced by a German teenager who was displaying classic symptoms of

early onset schizophrenia. He had been hearing voices, had seen intense lights while

swimming in the sea on holidays in Croatia, had paranoiac symptoms and was having

conversations with people who were not there. He had crossed paths with the shop owner on

Hermannstraße., the main artery of the neighbourhood. The boy was on the threshold, and

Yunus could not understand the reason why the afflicted were constantly being sent to him.

He was collecting Hartz 4, lived alone, and had been abandoned by his father. His only friend

xliii

had been his father’s stepdaughter from childhood on, but she too had begun to ignore him

since the onset of illness. The first task of the shopkeeper was to try and explain to the

teenager that he was not “crazy”. From the emic perspective, seeing colours, hearing voices,

and being observed are not necessarily indicative of mental illness, but could signify a

connection to the spirit world. The teenager was also given a 400 Euro job and a similar

relationship to the one described above, appeared to be developing.

The intrigue of this particular setting was, admittedly part of the reason why I returned

to the Fezhane time and time again. I was somewhat naively intent perhaps to find a classical

kind of spirit possession cult in a not-so classical situation. With more time and focus on the

shop, its “patients”, and the group of Sufi cum cultural activists associated with it, the

possibility might be there to define more precisely just what is happening inside of the

network. If there are real notions of possession occurring here and the relevant social actors

could be seen to have very concrete notions of djinn that are organised into ethnic groups etc.,

then it is within the realm of possibility that we have, for the first time, a cult similar to the

kind found in Africa. Whatever the case may be, I believe that what I was able to observe

serves as valuable material in that it is able to illustrate a great deal of the theories on

possession like Boddy (1994), Giles (1999) and Crapanzano’s (1980) saint-djinn-human

complex.

The association is marginal in the sense that it is juxtaposed between various Islamic

fields, even breaking off from its Naqshibandi Sufi source. The leader is considered to be a

false sheikh and one naqshbandi murid even went as far as to say that they had developed a

Mafioso-like structure. They were apparently collecting tribute from local businessmen and

the sheikh was always accompanied by bodyguards. While my own observations did not

confirm anything of the sort, the accusations demonstrate perhaps the way that possession

cults are marginalised both from outside and from within. In this case, we are dealing with

historical and cultural paradigms which are overtly incompatible with contemporary German

society.

The connection to both Prussia and the Ottoman Empire is central here. German

converts, writers such as Abdallah (1981), and groups such as the one here, have often

fostered the connection between former Kaisers and Sultans in order perhaps to overcome

current discourses on parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften) and the apparent rift between

Islam and the West.17 The tomb of Ali Aziz Efendi, not more than 500 metres away from

Fezhane zu Preussen, is a place where such connections are ritualised and given an aura of

17 See for example, Schleßman (2003).

xliv

facticity amongst a small group of followers. What needs to be said about Ali Aziz is that he

was (and still is, in the emic Sufi perspective), a diplomat who represented the Ottomans at

the Prussian court in the late eighteenth century. When he died suddenly in 1798, King

Friedrich Wilhelm the Third assured that he would be the first Muslim to be buried according

to Islamic ritual in Berlin:

Aus der langen Reihe der türkischen Gesandten und Botschafter am Berliner Hofe sei Ali Aziz Effendi hervorgehoben. Als der Diplomat am 29. Oktober 1798 starb, erwarb König Friedrich Wilhelm der Dritte vom Grafen Podewils ein Gelände in der Hasenheide (heute Columbiadamm), das als Gräberfeld dienen sollte. Die Überführung der Leiche von Aziz Effendi wurde nachts vorgenommen. Bei Fackelbeleuchtung wurde der einfache grüne Sarg von der Gesandschaft durch die Friedrichstraße in der Hasenheide getragen, wobei dei türkische Dienerschaft kleine Goldmünzen unter die spalierbildende Bevölkerung warf (Abdallah 1981: 17).

A small prayer room was later built on the site of the cemetery. It was administered

by the Suleymancilar movement until Diyanet built the large and impressive Ottoman style

mosque standing there today. A minaret like structure commemorating Ali Aziz was donated

by the sultan in 1866, which stands in the courtyard of the Sehitlik Mosque. It is not

completely clear just where the remains of Ali Aziz Efendi lie, but it is presumed to be under

this column. A historical monument, jointly funded by the Turkish state and the Berlin

senate, was erected in the city (not near the mosque) in 1988. There is also an historical

plaque at the entrance to the courtyard in which the tomb lies. The mosque complex has even

become somewhat of a tourist attraction since its completion. People on Sunday afternoon

walks through the Hasenheide, the large park across from the mosque where Ali Aziz’s

remains were originally buried, often stop by to see the building and the Islamic cemetery

surrounding it.

Apart from being a diplomat, Ali Aziz is also a literary figure. His work is neither

reality nor fiction. They are journeys in which unseen worlds meet with the here and now:

djinn, demons and angels mingle and interface with human societies18. The barrier between

two worlds, parallel societies in the anthropological sense, is broken down and brought face to

face with the reader. His Muhayallat (“Imaginings”), although carrying “folk religious”

elements, is ironically enough considered as one of the classics in the modernisation of

Ottoman literature, where traditional Anatolian poetry is transformed into prose form (Tietze

1948). His works are fairy tales, but for Sufis, his distinct knowledge of, and contact to the

unseen is proven through them. His works in one sense demonstrate karamat in themselves,

while the diplomat and writer are sanctified through what one informant interprets as a

mystical but ultimately real relationship with the city:

18 See Tietze (1948) for a literary discussion on Ali Aziz’s works. See also Götze (2001), for a historical perspective.

xlv

Ali Aziz Efendi is like the patron saint of our neighbourhood and of all Berlin. Sheikh Abdallah said that there is no doubt. Through his intercession, the people of West Berlin were saved from hunger after World War 2. It is no coincidence that just near the mosque, there is the Tempelhof Airport. What happened there? That airport was built in the middle of the city by the Nazis. It has never really been used as a real airport. But what happened there?!!?- The Luftbrücke took place there. The Americans brought us our food. But it was not the Americans it was Allah. It’s only used by businessmen today, and you know if there is one thing Berlin needs it is investment. It is a poor city. Now across from the mosque they are building a Hindu Temple. Mashallah. Even other religions are allowed to be near him. The mosque, it’s like a poem. Maybe Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the third was a friend of Allah too. We don’t know that. Allah knows that. But to me it is proven that Ali Aziz Efendi, may Allah sanctify his secret, is a great man of Allah. He has saved this city. And after the senate built a monument with the Turkish state for him, then just a short time later the wall came down. That wall was a symbol of hatred and oppression, totalitarianism ( ...). It caused pain for our souls. We could not even go to the countryside as West Berliners. We couldn’t even go on trips to the Spreewald or the Havelland like we do today. Now in the lands of the former GDR there are tekkes of real sheikhs. We couldn’t go there before. The wall came down just after the city built that monument.

The informant (Rashid) visits and supplicates regularly at the tomb. He is also one of

the special guests at the Fezhane zu Preussen, dropping by there after returning from the

mosque and its courtyard. As his Rifa’i sheikh is based in Turkey, he is without a fixed

religious community in Berlin. In the spring of 2007, he was suffering from kidney stones

and was waiting to see if his sheikh would pass through Berlin and remove them by hand.

Part of his depression is based on the physical separation to his sheikh. The void is filled by

Sheikh Abdallah (in the Lausitz) and other local communities such as the Neo-Ottomans. The

discourse above shows that for some, the story of Ali Aziz is inextricably linked and

interpreted through historical events and the ties between Prussia and the former caliphate.

Karamat is ascribed not through the saint’s actions while being alive, but through historical

events which are believed to be a divine pay-back for the Kaiser’s goodwill in having assured

the mystic diplomat and writer an Islamic burial. Another Sufi informant living outside of

Berlin, stopped at Ali Aziz’s tomb whenever passing through the area. He told me that the

historic event was in his mind, an invitation from the Prussians for Islam to root itself in

Germany, while reciprocal acceptance on the side of the Ottomans (Ali Aziz’s servants

handing out gold coins to the population) was a sign that the future would bring millions of

Muslims to settle here. From these perspectives, as well as Abdallah’s (1981), it was the

beginning of the Islamisation of Germany, which began to be realised much later when the

immigrants arrived in the second half of the twentieth century.

The mysterious djinn dhikr rituals which are said to take place at the tomb, and the

pilgrimage type of visits by people such as Rashid are indications of the ways in which an

alternative version of Muslim history in Germany might be played out in performative ritual.

The Prussian/Ottoman connection is then lived out in daily life in that people such as the

owner of Fezhane zu Preussen truly begins to dress, look like, speak, and to some extent, act

like an Ottoman. When I enquired once again about the djinn dhikr to another informant who

xlvi

spent time at the shop, I was told that one could attend only by invitation from the spirits

themselves and that ultimately one needed permission from Allah to “see it”. Although he

knew about it, he had not received any such invitation and he did not particularly wish for

one. One would go insane if one were to dare go uninvited. I can only speculate that with

further research, a parallel society in which Muslim spirits loyal to the Ottoman Sultan and

Christian djinn who swear allegiance to the old Prussian order might be brought to the

surface. I did hear of one Muslim spirit who lived near the tomb who was said to have been

alive for so long that he had mingled with the prophet during his life. Thereby, the djinn was

considered to be sahaba (companion of the prophet) and was seen as having extraordinary

healing powers.

The ritual visits to Ali Aziz Efendi help Rashid through his depressions but they are

also seen as a responsibility in maintaining the health of society at large. If no one pays

attention to the saint who intercedes on the city’s behalf, the djinn become angry and the

blessing the people have received through the saints intercession may be replaced by

affliction. The troubles of Berlin, once divided through the infamous wall that cut the city

into two ideological sectors, are interpreted as a test to its inhabitants. But the secular

commemoration of Ali Aziz by the local Berlin and Turkish governments is seen as having

been influential in bringing down the wall. There is a parallel society at play here that clearly

mirrors that of human society, and may bring certain people to construct alternative versions

of local and national history, concerning not only Muslim life and identity, but of society in

general.

The result is a cultural text in which humans, spirits and saints are actors. The

dominant hegemony that the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia no longer exist is

ritually contested. In one sense, we have an example of a deprivation cult in that the

“patients” involved, whether an Igbo man afflicted by evil djinn or an abandoned German

teenager are without doubt amongst those who have little means of attaining upward social

mobility. Somehow they are brought to the Fezhane. Hopes of upward social mobility and

freedom from affliction are bestowed by the writing of amulets, while on the corporal level it

is through the possibility of apprenticeship. The veneration of Ali Aziz and the support that

some of the individuals seek from the cultural, historic, and saintly figure is also

demonstrative of the deprived Prekariat in aspiring towards transformative change in which a

cycle of unemployment and underemployment is overcome. With the alleged support of the

saint, Rashid escapes a long period of collecting Hartz 4, after having quit his studies in

xlvii

political science and Islamic Studies. He becomes self-employed and does a number of jobs

to scrape up a living.

The veneration of Ali Aziz is expressed through a simple ritual which can be

integrated into a Sunday afternoon walk. My informants would recite certain surah from the

Koran at the tomb and engage in longer, free-flowing dua after having performed one of the

prescribed prayers in congregation inside the mosque. Sometimes they would bring gifts for

Ali Aziz. On the first Sunday of Advent in 2007, a traditional German candle and reef was

placed near the tomb. Rashid would also venture to the cemetery at night, when the gates of

the cemetery are closed but there are no other people who normally spend time at the mosque.

The attitude of Diyanet towards Ali Aziz seems ambivalent. On the one hand, the tomb is

housed in the courtyard of the mosque and there is an historical plaque at the entrance. Yet it

was impossible to receive any information about the saint from the mosque administration.

No one even knows where exactly his remains are. Supplicating at the tomb is regarded with

suspicion and is considered to be superstitious or shirk. The local cult is tolerated and upheld

on the secular level but there are only a few who consider Ali Aziz to be a saint. While the

mosque produces touristic postcards for the public on which the obelisk is centred, most

worshippers are not conscious of the significance it holds for some. Hence ritual supplication

at the tomb might also be seen as undermining of Turkish state/secular ideology. One could

certainly receive information at the mosque on the founder of the secular Turkish republic,

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His portrait is ever-present in the teahouse of the mosque but at the

Fezhane zu Preussen, this very fact is ridiculed.

I later discovered that the army surplus store, also serves as the defacto Ottoman

embassy for the provisional government of the Second German Republic. The “Ottoman

ambassador” meets with the self-proclaimed Reichskanzler in much the same way that the

current Turkish ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany would meet with Angela

Merkel. “Talks” are held for approximately one hour. The ambassador brings with him the

greetings and news of Sheikh Nazim, while the Reichskanzler briefs the “ambassador” on

legal proceedings challenging the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and

attempts to come into contact with Washington.19

Djinn, mental illness and the media: The case of Enes Hodja

19 See www.der-reichskanzler.de, www.deutsches-reich.com, www.2tes-deutsches-reich.org.

xlviii

The case study I wish to present next involves a Turkish healer who has recently

attracted media attention amongst Germany’s most prominent networks. A documentary on

the national television channel 1 (ARD) aired during prime time in July of 2007, and a radio

programme on the WDR also featured Enes Hodja and one of his patients. I had heard of

Enes Hodja before seeing the broadcast during the summer. When I was asking around the

neighbourhood for healers and potential informants, one person mentioned having gone to a

djinn hodja, when a friend of his had been having severe marital problems. The friend, who

was not at all religious had expressed doubts as to the validity of such a consultation but the

healer stated that religious orientation had little relevance and that treatment could be

effective regardless of one’s faith in the particular medicine. The two men visited the djinn

hodja and were told to recite a certain surah one thousand times during the sitting. When the

recitations had finished, it was my informant, who theoretically had nothing to do with his

friend’s afflictions who was exhausted and bewildered. The other man, not having the same

conviction perhaps in the words that had been recited, calmly returned home. The domestic

situation improved and the family was said to have resumed their lives without undergoing

any kind of conversion from their previous atheist standpoint.

It was through the airing of the documentary on channel 1 that I actually came into

contact with the now most famous djinn hodja of the city. This particular setting is at

Kreuzberg and Neukölln’s popular outdoor market, known also as the Turkish bazaar.

According to the documentary, this is the centre of Kreuzberg’s Parallelgesellschaft

(although paradoxically perhaps, the market is actually located in Neukölln). It has always

been my impression that this bazaar is actually much more of a nexus and point of interface

between various sub-cultures in a highly urban context. Yet there is a parallel society which

is performed here and it has been, until now at least, hidden from the dominant gaze. The

documentary showed not only the inside of the healer’s apartment on the same street as the

market, but also the exact location of the textile stand which he has run since having come to

Germany. It was in this way that I sought out the additional perspective from a controversial

healer who has in a way, become not so marginal through media and local fame amongst

Turkish immigrants.

The documentary Ein Dämon namens Ahmet chronicles the journey of one patient

(Hasan), his illness of many years, and essentially posits him into a kind of medical vacuum.

A variety of medical systems has apparently failed him. He spends years searching for the

appropriate cure to an illness which was unidentifiable to a plethora of doctors and specialists.

xlix

The journey into Hasan’s life portrayed in the documentary strikes me as an almost

typical etic account of failed lives in the context of migration. The son of some of the original

guest workers, he was fostered by his grandparents in Turkey until his parents brought him to

Berlin at the age of nine. His education was, as with many second and third generation

migrant teens, minimal. On television at least, his command of German was not what one

would consider to be outstanding. At the age of nineteen, his parents travelled to the

Anatolian village world to seek out a bride. Things went well at first. The couple had three

children, but then things started going to change. It all started with some mysterious throat

and ear problems of which the doctors could make no diagnosis. Hasan began to fall into

intense depressions, because in his words: “ich wollte eine Krankheit haben”. He went from

doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist seeking to no avail a diagnosis. The camera shows a

cabinet full of different medicines in his home. None of them had much effect. As his

depressions worsened, he was constantly on sick leave, could not work, and the entire family

was hitting a dead end. Much of the next years were spent on the couch in front of the

television. Only his wife was able to motivate him at all to leave the house and continue on

the quest for diagnosis and treatment.

Finally a Turkish psychologist who is interviewed on the programme, recommends

him to the djinn hodja of Kreuzberg. Although the first doctor is an unswayable atheist, he

transfers Hasan to the healer in order to “restore hope2. As a psychologist he knows that in

order to treat the patient successfully, new interpretations must be offered in order to motivate

change. To the psychologist, the djinn are indicative of angst, psychosis and depression.

Hence Hasan’s illness must be rooted in poverty and a general lack of goals and direction.

Youth gangs, drug and alcohol abuse are cited as symptoms of failed integration. Migration

in itself must therefore be seen as important factors in the psychological problems of Turkish

and Arab young people.

Meanwhile at the Al-Nur Mosque in Neukölln, Imam Abdul Azim, a charismatic

preacher, is shown to prescribe a different medicine for the large number of both Muslims and

non-Muslims suffering from depression. In this interpretation, a lack of religious belief and

faith in Western society at large are held responsible: “Viele Seelen sind durstig und sie

schreien nach Hilfe”. The cure, quite predictably is shariah. Illness is - seen to be a test from

Allah and holding to legalism is presented as a shield. While the Al Nur mosque has been

raided several times since September 11, 2001 because of suspected terrorist connections and

is widely regarded as being the most Islamist of Berlin mosques, I did hear several stories of

l

Imam Abdul Azim conducting successful exorcisms right on the street. In those cases, the

djinn was brought to either to convert to Islam or to leave the body of the victim.

The scenes at the apartment of the djinn hodja reveal to the public what goes “behind

the facades” of the Berlin districts which are colloquially called “Klein Istanbul”. It would

doubtlessly be shocking to anyone being confronted with the phenomenon of spirit possession

for the first time, to see what happens to Hasan in a session at the apartment. He is shown in

trance, speaking not through his mouth but through his stomach and his left leg. It is not at all

decipherable as the same voice which had been telling Hasan’s story during the first part of

the programme. The dialogue between the healer and what is identified to be “Ahmed”

(Hasan’s djinn) is shown in detail. “Ahmed” speaks Turkish. It is a resilient spirit who

insults the healer, screams in fits of rage when being forced to hear the Koran, and yells its

refusals to leave Hasan. It is evident that the patient himself is enduring intense pain during

the ritual. He is shown lying on a reclining chair, wearing headsets through which koranic

recitations are heard. Hasan squints fiercly, his body seems to go into intense convulsions. It

is reminiscent of the doctor-patient relationship in classical psycho-analysis, where the patient

reclines comfortably on a couch while the psychiatrist prods his or her consciousness. In this

case however, it is not the healer himself asking questions. It is the Koran which takes over

the discourse. At this moment, the healer-patient relationship becomes invisible. The spirit

begins to speak through Hasan, saying in Turkish, “I am burning, I am burning”. Hasan’s

pain intensifies. The healer and the djinn are then able to take up dialogue.

The facit of the documentary is essentially that Hasan has fallen through. All kinds of

medical systems have failed. The ambivalence of his illness leaves him marginalised.

Although the djinn hodja was able to successfully drive out two of his spirits, the final one,

named Ahmet is resilient and Hasan’s suffering continues. The patient recounts that there had

once been a Christian djinn that was the worst amongst his individual pantheon. This spirit

had caused him to beat his wife and neglect his children completely. From the emic

perspective, the work of the healer is considered to be successful. Hasan’s wife claims that

only the hodja and one neurologist were of any effect in bringing about an improvement.

While the Christian djinn was bringing him to act violently and to neglect his religious

obligations completely, now Hasan is praying regularly (the five daily prayers are the sole

structure in his day. Yet as the commentary points out, he has no new goals and aspirations.

He is still a financial failure and still spends most of his time sitting on the couch. Neither

strong belief nor German bio-medical doctors nor Enes Hodja are able to solve Hasan’s

“problems abroad”.

li

What is interesting here is that Hasan is portrayed as being abroad. Although his

parents came to Germany in the 1960’s or 1970’s and the patient indeed has lived most of his

life in Berlin, he is not considered to be native to the society or to have immigrated.

Subsequently, the illness too must be interpreted under the same paradigm. The documentary

places emphasis on the Parallelgesellschaft of Kreuzberg, implying perhaps that spirit

possession is a part of this supposed parallel society. Yet the healer himself says in the media

portrayal that with migration, the djinn have also “conquered” Germany. The spirits are seen

as torturing those who are not firm in their faith. As we have seen before and we shall see

again, possession itself is interpreted as an illness that results from a certain unseen

vulnerability when not living according to the precepts of the scripture. According to the

healer, Hasan’s mistakenly took the existence of djinn lightly. Many Muslims he says,

dismiss them as superstition.

Essentially, the media creates a sensation, bringing to the public what goes on in the

living rooms of migrants. The patient is portrayed as living in a parallel society of his own.

He is beyond help in every spectrum, and is caught between two worlds. What might be

implied is that the integration of foreigners has failed. The patient here is a case study, not

just in the medical sense but in the overall social sense. He has “fallen through the cracks”.

His parents had clear financial goals in coming to Germany, but their son has succumbed to

idleness and to a psycho-somatic illness which is not identifiable in the modern sense.

When I went to the Kreuzberg/Neukölln market some weeks later to attempt to take up

contact with the Enes Hodja (the camera had revealed the location of his stand, showing him

joking with the chicken vendor across the path), I was not the first to come. Apparently since

the documentary had aired, a flood of people had arrived at the market to ask him questions.

He was deeply disappointed with the portrayal. First of all, the documentation had said that

he charged 30 Euros a session, showing a sign on the wall of his room. He claimed that this

was not true and that the sign was merely a suggestion for those who were willing to make a

donation to help cover costs. If he would really charge that much money for each session,

then there would be no reason for him to have a textile stand at the market. At least 15,000

people had come to him in the last few years. He was now ready to stop working as a healer,

as he had become too frustrated with the subsequent onslaught of patients and curious

esoterics overwhelming him. The 30 Euros on the sign was a decoy for the tax office so that

he could write off the rent for the apartment.

Enes Hodja was then for a long time reluctant to speak with me. I would go to his stall

at the market whenever I was doing my shopping there but he was rather aloof each time. At

lii

first he simply did not have time for an interview. Then it became apparent that the whole

experience with the media had made him reluctant to speak to any other outsiders. I was

interested in his life story and his entire perspective on what had been said in the media. It

was not until I had brought the regards of Sheikh Abdallah Hallis in Trebbus that a door was

opened. I had brought my Turkish assistant with me who told him that it was my job to make

a positive portrayal of Islam in the community (a claim which I did not rebuke) upon which

he apologised for having misunderstood my intentions. He couldn’t figure out why I was

coming to him when the same thing happens in the Vatican. Furthermore, most people in

Europe were no longer aware of the existence of demons and it would be valuable work to

remind the people of this. The point he wanted to make perhaps was that Christianity had

always had the same thing and that there was nothing really exotic about spirit possession.

Why should I then as a European go to a Muslim healer and thereby uphold the notion of

parallel societies even further?

It became clear throughout the fall that quitting his vocation as a healer would not be

possible. As the winter neared, more people were suffering from depression and were

becoming more vulnerable towards the djinn. November in Berlin is especially cold, dark,

damp and grey. Anyone who has lived in the city knows that at that time of year, the general

mood is quite negative.

Enes Hodja, unlike the healers presented in the previous chapters, is a scholar. He

neither underwent any kind of illness in his younger years, nor does he claim to work under

the medianship of a particular spirit or mystical figure. He came to Germany in the early

1980’s and married a Jordanian woman who had studied theology in Amman. He became

jealous of her education and subsequently went to Jordan himself to receive a doctorate in

Islamic theology20. Then he went to Al-Azhar University in Cairo where he attained a second

doctorate in Theology and specialised in Koran-based medicine. Although he is portrayed in

the media as a “folk” healer, his education is formal and his vocation could actually be put

under the old anthropological category of “elite” Islam. At par with the training of his wife

(who treats women), he began his career as a healer when he returned to Germany after

having spent time in the Middle East. He was advertising on the internet at one point, with

the help of the local office of the Islamic Relief Foundation. So many people responded to

20 The fact that his wife is also a healer and that he “followed in her footsteps” is of course very interesting. First of all, it contradicts common stereotypes of the subservient Muslim woman, while shedding some local perspective on the ways in which women contest male patriarchy in possession cults such as zar Because of separate gendered spheres in Muslim communities, unfortunately, as a male researcher, it was difficult to work with women, except in the milieu of Sheikh Suleyman.

liii

the ads that they eventually had to be removed. He was flooded by people who had never

even heard of djinn.

I received an appointment finally to sit in on a session, similar to the one which had

been aired on television. This time, there were three men, two of whom were brothers. The

three men looked almost identical and the two siblings were even wearing the same clothes.

The hodja had been adamant about having me meet one of these patients in particular as he

was severely ill and would serve as a good example. It seemed that the healer’s concern was

to convince me, as a researcher, that illness through spirit possession is real. The patient

whom he had in mind for me to meet would serve as perfect case study, in his mind.

On a cold, dark and dreary November afternoon in Kreuzberg then, I was able to

witness what might convince the greatest sceptic that the existence of the djinn is in fact, a

reality. The two brothers had undergone sessions before, while the third man who was

evidently an acquaintance of theirs was there for the first time. Like Hasan, the first brother

had already been cured of two djinn but there was a third which was especially resilient and

refused to let the man go. The session began with audio-recorded Koran recitation, the men

listening on headsets in reclining chairs. Enes Hodja explained to us that this was the

diagnostic part of the treatment. The Koran is used to provoke the djinn and bring it to

identify itself and speak. This is the easy part of the treatment. Getting the djinn to leave the

afflicted is much more difficult and dangerous.

The healer engaged in conversation with the djinn, prodding them to reveal their

identities. During trance, the men were not at all moving their lips but their were voices

coming out of their stomachs. The hodja sat comfortably in his swivel chair, his feet up on

his desk and “interviewed” these voices. No constructive dialogue was able to take place with

the first man (whom I was supposed to meet). The following took place with the second man:

The second patient, who strikingly resembles the first (they are both wearing blue jeans and red sweaters), is now diagnosed. He stands up and Enes begins to speak with his djinn. It is man’s voice coming from the patient, but his lips are not moving. The man tries to resist. But the djinn takes control. It is extremely agitated. Hodja: “How did you get into this man”? Djinn: “Büyü” . H: “How long has it been”? (The patient tries to resist). D: “two years”. (Hodja is smiling and speaks to the voice coming from inside the patient sternly, but he is at ease). H: “What’s your religion?” (There is no answer). H:“Din ne!? (what’s your religion?!)” D: (becomes angry) “Kafir! (infidel)”

liv

The patient falls back into his chair, just like the first man. Enes Hodja then tells us

that this particular spirit is a difficult one. It is a liar. Before it took on the form of a woman

but it is a man’s voice coming from inside the patient.

The third patient had recently begun to “see smoke” and often felt as if he was being

stroked on the cheeks by some invisible beings. No successful dialogue was able to take

place here. All three of the men were ordered to listen to surah al baqara21 everyday until the

next session. The hodja explained to us that this section of the Koran was particularly

effective in forcing the djinn to communicate and to reveal their identities. No further

treatment could take place without this preliminary step. He also emphasised the fact that the

voices coming out of the men’s stomachs were not their own, and that although one of the

djinn had identified itself as an infidel, all three of the patients were actually practicing

Muslims. The three men were sent recordings of surah al baqara via Bluetooth onto their

mobile phones.22 The more the djinn would be subjected to the surah, the more they would

eventually be forced to communicate.

It is interesting here that communication takes place through contemporary media such

as mp3 recordings. This firmly supports current academic paradigms that spirit possession is

as much a modern phenomenon as anything else (Luig et. al. 1999).

Analysis

Having presented some ethnographic particulars from the material which I collected in

the Spring and Autumn of 2007, it is now possible to embark on a theoretical analysis of what

I call „magico-Islamic fields”. The first issue which I would like to raise is the notion of

“parallel worlds” (Boddy 1994). It might already be clear that I have juxtaposed several

parallel societies, which are such in the sense that to a greater or lesser extent they

demonstrate connections to unseen worlds which appear to transcend ethnic, ideological or

national boundaries. Like in the literature of Ali Aziz, the fine line between perceived reality

and an imagined world is ostensibly negotiated between humans, djinns and saints as well as

patients and healers. To locate these Islamic fields within the framework of the larger, media

dominated discourse on Parallelgesellschaften, failed integration and migrant illness, is

21 Surah al baqara, the second and longest surah of the Koran, deals explictly with different tribes and nations, religious groups, and types of believers (e.g., true believers, hypocrites). It also lays out a significant portion religious law. 22 Interestingly enough, the use of Bluetooth was recently judged to be haram by Saudi Arabia’s top religious body, on the grounds that the technology could be used to transmit illicit photographs and video recordings (www.adnkronos.com).

lv

possibly to see that the apartment of Sheikh Suleyman, or the so-called Ottoman Embassy and

its association with Ali Aziz and the Prussians contradict these paradigms. In fact, it appears

that cultural integration here has actually been quite successful. Either this, or the current

hegemonic and discursive order (i.e., the Federal Republic itself) is ritually contested. It is

also ascertainable that the deprived Prekariat is a Parallelgesellschaft within the economic

order. Unemployment, Hartz 4, and mental illness are ever pervasive themes which in these

contexts are perhaps overcome through a Turnerian “community of suffering”.23 Sheikh

Suleyman’s water and Koran therapies or the Ottoman ambassadors’ visits to the

Reichskanzler may be quite evocative of liminality. Within the deprived Prekariat, does

communitas form which transcends ethnic distinctions through common adversity?

Each of the examples described above are distinct and may not resemble each other

greatly. In the apartment of Sheikh Suleyman, Muslims and non-Muslims of a diversity of

backgrounds seek healing. They do not necessarily come out of religious conviction but

through a local network which is fuelled by the charisma of the sheikh. It is a charisma which

seems most of all to be social.

He is someone who is accredited with being able to help in all kinds of affairs, whether

in one’s love life or one’s social positioning in the Parallelgesellschaft of welfare and

employment offices. A similar scenario arises at the Fezhane zu Preussen. The ambassador is

at once a provider of spiritual and social assistance. At the same time, this particular

“magico-Islamic field” initiates the patient, guest, or anthropologist into a parallel society

where Prussian chancellors meet with Ottoman diplomats while distressed and uprooted

murid of various tariqa supplicate for Ali Aziz (the most famous and real Ottoman

ambassador to Prussia). These magico-Islamic fields may form parallel societies in both the

realms of subjective experience and objective “truth”. They are hidden from the dominant

gaze of the media and even to the youths who shop at the Fezhane zu Preussen. Yet they

form communities which are to some extent or another, dynamic and alive. Contrary to the

popular Parallelgesellschaft paradigm, they are both multi-ethnic and poly-religious. In fact,

they might not even have that much religious significance at all.

They are however, reflective of social and religious history. While on the Swahili

Coast, different spirits represent different human characteristics based on ethnicity (Giles

1999, Mackenrodt 2007), at the Fezhane zu Preussen this is not all that tangible. A

connection to the spirit world is spoken of and demonstrated in some ways. The rituals that

23 See Turner (1969: 20). The community of suffering comes into being through common affliction, whereby in three van Gennepian phases patients seek the help of Isoma and are then initiated into the local cult. The third stage consists of the healed individual returning to the profane realm after having been isolated from society through the ritual.

lvi

are said to take place are not accessible to those who have not been initiated. If a dhikr

involving human hosts and djinn of Ottoman and Prussian ideological or political persuasion

does indeed take place (I believe so), then the possessed certainly carry the respective

convictions of their spirits over into everyday life. The “Ottoman ambassador” mingles with

the “Prussian chancellor” in secretive meetings where strategies are sought out in attaining the

“help” of the “allies” in straightening out Germany’s post World War 2 era social malaise. A

different social and political order which is based on traditional monarchism and the old

caliphate are negotiated perhaps through spirit intervention.

Meanwhile a living saint, possessed by a guardian spirit, does not appear to have any

particular social or political conviction at all. As a Rifa’i murshid, the syncretistic themes of

the founding myth of his tariqa are carried over into the streets of Neukölln. Sunnis and

Shiites, Serbs and Kosovars, Muslims and Christians all find their way to his apartment. For

some people, contact to the sheikh has influenced the road to religious conversion while

others have simply managed to clarify their love life. At the commands of the spirit-being

Khidr, the sheikh negotiates new perspectives, encourages the Latifa to do her “thing”,

suggests different avenues to take. The goal of the healer and most of his patients is to re-

assert the individual into a precarious social order which has undoubtedly crumbled in recent

years:

Possession cults are embedded in local contexts that are never only local and are always complex. With other spiritual philosophies […], they provide ways of understanding, trying out, coming to terms with, and contesting modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and religious and other hegemonies. They allow to implicit synthesis of the foreign with the local and historically relevant while reshaping all in the process. They heal and they teach; they are intellectually empowering […]. They may pave the way for overt political struggle [….]; yet, they might also (re)insert disaffected individuals into the very structures of domination they contest (Boddy 1994: 421).

It should be clear by now that the health problems of migrants and German’s alike are

social problems as well. In these contexts, we have seen perhaps unexpected ways in which

these communities find ways to adapt. At the same time, cultural texts are written which

might function to create an altogether different social order:

Spirit possession provides an ideal medium for the creation of cultural texts. It creates powerful metaphorical dramas that are enacted in human form but attributed to the spirit world. The human actors are not actors in the conventional sense but a stage – the human body becomes a vehicle for the spirits to communicate and interact with the human world (Giles 1999:143).

While the above quote refers of course to the East African context, specifically the

Swahili Coast, the provisional Ottoman ambassador’s trips to the provisional

Reichskanzleramt are reminiscent of this. The religious, social, political and economic order

of the past is recreated. The Fezhane zu Preussen may be in very close proximity to the

lvii

famous Sehitlik Mosque but it is very distant from it ideologically. At the same time, as some

of the patients of Sheikh Suleyman change their religious convictions, new meaning is

attached to places which might otherwise hold little significance (certain bridges, rivers,

public squares). The employment office and the Grunewald become spaces of

empowerment24, while the tomb of Ali Aziz becomes a cultural and historical nexus for

supplicating murids. While all of the above settings do uphold the notions of Lewis (1966) in

viewing spirit possession and ecstatic ritual as embedded in social contexts of marginality and

deprivation, they are representative of contemporary ways in not only overcoming affliction

but in attempting to master psycho-social crisis as well. They are without doubt marginal

practices which are very much hidden, a subtle element perhaps of the esoteric religious

market.25 Yet for the most part they are positive experiences, stemming from shared

adversities but re-shaping the individual and even the community in which he or she lives.

They are parallel societies in both an imagined and very real sense.

A slightly different picture unfolds at the apartment of the more famous djinn hodja at

the Kreuzberg market. The life stories of the possessed do resemble each other greatly. They

are also unemployed, lack much formal education and live a precarious existence whose

status is somewhere between indigenous and migrant. The spirits with whom negotiations

take place are held responsible for the individuals’ “falling through the cracks”. The djinn

contradict the personality of the patients. They identify themselves in one way at one moment

and in very different ways the next. The media categorises the patient as lost between worlds,

straddling the boundaries between modernity and tradition, bio-medicine and faith healing,

science and superstition, objective knowledge and subjective experience. Ritual treatment as

posited within the confines of the supposed Muslim Parallelgesellschaft, is mysterious and

bizarre to the outsider. Going by the media, the patients are left sitting on their couches at the

end of the day. Yet for the families of the afflicted there has been progress. The hodja is the

only one who has been able to ameliorate Hasan’s condition. The performance of daily

prayers, is from the emic perspective, a definitive and decisive step forward.

Yet if distinctions such as folk Islam and elite Islam, “traditional” healing and modern

bio-medicine are to be made, then Enes Hodja does not fit into any category. While he deals

with possession cases, he himself is a religious expert rather than a spirit median. Of the

healers in this study, he is the only one who masters Arabic, lending him certain legitimacy in

what he does. The spirits with whom he negotiates are of different religious affiliations but

24 See Kuczyniski (1988) and Werbner (1997) for insights into ways in which Muslims and non-Muslims alike sacralize space which does not hold any particular significance otherwise. This occurs through the healing rituals of the Parisian marabout or the public dhikr of Naqshiband Sufis in Britain. 25 See Zinser (1988).

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lodged inside their mostly Turkish hosts. They generally do not speak any other languages.

Enes Hodja can be seen as a decisively modern healer, using sound technology and the

internet as much as amulets and word of mouth propoganda. Hence this particular healer

might be an embodiment of the point of view that “despite the exotic fascination it still exerts

on Westerners, spirit possession, like magic or witchcraft, represents no archaic past” (Luig et

al.1999: xiv). While the media approaches the field with exactly this “exotic fascination”, an

ethnographic look reveals a picture that is not at odds with contemporary society at all.

The patients who have surfaced in this study are also “modern” individuals. They share

a common reality in that their success in contemporary Neukölln and Kreuzberg has been

limited because of socio-ecomonic conditions. What is surprising is that while some come

from societies where spirit possession or the belief in magic might be more prevalent, others

are Germans who have come into contact with Muslim healers through interaction in the

mixed ghetto. The cultural text that is written on the backdrop of healing rituals presents a

picture of these highly urban districts that is ethnically diverse and culturally integrated. The

afflictions or ailments which bring them to consult with the sheikh or the djinn hodja are

diverse but all seem to be connected to the underlying issues of poverty and unemployment,

decreased social mobility and a precarious position in current society. These cults (if they can

be seen as such) are marginal and peripheral but they also contest the social reality in which

they occur.

As I mentioned earlier, spirit possession cults in the Muslim sense are most elaborate

and complex in the African context. There are no equivalents in Berlin to Zar, Bori or

Hamadsa, but there are certainly people who believe in the existence of djinn. There are

healers who negotiate with the spirits and there are saints who assist them. While there are no

intricate pantheons as found on the Swahili Coast or West Africa, there are people who are

involved with the possession phenomenon and the relationships they have with their spirits

are illustrative of the society in which they live.

The various “Islamic fields” in Germany which Thielmann (2005) described, are

trascended here through common adversity and a much more vivid belief in the unseen. I

therefore call them “magico-Islamic fields”. They are both local and trans-national. The three

“magico-Islamic fields” which I have described above are neither traditional nor modern.

They come into being only through a particular set of adversities and afflictions that are

specific to the local context. I quote Turner (1974: 56) however:

But I am suggesting that this process only works where there is already a high level of communitas in the society that performs the ritual, the sense that a basic generic bond is recognized beneath all its hierarchical and segmentary differences and oppositions. Communitas in ritual can only be evoked

lix

easily when there are many occasions outside the ritual on which communitas has been achieved. It is also true that if communitas can be developed within a ritual pattern it can be carried over into secular life for a while and help to mitigate or assuage some of the abrasiveness of social conflicts rooted in conflicts of material interest or discrepancies in the ordering of social relations.

The evidence at hand does not seem to point in this direction. First of all,

contemporary, secular German society is hardly one in which in there is a high level of

communitas, at least in the Turnerian sense. The rituals which are prescribed by Sheikh

Suleyman and Enes Hodja are strictly speaking, individual ones. We have seen that amongst

some of their patients, the effects of these rituals have been carried over into everyday life.

New personal boundaries, improved social positioning, changes in religious conviction or

simply an ameliorated sense of psychological health have all been found amongst the people

with whom I have worked. While the relationship of healer and patient often takes on real

proportion outside of the immediate context of therapy, apart from the word of mouth network

surrounding Sheikh Suleyman and the virtual advertising of Enes Hodja, the participants do

not generally foster ties amongst each other that are directly related to the healing context.

The Fezhane zu Preussen may serve as more of an example of communitas. There we

see that the shopkeeper is also an undercover Ottoman diplomat in everyday life. The

discussions that take place in his “embassy” are centred on common themes such as Sufism,

Prussian and Ottoman history, Ali Aziz, other saints, and notions of djinn prevalent in

Naqshibandi Sufism. The patients of the “ambassador” receive a new social role in the form

of nominal employment. Neo-Ottoman spirits are transferred into the everyday, profane

realm. Initiation seems to mean social membership with new but partly constructed social

roles.

The question arises then as to whether or not these cases can indeed be seen as local

forms of Islam (or “local Islams”) which are distinct to the context of Berlin or Germany. I

have attempted to show the ways in which local histories are re-constructed through the

veneration of local saints and possible conceptions of spirits which reflect human society.

The figure of Ali Aziz is specifically relevant to the context of Berlin, and to some he is even

seen as a guardian of the city. It is a small, marginal cult but it does exist. The fact that his

devotees lay customary German advent reefs at his tomb plays testimony to the emergence of

religious practice that is rooted in “folk” Islam but carries cultural relevance that is restricted

to the local context. The individual healing rituals prescribed by the median of Khidr are

reflective of social realities which might also be unique to Germany, while the children of the

former Gastarbeiter seek treatment against possession which is commonly explained through

the experience of migration during the past 40 years. All of these phenomena take place

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elsewhere, but it is clear that they reflect local conditions and realities which are unique to this

context. Finally, the meanings attached to these rituals are of utmost significance.

I have presented hence the emergence of possible “communities of suffering” which

transcend various Islamic fields based upon ethnic and ideological categories. While Milli

Görüs or Diyanet might be seen as exemplary of modern Islam, these magico-Islamic fields

are by no means simply rooted in superstition. At the same time, the possibility that they may

be considered as local forms of religious practice has been raised. I dedicate the rest of this

magisterial paper to notions and cultural constructions of illness itself, focussing on the

journey of one individual in Berlin who has yet to find the context in which to find the

meaning and interpretation of the symbolic world in which he lives.

7. Yahya, Tuhami and Mama Ji Sarkar: Three Men, Three Cultures, Three Illnesses?

In this chapter I intend to make a cross-cultural comparison of three men living in

three rather different cultural contexts. A similar experiment was produced by Clifford

Geertz in Islam Observed (1968). In order to demonstrate regional differences within the

setting of one Islamic belief system, Geertz compares first of all, one Moroccan saint to an

Indonesian counterpart. The two societies, the first with a Berber, tribal backdrop and the

latter rooted in Hinduism have two drastically different figures, both of whom are cultural

heroes in one sense, embodying national attitudes and mentalities. Both however, are

illustrated to be religious figures albeit with distinctly different characteristics. The

Moroccan, Lyusi, is a fierce warrior, whose karamat wins him power over the sultan and

reinforces the Berber mentality over the power-holding Muslim elite to whom prophetic

descent is ascribed. The Indonesian counterpart is a meditative, quietistic yogi like figure

who is reformed from banditry after having been enlightened after several years of meditation

in one spot.

Geertz’s Indonesian and Moroccan saints might be demonstrative of what it is to be

healthy in those societies. Here however, I compare three men who might embody what it is

to be ill in Germany, Morocco and Pakistan. All three individuals are single, middle aged

men who are outsiders in their respective societies. While they are all truly ill from one

perspective or another, they live in three different cultures and the way their illnesses are

interpreted differ considerably. The similarities amongst them will become more and more

evident as this analysis proceeds. Yet the mechanisms which they have at their disposal to

cope with their illnesses are sometimes entirely different. All three are deeply embedded in a

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battle between the visible and the invisible which gives them both release on the one hand,

and further affliction on the other.

The Case of Tuhami

Vincent Crapanzano’s controversial work entitled Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan

(1980) was a post-modern experiment in psycho-analysing a tile-maker who lived in a small

hut near the factory where he worked. It was revealed that he considered himself to be

married to a local Djinniya, a camel-footed she-demon who demands the blood of her victims,

bringing them to slash open their heads in a ritual context that is a therapy and release. The

Hamadsa brotherhood is a socially recognised treatment for djinn possession in that local

setting. To become ill through Ayse Qandisa (to whom Tuhami is married), is logically to

seek treatment amongst the hamadsa and if a diagnosis pertaining to her or another of the

spirits in her pantheon is made then to undergo the brotherhood’s form of therapy.

Paradoxically, and to Crapanzano’s great intrigue, Tuhami does not participate in these

rituals, which are “mediated through the curing ceremonies, the trance-dances, of such

exorcistic brotherhoods as the Jilala, the Gnawa, and especially the Hamadsha” (ibid. 5).

While the victims whose relationship with the djinn are mediated lead more or less normal

lives, Tuhami is one of her husbands. She is a jealous wife and he is therefore fully under her

control. She demands full secrecy in their marital life and is seen to be the cause of his

depressions from which he seeks escape by visiting the tombs of local saints.

Aisha Qandisha belongs to a local pantheon of demons which are a part of folklore in

Meknes. Tuhami himself is considered an expert on her and other djinniya, and his assistance

is often sought out when a diagnosis needs to be made. As Crapanzano writes:

Aisha Qandisha and the other demons may be regarded, accordingly, as refractions of “social processes”, “tensions within the society”, “conflicts within the individual”, or on a slightly more concrete level, “historical events”. The choice of explanatory ground is of course, dependant upon the particular theoretical stance accepted; the ground itself is a reification of an essentially abstract concept or category, of a symbol or idiomatic element, which, if one stops to think about it, is no more or less “real” than the demonic elements in Tuhami’s discourse (ibid. 22).

Tuhami is portrayed therefore as a member of society who embodies local

interpretations of illness. He is a man who is by all means conflicted and his story reflects

social tensions and to some extent connects historical events in an individual interface which

comes to surface in his biography. As a young man he was abandoned by his mother and

brought to a colonial family to live and work. He has a certain level of hatred towards his

lxii

mother which is denied but expressed in Freudian slips. He was angered when his father died

and she re-married.

Tuhami was never able to marry in the visible world. While he attributed this to

financial reasons, Crapanzano points out that there were poorer men in his vicinity who were

able to support their families with relative ease. He entertained married women with tales of

saints and demons late into the night. In an otherwise intensely male-dominated society,

where many women’s movements are closely monitored by their husbands, the local men did

not perceive Tuhami as a threat. Yet, “there was nothing effeminate about him” (ibid. 33).

He was actually “reputed for his knowledge of the ways of women” (ibid. 32). Local women

sought him out for his advice and for his “herbal remedies, magical brews, and tales of saints

and demons” (ibid. 32). For the men of his community on the other hand, Tuhami is a sort of

non-person. Unmarried and “scatter-brained” (ibid. 33), he simply was not respected by his

male counterparts. It was however, the men who pointed the ethnographer in the direction of

Tuhami.

His relationships with the men in his life were not always positive. His stepfather had

been the partial cause of his abandonment, and later his grandfather blamed Tuhami for

having had to divorce his wife. Yet it was the death of his grandfather which by one of

Tuhami’s accounts (stories from his earlier life would often contradict each other) triggered

the first and most severe depression in his life. Some of the grandfather’s last words were that

Tuhami needed to be taken care of as he had “something in his bones”(‘adam) (ibid. 55). The

term ‘adam is indicative of possession and is also related to epilepsy and the latter condition

has often been explained in North Africa through interference by djinn.26 Tuhami spent

several months in a hospital before returning to the Jolan’s, the French colonial family where

he was loved by the women. 27

He is, in Crapanzano’s semi-Freudian perspective, locked into a saint-djinniya-ego

complex in which he looks for the nurturing female figure and the supportive father who plays

the male role-model which he never really had. In another version of his first illness, he had

spent a year in hospital and then started spending great amounts of time at the tombs of local

saints. The first illness was triggered by an episode in which he was attacked by a seemingly

26 It may be worth adding that even from the bio-medical perspective, the Bori Cult has been known to cure what would be clinically diagnosable as epilespy (see Rahal 2000). 27 Eventually he escaped from them, as rumours began to circulate that he was sleeping with Madame Jolan. This episode signifies the end of Tuhami’s “normal” life. He refers to it as the time in which he slept in cemeteries, and it is from then on that he is metaphorically dead. Any aspirations of wealth, marriage and family life are renounced at that time. In Crapanzano’s view, he resigns to a passive fatalism which prevents him from attaining any such goals.

lxiii

invisible man who threw a rock at his shoulders. Then, while he was sick, he dreamt of a

woman who told him to dress like him and follow her orders. He consulted with a marabout

after the dream but the same woman (evidently Aisha Qandisha) did not allow him to wear

the amulet which had been written for him. The djinniya began to take control of his life.

When Tuhami was later hospitalised, Aisha Qandisha likewise orders him to escape and to

not return. This Crapanzano interprets as “his presumed desire not to return to the hospital”

(ibid. 71). Medical treatment of any kind is replaced by frequent visits to certain saints in the

region who appear to him in dreams. He is also at their mercy and must obey their commands

in order to avoid misfortune. The tombs of the saints are “symbolically equivalent to the

hospital”(ibid. 72). Crapanzano departs to place Tuhami’s illness within the

prevailing Moroccan social structure which has been altered greatly by colonialism:

With the arrival of the Spanish and French and the subsequent colonilization of Morocco, traditional patterns of behaviour and the confidence the Moroccan had in his symbolically constituted world were undermined, not, in most instances, suddenly and dramatically, but gradually and irregularly, subtly (ibid. 82).

As the symbols of saint and djinniya, upon which Geertz (1968) based his analysis of

Moroccan society and Islam, were gradually eroded through the process of modernisation and

its associated scripturalism, Tuhami is to Crapanzano, caught between two worlds that seem

to clash. Tuhami, then is a walking contradiction of sorts and his illness might have been

interpreted differently had he lived two hundred years earlier:

Tuhami is, as I have said, a victim of this shattered mode of social life. He is both more traditional and less traditional than many Moroccans of his background. He insists upon articulating his world in traditional symbols, but he is unable to receive succour from such symbolic understanding. He is haunted by demons-enslaved by them-but is incapable of receiving ritual release from them. Why? The question must be asked, and it cannot be answered without imposing a determinism on Tuhami that would deprive him of what freedom he has. He is, despite everything, capable of manipulating the symbol system, however fragmented and alienating it may be, to his advantage. Perhaps he does not want the cure (Crapanzano 1980: 83).

Is Tuhami then, through his own stubbornness entrapped not only in a symbol

complex that is both the apparent source of illness and its cure ? Of course, he is able to

attract audiences with his stories and recitations which give him a social status that is

simultaneously one of outsider and bard. Yet the very setting Tuhami lives in is symbolic of

colonialism and modernity. His one room “windowless hovel” is located inside the tile

factory where he is a wage labourer. It is located on the banks of a river which has trickled

down to a stream through industry. The body of water is of great significance in the symbolic

landscape of Meknes, as according to Tuhami, it is the home of 44 saints. Tuhami is an

expert on both local hagiography and demonology but at the same time he is a worker in a

modern factory.

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Tuhami’s illness cannot easily be put into bio-medical terms. To Crapanzano, he is at

times, a neurotic. He sees Tuhami’s illness as a “condensation of several illnesses” (ibid. 58).

What is of greatest relevance to this paper in any case, is the way in which the Moroccan

articulates his experience of illness through the saint-djinniya-human symbolic complex. As

the author notes, however:

To look at the saint and jinniya as simply symbols, of whatever status, is, however, to lose sight of their most important feature for the Moroccan: their facticity, their givenness in and for themselves. Both saint and jinniya manifest themselves in dreams, visions, and other states of consciousness. The saint is a “historical” personage who is believed to be alive within his sanctuary and whose existence is confirmed through action-his miraculous interventions in ordinary life. The jinniyya’s existence is also confirmed through action (ibid. 75).

The apparent transcendental reality of these symbols then is what directs Tuhami’s

illness. The course of action he takes in seeking a cure depends on them. They are sources of

both conflict and resolution. Relations with both figures must be modified and the afflicted

must base his life very much on their commands: “The saints and demons remove the burden

of failure, of guilt even” (ibid. 76).

The case of Yahya

I turn now to a man whom I have mentioned earlier on in this paper and have gone as

far as to refer to as the “Tuhami of Neukölln”. While my personal appellation might be

somewhat fantastical, the parallels between these two men are indeed striking at times. At the

time of my research Yahya was almost fifty (near the same age of Tuhami in the 1960’s) and

had never been married. He lived alone in a bachelor apartment to the south of the Ringbahn

which serves well as a boundary to distinguish the northern urban core of Neukölln to its

more suburban areas. Yahya is a convert to Islam and a Burhani murid. He was born and

raised in the former German Democratic Republic, a fact whose relevance becomes much

more apparent as his story is told. Most of what I know about Yahya is from what he told me

during informal visits and what others from the tariqa have related. I was often determined to

record our conversations but there was always something which prevented me from doing so.

He simply came alive so well in spontaneous situations that to introduce audio equipment

seemed to be entirely inappropriate. He was often very sceptical about the idea of writing his

story although at other times he was convinced that the two of us should eventually work

together in writing a full scale biography.

Yahya is in many ways a gentleman, the likes of one which is hard to find anywhere

else. He greets just about everybody with the extensive ritual greeting of “assalam aleikum

wa rahmatullah wa barakatu”, a recitation which of course not everyone is accustomed to.

lxv

Whether at his local green grocer or at thee kebap shop across from the mosque where he

prays, his presence is never one which goes unnoticed. When I first met him it seemed to me

that he was an embodiment of what I heard the Sufis refer to as feni fi sheikh (annihilated in

one’s sheikh).28 He addressed just about any other Muslim man on the street with “my

sheikh” (in Arabic). While he is extremely polite to everyone he meets, often he arouses

shock and bewilderment amongst those who do not know him well. He “wears his heart on

the outside”.

Like the “Ottoman ambassador”, he often seemed to me as lost somewhere in time.

He had never used a computer and I was shocked one day when he asked if I was going to

write my thesis by hand. He was in the habit of dying his clothes anew when their colours

had faded. Part of this was for financial reasons but at the same time it was his religious

unwillingness to waste anything. The clothes he wore were subsequently not of contemporary

fashion. Everything about him, from his general attitude to the way he walked, simply did not

“fit in”. Somewhere he is more “traditional” than the “traditional” German.29 The language

he uses does not conform to the contemporary jargon referred to as Neudeutsch. It is a style

of German which might go back a few decades. It is peppered with Arabic phraseology like

el hamdullilah or mashallah and he goes out of his way to use the few Turkish phrases he

knows with local Turks. He is in some ways a bricolage of character, integrating the pious

Muslim with the decent German citizen and the “mystical Sufi” with the rather straight-edge

former socialist comrade.

He has been ill for most of his life. His mother had left his father before he was born.

He attributes the beginning of his struggle with several djinn to his suspicion that his mother

slept with his future step-father while she was pregnant with him. The relationship with his

parents was always strained. He points to a mark a little above his forehead and claims that it

is the result of a beating he received from his mother with a kitchen pot. His mother tried to

kill him in a fit of rage. Yahya claims that to this day, his mother denies that this incident

took place. Therefore he strongly rejects the idea of reconciliation.

The extremely volatile relationship to her is in many ways a point of departure in a

journey that walks a fine line between a firm conviction in faith and a long history of illness

that has on various occasions nearly cost him his life.

Life in former East Berlin was much more one-sided that it is today. There was only

one official voice: the organs of the socialist party. He was a worker in a light bulb factory in

the Köpenick district and at the time of the Wende (re-unification) was living in the, for East

28 See for example, Werbner (2003: 192).29 As Tuhami is “more traditional than the traditional Moroccan” (Crapanzano 1980: 55).

lxvi

German purposes, the modern suburb of Marzahn. He lived alone and had little contact to his

mother and step-father. He knew his biological father and got on with him quite well but for

the most part lived a solitary existence. He, like millions of people in the GDR joined the

socialist party at some point. His departure from the organisation is an event which seems to

be of significance. He did not want to disclose details as to the way he was treated by his

party comrades. It seems that he was either chased away or that he left in an intense state of

disillusionment with the general attitude and behaviour of the people in the organisation. This

seems to be the second major source of trauma in his life and themes of being “mobbed” and

censored by a general other come up here for the first time.

The image Yahya projects of life “behind the iron curtain” is one of solitude. He is a

solitary worker, commuting to the factory each day by train. He would have beers with his

co-workers after each shift but mostly he found this form of socialising to be rather banal.

This might of course be his perception many years later, but the theme of wanting to “fit in” is

a recurrent one. He joined the socialist party not out of ideological conviction but in the hope

of finding a belonging. There were never really any women in his life during this whole

period. There were no girlfriends. Yahya has always been single. In isolation, suicidal

phases already came up then.

The day after it was announced that the impassable border between East and West

Berlin was no longer, Yahya rather nonchalantly took the streetcar from his apartment in a

Stalinist Plattenbau to the Oberbaumbrücke, the bridge that was now re-connecting the

eastern district of Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg. Thousands of Berliners had already celebrated

together and had begun the task of physically destroying the wall. By this time, many East

Berliners were already shopping in the West. He walked out onto the middle of the bridge

alone and began to howl ecstatically. Although there was nothing ostensibly stopping him

from continuing into Kreuzberg, he did not make the journey. He was afraid of what might

happen to him if were to make the crossing. Moreover, the world of over there was strange

and unfamiliar. He remained at the middle of the bridge, right on the border.

The experience on Oberbaumbrücke is intensely symbolic. As always, he is alone

while others have celebrated together. He stands right on the border in a bizarre state. What

lies to the one side is strange and uncertain, yet in the future he will relocate there completely

and accept the religion of the Muslim immigrants who were not present in his society.

The most immediate effect of re-unification was first of all that Yahya was out of

work. The factory was soon closed down and like thousands (if not millions) of other people

the first years were a period of structural adaptation.

lxvii

Shortly after re-unification Yahya left Berlin for Pforzheim, a small industrial town in

Southern Germany where he underwent training as a health care aide. He received a job in

Pforzheim and lived there in the early part of the 1990’s. He somewhat proudly told me that

his hair was died orange at the time, as if to make the allusion that popular culture has not

always been strange to him. It was during these years that the most pivotal crossing of

boundaries took place.

He had bought a translation of the Koran soon after the wall had come down and he

was on a “spiritual search”.30 He did not read it until the period in Pforzheim, as it was there

that he was surrounded by Turkish immigrants for the first time. One day he looked in the

telephone book for a local mosque. He phoned the only one in town and told them that he

wanted to become a Muslim. He spoke his shahada on the following Friday where after the

weekly sermon he asked permission to read a poem he had written about Allah. The imam

hesitantly accepted and had it translated into Turkish for the congregation. The word

“gewaltig”, meaning majestic, was misunderstood and falsely translated as “violent”

(“gewaltätig”). This caused an uproar amongst the worshippers.

Evidently there was a cultural gap between him and his new community so he asked if

there were any Muslims of German heritage that he could come into contact with. He was

given the telephone number of a music teacher named Nureddin. He called on a Thursday

night. Nureddin was very excited, as this was a hadra night. There were a few Burhanni

living in the Karlsruhe area gathering once a week and Yahya was invited to come around

within the hour. This startled him. Somehow he has a conscience about the hesitation many

years later. His GDR background comes into play. He says he was not used to being so

quickly received and in the GDR such a gesture would have been greeted with suspicion (due

to the ever-present secret police). He did attend the hadra the following week and says that

he was deeply moved by the qasida (sung devotional poetry) and the music. Nureddin

immediately pointed out that he should “become one of them”.

That Christmas Yahya and Nureddin’s family went to the annual winter retreat at Haus

Schnede, the European centre of the Burhani tariqa. Here the experience of his illness is

articulated for the first time in religious terms. Overwhelmed emotionally, he broke into a

spontaneous ecstatic dance on his own, similar to the one on Oberbaumbrücke. But this

altered state was enunciated much differently: “Ich fing an mich zu drehen und schrie ,

Allah, Allah”. He recalls this moment vividly because some of the people were taken aback

30 It would have been very difficult to obtain a copy in the atheist regime of the GDR.

lxviii

by his behaviour which did not take place in the ritual context. It was the first time that he

heard the word majzub.31 It was being used in reference to him.

The memories of conversion and the initial contact to Sufism and the tariqa are told

with a great amount of both joy and pain. Paradoxically perhaps, it was after these events that

he became seriously sick for the first time. The psychotic episodes and hospitalisations are

incidents which he cannot talk about. It began with an incident at the clinic where he worked.

He was no longer able to hold a job.32 Since that time he has been classified as

erwerbsunfähig 33, and has collected a small disability pension of approximately 700 Euros a

month.

He returned to Berlin. At first he lived in the northern district of Wedding. At one

point there was a telephone call made to Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim where it was confirmed that

he had a djinn. A Sudanese murid took several weeks off work in order to assist him in trying

to eradicate it with an intensive treatment through the inhalation of embued smoke.

During the first years back in Berlin his second home was “Bonny’s Ranch”. This is

the nickname for the Karl Dietrich Bonhöffer Nervenklinik, an institution which is notorious

for its intense atmosphere. His experiences there are not retold but it is clear that he has a

hatred towards the place. The exact bio-medical diagnosis is a mystery. He denied that there

even was one. The medication he must have received in the past is now taboo to him.

Bonny’s Ranch is a place which lies beyond his personal geographic boundaries. Once while

hospitalised there, one of the local murshid told the doctors that Yahya is was a saint. The

Sufi teacher asked if it would be possible to smoke the place free from djinn. The request

was, not surprisingly, denied.

What he talks about much more and what is retold by others (in an almost folkloric

way) are the events which occurred at the zawiya of Berlin and Khartoum. The hadra

ceremonies often cause adverse reactions. His djinn hates participating in them and becomes

angry. At one ordinary Thursday night gathering Yahya’s hal went out of control. When the

hadra ended he ran wildly through the zawiya and, convinced that he could fly, appeared to

be jumping out of the fifth floor window. Clearly the murids did not allow him to do this.

Their successful attempt to prevent certain death triggered the arrival of the police. Some

people who just happened to be in the offices, late at night in the house across the courtyard

witnessed the spectacle and had reported that some Ausländer were trying to murder a

German. At other times Yahya narrates that it was the djinn who was responsible in pushing

31 See Frembgen (1998). 32 He later told me however, that he was fired from his job in Pforzheim because he had converted to Islam. 33 This translates literally as incapable of earning a living. I cannot help but to point out the derogatory implications of the term.

lxix

him towards suicide and not the mystical calling to the sheikh. In any case, the incident led to

another hospitalisation at Bonny’s Ranch.

Yahya did physically realise the trip to Khartoum three times.34 The last visit in 2003

is spoken of most. Before meeting the sheikh he got some black polish from a shoe-shine boy

on the streets and painted himself black. The story was also related by others and is

interpreted as an attempt to resemble the sheikh. Was Yahya plunged into a hal which

eradicated the boundaries of self and other to the extent that there was no longer Yahya or

sheikh? In any case, he appeared in front of his master literally painted black. Treatment

against djinn possession was once again attempted through the inhalation of embued smoke.

The duration of the trip had to be extended. There were several suicide attempts in the nine

weeks that he ended up staying in Khartoum. He was introduced to a Burhani woman who

was considered to be a saint. Because of his bizarre and suicidal behaviour, he believes that

she rejected him as a marriage partner. He returned to Berlin devastated. He broke a

religious taboo, the psychological effects of which hospitalised him yet again.

Two djinn are believed to have been eradicated through the sheikh’s treatment in

Khartoum. Along with the smoke treatment, Yahya was also to recite the ayattul kursi35 a

certain number of times each day. The third djinn is resilient and seemingly invincible.

Eleven years later the same koranic verse is applied ritually each day in the struggle to

conquer this last demon.

“Ich bin der Djinn”

Yahya’s djinn has no name and no identity. He was never able to describe it. It yells

at him, insults him and commands that he kill himself. It climbs into his CD player causing it

to break down. It has caused the death of one of his tropical birds. It wants his life. It lives

off inhaled tobacco smoke, anti-depressants and sexual activities which are deemed taboo.

Once I asked him if his djinn might be a communist. If the spirits in East African possession

cults reflect human society in that they are of different ethnic and religious groups (Giles

1999) and Yahya’s journey is to a good extent linked to his GDR past then would this not

34 Franz Langenkamp (2004) tells numerous tales of German murid travelling to Khartoum. The episodes retold all carry themes of inexplicable or magical events in the encounters with Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim. I cite this source in order to point to the meaning associated with the journey to The Sudan for ethnically German Burhanni. The tales in the book parallel Yahya’s journey to the extent that these murid all experience surreal states where the boundaries between self and the other in terms of murid and sheikh are dissolved. 35 Ayyattul kursi, or the throne verse, is considered by Muslims to be the most potent verse in the Koran. In various hadith (sayings of the prophet), it is said that its recitation even once frees one’s house of any djinn.

lxx

then be plausible? He thought about my question for quite a long time. He could not give an

answer. I quote directly out of my journal here:

It possesses him. It has caused him to lose his teeth. Did he just neglect to take care of his teeth or did the djinn cause them to fall out? He has stomach problems. He has problems with his bones. He has many health problems. I cannot list them all. But I think that they are all psychosomatic. The Djinn is his illness. Other people do not believe him but he is convinced of it. He does not know what type of djinn it is. Sometimes it is his Kumpel, sometimes his Schweinehund. Sometimes it is his alter-ego. Sometimes it is shaitan or one of his army of helpers. And sometimes it is even the sheikh himself.

He interprets any kind of strange or inappropriate behaviour in others as possession

too. He said many times that I myself have a djinn. He would come to this conclusion when

for example, I was going through some financial difficulties and there were some unpaid bills

that saw on my desk. When my doorbell wasn’t working, that too was the result of a demon

who had climbed into the wiring.

Within the community he respected for his dedication in performing the prescribed

religious duties. He is not known to miss a prayer and does not perform it with any delay.

When in the community, he is often the one allowed to do the call to prayer or to sometimes

even to lead the group as imam. The stories of his djinn are no secret to anyone and it appears

that the members of the community generally keep their distance from him in everyday life.

At the same time, he is referred to as majzub.36 One former member of the tariqa, who has

now become the murid of a different sheikh, believed that he did not really have a djinn but

that he makes the psychological construction of it in legitimising his bizarre behaviour and in

coming to terms with his illness. “Ich bin der djinn”, he often said. Sometimes he would

allude to it as a gremlin sitting on his shoulder.

“Der einzige Weg diesen Schweinehund wegzukriegen ist durch dhikr”

Throughout the course of our acquaintance (I do not intend to refer to it in the past

tense), Yahya was fighting hard. His condition is seen by almost everyone who knows him to

have improved over the years. There have been no recent public incidents such as the ones in

the Sudan or in the Neukölln zawiya. This might be interpreted through the notion that two of

the djinn have been eradicated. As I have said however, the third demon is extremely

stubborn and refuses to leave. In the spring, during the summer and again in the fall, Yahya

was attempting a 40 day therapy which was to conquer the Schweinehund once and for all. It

was never clear as to whether this was prescribed in person through one of the local murshid

36 This of course does not have to be a derogatory term. In fact, in Pakistan it would be endearing and sanctifying (see Fremgben 1998 and Pratt-Ewing 1998). In the South Asian context such individuals are not expected to hold to shariah, whereas amongst the Burhanis this does not appear to be the case.

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or if it comes as a result of the perceived telepathic communications with the deceased

Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim.

In any case, the form of therapy he has been adamantly attempting to fulfil is an

extension of the prescribed recitations he received in Khartoum. For 40 days and nights he is

to recite once again the ayattul kursi 1200 times each day.37 At the same time he must

absolutely abstain from breaking any religious taboos. If even on the 39th day he commits a

“small” haram, the therapy cannot be effective and the entire exercise must begin all over

again. During the times when he was attempting the individual ritual he was unreachable. It

clearly took up a great bulk of his time. Those periods of several weeks were filled with

suspense. Could he make it? Would he be healthy on the 41st day? Would a new Yahya, free

of his torturous Kumpel emerge ready to take on the world, full of optimism?

I had to briefly travel to Canada for two weeks in the fall of 2007. Before my

departure Yahya must have been doing well with his aurad. When we met the day before my

flight to Toronto he told me that when I return he would inshallah be healthy and that we

would one day write his full biography. Using the short break from Neukölln to re-structure

and begin to seriously plan the writing of this thesis, I was almost looking forward to working

extensively with him for a few days when back in Berlin. My hopes were to record some of

his narratives so that in this very chapter he could speak for himself. His hopes were not

fulfilled. When I returned he was nowhere to be found.

When we finally spoke on the telephone it was clear that the aurad therapy had failed.

Yahya was devastated. He said that he had bad news. I expected to hear of course that in the

later stages of the 40 days he had inadvertently done something to nullify the treatment. But

the “bad news” was that Yahya Pelle was no longer a Muslim. Nor was he any longer a

Burhani. He was angry with his sheikh and the entire organisation. The last time he had been

to the zawiya he had realised that from the very beginning he was being mocked by the others.

He had been going to the Thursday night meetings regularly in the last few months and it had

always been pleasant but at the end of it nobody there was empathetic enough to “hear him

out”. He felt that he had been ex-communicated: but for which reason? The answer is that

they hadn’t said anything to him at all and that there had not been any new incidents at the

zawiya. It was Yahya’s “heart” (or one element of a polyphony of inner voices?) which was

telling him this.

37 The emic term for the ritualised recitation of certain formulas and Koranic verse is aurad. Each Burhani tries to recite the canonised aurad passed down from Mohammad Uthman every day (Dresch 2004). Additional aurad may be prescribed for certain purposes such as here.

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He now had an important decision to make and he asked that I keep my distance and

not interfere in this pivotal moment. It should be clear what he was implying. It all came

down to not being able to abstain from certain harams. He was no longer a Muslim and he

had to decide now which avenue to take in choosing between life and death. The essential

thing for him was not to go to Bonny’s Ranch. He would rather die than return to the

hospital.

Going by his accounts of previous suicide attempts, this seemed real. The past

incidents did not sound like they had involved any pre-meditation. I was deeply concerned

but felt of course, obligated to respect his wishes. His last words to me in that conversation

was that the annual hawliya for Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim was taking place on the week-end

and that it would be a good idea to go. I can only re-capture the paradoxes and surreal

conversations I had during that weekend through the following journal entry from October,

2007:

I go to the Hawliya of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim on Weigandufer. He is the sheikh in Yahya’s heart, who speaks to him, tells him what to do. He is Yahya’s invisible healer and has saved his life on several occasions. On this weekend, when my informant is contemplating the end of his “life” (I don’t know if life is to be understood metaphorically here or not), his community is celebrating the death of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim. The event of his death is celebrated as a wedding would be. It is a joyous occasion. In Khartoum, the urs of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim clogs traffic and fills the streets. The procession through town attracts thousands, including sympathisers and onlookers. On this weekend, adepts have come from across Germany, France and also from Denmark.

I am asked upon arrival where I had left Yahya. I say that he’s at home and that part of the reason I had come was to talk to someone about him. No problem. It was going to be a long night and the celebrations would go on all weekend so there would be plenty of time. The Burhannis meet in a warehouse on the banks of the canal which connects Neukölln with Kreuzberg and the rest of Berlin by water. The occasion of Sheikh Maulana Ibrahim’s passing is also used as the setting for the engagement of a young German couple who were born into the Tariqa and who have known each other since childhood. There is as always, a huge meal and a lavish selection of deserts (all of them German cakes). There is little sign here of Yahya’s strict asceticism. There is drumming and singing in anticipation of the engagement ceremony. The future groom presents his bride to be with a ring. There is wild applause and the music resumes, this time escalating in intensity. Everyone, men and women, line up to congratulate the young couple. There are long and warm embraces. There is a kind of “spirituality” here which would touch even the most positivist sceptic.

I speak at greater length then with Yunus, who in this gathering is positioned in a dark corner, on top of a staircase on top of the hall where at least one hundred murid are celebrating. He is alone there on top of that staircase, cooking tea and coffee continuously for the whole group. We talk about Yahya. The suicide threat is nothing new: “He’ll come around soon inshallah”: Yunus too, is fighting with a djinn Yunus relates, presumably what he knows through the teachings of the sheikhs. All of humanity is inflicted with illness. Illness is a way in which we come closer to God. Without illness we could not become close to Allah. Different people are inflicted in different ways. One fifth of humanity is possessed. One fifth of humanity is “mad”. We all must fight these illnesses. It is each of our own responsibility to do so. This is the greater Jihad, the inner battle of which the prophet spoke after the Muslims had defeated the Makkan army: “Yahya and you and I belong to those people who are possessed”. So Yunus too, is possessed. He wears a taweez around his neck which protects him. It was given to him by the sheikh, with formulations and ayats encased in silver which are particularly relevant for his condition. He too sees himself as ill. I say” but you are fine. You have a good job and you function in society”. He works at a kindergarten and is certified in early childhood education. “ Yahya collects a disability pension”.

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But Yunus shows me his hands. They are covered in a disgusting red rash. It is so bad that he wears cycling gloves in order to hide it. It is to me recognisable as neurodyrmitis a common skin infection which inflicts millions of people, and in the bio-medical system is widely attributed to stress. But for Yunus, another German Burhanni, it is a symptom of possession. It is his djinn. He belongs to the one-fifth of all people who have a djinn. The djinn push people to evil. Lust. Another one fifth of humanity may be afflicted by melancholy. The only way to fight the Djinn is by keeping to the Shariah. He relates the time when Yahya had tried to jump out the window of the zawiya. The (invisible) sheikh saved his life through the actions of the brothers who were there. But Yahya turned the facts around: The brothers and the sheikh were trying to kill him, to throw him out the window. It was evidently Yahya’s djinn who was speaking there.

“Yahya should not complain. He’s got a roof over his head and the state takes care of him. In China, there are millions of Muslims who have lived under oppression for centuries. He did live in the GDR, in that atheistic regime, o.k., that’s hard and he had a difficult childhood with his parents but there are other people who have no parents at all. He is alone. He isn’t married. But what woman could possibly put up with his complaints? A woman can’t tolerate that. He hasn’t got a chance with women. Women are allowed to complain. They were made that way. The problem with Yahya is that he has never really been loved”.

Ironically, on the weekend where the life of Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim is ritually re-

lived and brought back into the present, the man who might embody the notion that the saints

do not die is absent. He is at home alone while Yunus, another possessed Burhani is isolated

from the rest of the gathering, up alone on top of the dark staircase. The intensely festive

atmosphere in the zawiya eclipses well the undercurrents of darkness which pervade my own

perceptions on this particular weekend.

Just as Yunus had predicted, Yahya slowly but surely came around. A short while

after the hawliya I went to the small family-run Turkish green grocer where he always does

his shopping. I had become acquainted with the owner as Yahya had urged me several times

to buy my groceries there instead of at the larger Turkish supermarkets that abound in

Neukölln. I asked if he had been around but they had not seen him for at least 10 days.

Yahya called me the next day with his usual extended greeting, sounding like the often

euphoric gentleman I had spent time with during the summer. The same man who in the

middle of Alexanderplatz broke into a spontaneous dhikr screaming “Allah Allah” at the top

of his lungs. The grocer had told him of my inquiries. It was as if nothing had happened. It

must have been the djinn speaking before the hawliya.

“El Hamdullilah, ich hab meine Rente und den Scheikh.”

Maulana Sheikh Ibrahim lives inside of Yahya. His room is dominated by a large

portrait of the sheikh. He commands Yahya to keep himself busy. It is he who tells him to do

my sewing and to spend time with me. The living disciple is a meticulous housekeeper. He

wastes nothing. In the spring and summer he gathers berries from the city’s bushes along the

banks of the canals and turns them into jam. One would be hardpressed to find anyone who

even knew that these berries were eatable. He often walks six kilometres a day but when he is

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busy with the aurad therapy he has little time for distraction. Unlike Tuhami, he does not go

to the cinema. He does not have a television and his only regular media source appears to be

the Islamische Zeitung.38 His social life is limited to Thursday night hadra gatherings. He

does not foster any contact to his mother and step-father.

Yahya’s disdain towards western psychiatry should be more than evident by now. His

condition from the bio-medical perspective should be quite clear as well. His illness is real.

It straddles perhaps two drastically different interpretations of one condition. On the one

hand, a Capitalist system that from his perspective simply drugs the patient to halt what would

be perceived as aural and visual hallucinations. He becomes dependant on the medication

which his sheikh forbids him to take. On the other hand, he is deeply locked into an

interpretation of Islam which is rooted in North-East Africa but has been adapted significantly

in the German context. The zawiya replaces the clinic. In the past, some of his fellow murids

had taken extensive amounts of time off of work in order to supervise him.

As we have seen in the previous chapters, there is a variety of alternative options

available in his very neighbourhood. After the failed aurad treatment in the fall, I began to

see it as an ethical responsibility to at the very least inform him of the possibilities some of

the healers in this study presented. It was by no means my intention to cast doubt on the

efficacy of his sheikh or his living representatives in Berlin. I did wonder though if Sheikh

Suleyman, Enes Hodja, or the Ottoman ambassador would be able to make a second

diagnosis. But these possibilities were not considered: “Ich habe meinen Scheich”. One

afternoon we were walking near my street when along came Sheikh Suleyman. I introduced

the two men whom I was secretly hoping would meet at some point: “Scheikh Suleyman, ich

habe schon sooo viel von Dir gehört. Wie geht es Dir?” The Rifa’i healer said that he was

tired and suffering from pains in the lower back. Yahya replied that it must be as a result of

all the baraka weighing down on his shoulders. The sheikh gave a somewhat confused look

and continued on his way.

A part of Yahya’s illness is the perception that he is under the surveillance of Wahabbi

Muslims39. The contrast between puritanical or modernist interpretations and his own Sufi

viewpoint might be expressed in this delusion. His paranoia is expressed once again through

division and past experiences living in a highly state-censored society. As when becoming a

Muslim in Pforzheim and the initial distrust towards Nureddin’s immediate invitation, here

the conviction of being followed by the Saudi secret police (or whoever it might be) is also

38 The Islamische Zeitung is the only German speaking Islamic newspaper and appears every three weeks. It is published by the Weimar Institut, a Sufi Order currently based in Potsdam. 39 The disdain with which Wahabbism sees sainthood, possession, and a great deal of healing activity should be pointed out here again. See Doumato (2002) for an extensive account.

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accredited to the fact that he comes from the “other side of the wall”. The very real reality of

STASI censorship in the former East is replaced by a different kind of enemy who sharply

contests the status and symbol of the sheikh. While both potential Wahabbi stalkers and

sheikh are invisible, to Yahya they are more than real40.

The Majzub Mama Ji Sarkar

The third figure in this chapter whose madness I contrast with Tuhami and Yahya is

Mama Ji Sarkar. Jürgen Frembgen (1999: 140-157), presents his life story in a hagiographic

manner. Mama Ji Sarkar’s behaviour resembles Yahya’s in some way. His illness is

however, embedded in a cultural context which raises the figure of the “divine fool” to saintly

status.

This particular majzub lived in Pakistan in the twentieth century. Since his death in

1991, his tomb has been enshrined and an entourage of disciples from his lifetime has

developed into a small circle of devotees. Mama Ji Sarkar is hence considered to be a pir, the

founder of a small and local cult which springs from the tradition of the qalandarriya.41

During the saint’s lifetime he was considered to be a beggar and a hashish addict. He

ran the streets of Rawalpindi in ecstatic states, shouting for example, “I am the “Qalandar of

God” (ibid. 143). Sometimes he was naked. His sainthood though is proven by karamat. He

was once arrested in one of his “enraptured” states but when the police vehicle could not start

and the tires burst into flames for no particular reason, the authorities “finally realised that

they had arrested a holy man” (ibid. 143). In his lifetime, the majzub was known for going

into ascetic phases of self-renunciation while at other times, he appeared to be “indulging in

gluttony and seeking the company of dancing girls and prostitutes” (ibid.144).

Not much is known about Mama Ji Sarkar’s youth, except that he spent a great deal of

time at the tomb of a local saint. There are no indications of a difficult childhood or any other

traumatic episodes. The saint never married and kept a vow of celibacy. Like Tuhami

though, he did keep the company of women but as Frembgen (ibid. 144) states: “the swing of

the pendulum between these extremes becomes clear in the cases where the saint proves his

resistance to feminine charms”. The majzub here is evidently a kind of liminal figure, who at

once defies social convention while upholding the notion of baraka. He is neither an insider 40 He later rationalised his paranoia of Wahabbis by pointing out that he was suicidal in Khartoum and that some fanatics had caught on. He believes that the fundamentalists are seeking him out as “cannon fodder”. In other words, they are trying to recruit him as a suicide bomber. 41 The Qalandarriya are a brotherhood known for their disregard of religious taboos. They are seen as hashish addicts by the orthodoxy (see Pratt-Ewing 1996).

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nor an outsider. He is in permanent hal (ecstatic state) and thereby cannot be expected to

perform, contribute and integrate in conventional social life. This is also reflective of the fact

that majzub are exempted from religious duties. Mama Ji Sarkar was cared for by his

followers who for instance, rented a room on his behalf (ibid. 142). When living in the wild,

he survived through the donations of “villagers and city-dwellers” (ibid. 145).

Although the permanent condition of Majzub Mama Ji Sarkar is seen positively and

upheld through his devotees after his death, it is nevertheless clear that the “fool of God”42 is

considered in some sense, to be ill. Structurally, he is treated in a similar way that Yahya is

through his pension. The latter is not expected to perform in society either. The difference is

though, that Yahya is simply considered to be mentally ill. He has his own symbols to

articulate his experience but for the most part, his demon and his saint are foreign concepts

which even to most Muslims are entities which bare no real psychological weight. It is

possible that in Pakistan, Yahya would be treated differently because of his charisma and

intricate connection to worlds unseen by the majority of people:

Advocates of Western orthodox biomedicine might suggest as a diagnosis that many majzubs are actually schizophrenics, hysterics, epileptics or autistics. Beyond the questionable transfer of Western medical concepts and terms to another culture, what such diagnosis misses are the emic perspectives on charismatic ‘possession’. In the Islamic world, a majzub means a person being in a permanent state of ecstasy and divine emotion, in most cases enraptured since birth, but sometimes in response to dramatic visions or far-reaching experiences of the soul (ibid. 145).

Could Yahya’s illness not be interpreted under the same framework? It is quite clear

that his condition is not completely dominated by the same kinds of ecstatic states that Mama

Ji Sarkar was seen to be in all the time. Yahya’s suicidal episodes certainly would pay tribute

to this. But Yahya lives alone, while Mama Ji Sarkar was, at least in later years, constantly

surrounded by people. Yahya was called majzub but his sheikh has told him of his sanctity.

It is clear that Yahya’s state has been affected by a deeply troublesome past. His djinn is

almost inevitably a reflection of the tumultuous relationship with his mother. Mama Ji Sarkar

comes from a family which shares access to such symbols. In fact, his mother supplicated at

the tomb of a powerful saint while pregnant with him who told her the name of her future son

(ibid. 142).

The problem in Yahya’s case is that the society he lives in lacks access to the symbols

which are prevalent in the Punjabi context. Concepts such as djinn and sheikh have

penetrated his consciousness through an “imported” Sufi tradition. Yet the underlying

conflicts are much deeper than that. He, like Mama Ji Sarkar did for most of youth, lives in

isolation. While the Pakistani majzub spent time in the wilderness convening with the

42 Frembgen (1999: 143) points out that „fools of God“ were also venerated in Christianity as well as Hinduism.

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animals, Yahya wanders through the parks of Berlin picking berries which are not known to

be edible. He goes through episodes in which he spends the bulk of his time in meditative

aurad while Majzub Mama Ji Sarkar did the same. Of course, had Yahya actually have been

able to “fly” out of the window of the zawiya he might also have been ascribed with karamat

and a circle of followers might have developed around him. His expressive way of living out

divine emotions on the streets of Berlin would be one indication, at least in Pakistan, of his

sainthood.

Yet Yahya is trapped. The polyphony of voices which command his consciousness

are conflicted. The sheikh, the djinn, his bio-medical doctors and the Wahabbis each have

different things to say. Mama Ji Sarkar on the other hand is not considered to have a djinn.

His illness is, in Frembgen’s account, received positively by society. Even the police are

convinced of his sanctity. Yahya’s own conclusion about his condition is that he is a saint.

The secular societies in which he has lived lack even a firm notion of what that is. Hence he

is torn between the psychiatric clinic, the zawiya and the confines of his own apartment. It is

when he tires from each of these settings or when he can no longer make the distinction of

which voice is saying what that he falls into suicidal depressions and loses his personal jihad.

Like in Tuhami’s case, djinn and sheikh co-exist in a dualism which is at once a battle

and a symbiosis. The former however, lives in a society in which such concepts, have at least

carried a great amount of meaning in the past. Aisha Qandisha’s name is known by many of

the people in his milieu. There is a socially recognised form of treatment for her victims,

which Tuhami refuses. Yahya’s cultural background is ambivalent in itself. Having grown

up in an atheistic, communist regime and still coming to terms with the current, secular

Federal Republic, he is then also a member of a tariqa which seems to view spirit possession

as rampant in society but does not seek compromise. His passive fatalism is very similar to

Tuhami’s. He is at the command of the voices from within. In the end, he is left in isolation.

8. Cultural Constructions of Mental Illness

The preceding chapter compared three precariously situated men, all of them Muslims,

living in three different cultures. Not surprisingly, the ways in which seemingly quite similar

illnesses are interpreted in each context were found to differ greatly. Subsequently, the social

positioning of each of the three men is almost dramatically different. To conclude this paper,

I embark on a discussion on mental illness in Islam, and its social implications. The apparent

rift and conflict between “traditional” healing and bio-medicine is of great relevance here. As

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a point of departure, I begin with the statement that “what is needed in modern health care

systems, in developing and developed societies, is systematic recognition and treatment of

psychosocial and cultural features of illness” (Kleinman 1980: 363).

In scientific discourse, the rift between bio-medicine and indigenous or faith healing is

also a constructed one:

Early on, Biomedicine was the reality in terms of which other medical systems, professional or popular, were implicitly compared and evaluated. Like science, Western medicine was assumed to be a-cultural - beyond the influence of culture - while all other medical systems were assumed to be so culturally biased that they had little or no scientific relevance (Gaines et al. 2003: 1).

Studies have shown that in societies where the existence of parallel worlds inhabited

by djinn, angels, saints, elves, etc., many, if not most people use both the bio-medical system

as well as indigenous healing rituals. Lisa Mackenrodt (2006) has shown this to be the case

on the Swahili Coast. Incidentally, it is there were notions of unseen worlds are more widely

upheld that more pluralistic medical systems develop. Germany in itself may be known for its

medical diversity (homeopathy is financed by most health insurance companies) but it is safe

to say that generally, the society does not hold to a collective belief in unseen worlds. The

kinds of healing systems in this study hence are not reflective of society at large (including

most Muslims themselves) but we have seen that most of the patients here consult the sheikh

or the djinn hodja parallel to treatment in the bio-medical realms of psychiatry or psycho-

analyses.

It will not be possible to engage in an in depth discussion on the role of psychiatry in

spirit possession or related phenomena. I will however, adress some key issues in order to put

some of the material presented in this thesis into perspective. Anthropology and other

sciences have often attempted to look at for example, shamanism under the psychiatric frame

of reference. The indigenous healer, like the majzub, was often seen as being epileptic,

schizophrenic, hysteric, severly neurotic or simply insane. Shamanism, under this paradigm

is “regularly perceived as an institutionalised madhouse for primitives” (Lewis 2003: 160)

and “spirit possession and shamanism have also been viewed as a pre-scientific psycho-

therapy” (ibid. 172). The pathological approach was even upheld by the father of ethno-

psychiatry, Georges Devereaux, who “thus considers that there is no reason and no excuse for

not considering the shaman to be a severe neurotic or even a psychotic” (quoted in Lewis

2003: 162).

Counter arguments were in the past provided by scholars such as Eliade (1951), who

emphasised the shaman’s psychological condition as having been stabilised after earlier bouts

of illness which were eventually mastered through control of the spirits or ancestors. The

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classic work on shamanism looked rather at the meanings and implications of the shaman’s

journey through underworlds and unseen dimensions. As Frembgen (1999) argued,

considering majzubs as untreated schizophrenics, epileptics, etc., misses the point. In the

quest for meaning, the pathological approach hardly does justice. In the case of Yahya, bio-

medicine fails because it does not consider the world-view of the patient, or at best, lacks

access to its symbolic structure. The approach of Eliade or Frembgen might be echoed and

relativised in the following statement:

How then do we take the suggestion that psychosis may generate alternative world views which at times become more generally accepted: a resurrection of Laing’s assertion that schizophrenia is not a break-down but a break-through? My point is that from a more distanced perspective, schizophrenia is neither. To say that one or the other is true is equally arbitrary, depending not on the biological or social data in themselves but on a particular culturally embedded point of view. Schizophrenia, like left-handedness or dsyschromic spirochaetosis, can be perceived in a variety of ways depending on our frame of reference, our personal identification and sympathies, our compelling social urgencies (Littlewood 1998: 58-59).

Schizophrenia or other forms of mental illness are hence cultural constructions, even if

they are well grounded in objective, biological research. In their rather harsh criticism of the

Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) “have suggested that the conceptual apparatus

and practices of psychiatry and psychoanalysis are a repressive structure that reproduces the

constraints of a capitalist order” (Pratt-Ewing 1999: 181)

The anti-pathological approach then, seeks to find the possibilities within the majzub or the

shaman’s state:

So what does it mean to be majzub, to have one’s mind “burned by God”? For me, for now, it means to be able to step outside of the confines of a restrictive social order, the confines of a Symbolic Order organized in terms of an array of hegemonic discourses, and to represent the opening up of infinite possibilities through the acknowledgement of that which in other circumstances is abjected, dismissed as disgusting, polluted, childish, dangerous (ibid. 180).

It is only there where the schizophrenic is seen as such that bio-medical treatment can

be effective. Medical doctors hold a status not all that unsimiliar to the charismatic,

“traditional” healer. White uniforms, numerous degrees and a stack of books in the office

speak for his or her efficacy. In considering the placebo effect, framed ijazas and other

theological certificates in the healers’ rooms lend the same aura of legitimacy and

effectiveness.

The modal developed by Arthur Kleinman (1980) still provides, in my mind, the best

possible solution in bridging the gaps between bio-medicine, systems of healing such as the

ones presented in this study, and local as well as wider Islamic beliefs. The anthropologically

trained psychiatrist identifies clearly three distinct but related spheres of reality related to

illness: 1) psychological reality which is comprised of the inner world of the patient, 2)

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biological reality which is strictly related to organic and/or chemical imbalances and 3)

physical reality, comprised of “the material structures and spaces making up the non-human

environment (Kleinman 1980: 41). He furthermore divides so-called social reality into two

elements: social reality per se, and symbolic reality which has a bridging function “that links

the social and cultural world with psychological and biological reality” (ibid. 41).

Kleinman’s lenghty account of Chinese medicine in urban Taiwan shows the ways in

which patients are healed in one sense, at Taoist shrines while undergoing western-based

psychiatric treatment which they often deem as irrelevant to their needs. What the bio-

medical system (which in Germany and much of the world is the most socially accepted form

of treatment) cannot do is to construct and maintain bridges in the individual’s symbolic

world:

That is, symbolic reality enables individuals to make sense out of their inner experience. It helps shape personal identity in accordance with social and cultural norms. In this view, symbolic meanings influence basic psychological processes, such as attention, state of consciousness, perception, cognition, affect, memory, and motivation (Kleinman 1980: 42).

The quest for meaning then is lost when the voices are simply silenced through

medication. A patient such as Yahya might find relief here but in terms of personal

development, the road to long-term healing might lead to a dead-end. I suspect that this is the

reason why his djinn loves medication so much while the sheikh forbids it.

Kleinman’s notion of “clinical reality”, which is “social reality that expresses and

constitutes clinical phenomena and which itself is clinically constructed” (1980: 42) can be

transferred onto any one kind of system of healing. Mama Ji Sarkar’s clinical reality is the

community which develops around him, providing him with accomodation and care. In

Berlin, Yahya is torn between the clinical reality of the bio-medical system (i.e, Bonny’s

Ranch) and the possession concepts of his tariqa (i.e, the zawiya). Neither of these settings

are completely satisfactory. What Yahya desperatly seeks is an interpretation of his illness

experience. Transferring Kleinman’s model onto Yahya’s personal reality:

biological reality = chemical inbalance, schizophrenicpsychological reality = djinn possession, polyphony of contested voicessocial reality = marginalised, erwerbsunfähig, tariqa as surrogate family

The shaman, majzub, possessed patient or healer, might all very well be afflicted with

one bio-medical condition or another. This might be of little relevance in cultural contexts

where such individuals have the possibility of breaking through social orders or constructing

new and counter-hegemonic world views all together.

lxxxi

Foucault (1965) has shown how since the Middle Ages, insanity was gradually

redefined from a marginal or liminal position in Europe to full fledged mental illness, leading

to the birth of the modern psychiatric clinic:

To silence, to recognition in the mirror, to perpetual judgement, we must add a fourth structure peculiar to the world of the asylum as it was constituted at the end of the eighteenth century: this is the apotheosis of the medical personage. Of them all, it is doubtless the most important, since it would authorize not only new contacts between doctor and patient, but a new relation between insanity and medical thought, and ultimately command the whole modern experience of madness. Hitherto, we find in the asylums only the same structures of confinement, but displaced and deformed. With the new status of the medical personage, the deepest meaning of confinement is abolished: mental disease, with the new meanings we now give it, is made possible (Foucault 1965: 270).

As bio-medical hegemony took hold more and more, gradually the patient became

confined to only one kind of status. Religious interpretations of illness (simliar to the ones

still found in Pakistan today) have lost significance through reason and modernity. Can

Yahya’s particular disdain towards the dominant clinical reality be seen then as a counter-

hegemonic statement or even an outright rebellion?

The Trans-Cultural Approach

The situation in Germany is not all that unpromising. As I mentioned earlier, patients

at the Urbankrankenhaus in Kreuzberg are referred to a reputable Turkish healer when the

notion of possession comes into play. At the Klinikum Charité (the Humboldt University

hospital), a German doctor and a Turkish psychiatrist form a joint team in cases where

Muslim (primarily Turkish ) patients themselves suspect to be possessed or influenced by

djinn. Their approach combines psycho-analyses with cultural aspects but the standpoit is

dictated by conventional norms (see Wohlfahrt/Özbek 2006). Following Devereux (1978),

possession is seen as a culturally specific defence mechanism towards external influences

(Wohlfahrt/Özbek 2006: 127). A case study is presented in which a woman of Turkish

migrant origin seeks access to her symbolic possession complex through the “open doors” of

the trans-cultural team. It became clear after the initial consultation that the woman’s

symptoms had been interpreted as djinn interference by a turkish hodja. The woman was

concerned as to whether the team would be able to communicate with and eliminate the spirit.

Having been pressured into marriage during adolesence, she blamed the djinn for her

deficiencies as a housewife. The doctors give the following interpretation:

Durch die konsequente Deutung der Geister als abgespaltene und verdrängte Gefühle und Bedürfnisse gelang es, dass die Patientin zunehmend ihre eigene Bedürfnisse wahrnehmen und verbalisieren konnte, ohne diese abspalten und externalisieren zu müssen, und dass sie in einen konstruktiv aggressiven Dialog mit ihrem Ehemann treten konnte. Dies führte dazu, dass ihr Ehemann mehrmals sagte, in ihrem besessenen Zustand sei sie für ihn erträglicher gewesen (ibid. 125).

lxxxii

Emic concepts are evidently interpreted under dominant psychiatric paradigms. The

doctors’ success is attributed to this trans-cultural approach. The turkish doctor, dismissing

notions of djinn as pure superstition, was at first reluctant to consider the individual’s

symbolic and psychologial reality. The German doctor, recognising the need for quick

treatment of her young daughter (which was placing additional burden on the patient) was

more prepared to come to a compromise in encountering the spirits. While the team came to

their conclusions by analysing the patient’s life history, it is questionable as to whether the

patient’s symbolic reality has been adequatly interpreted. It should be clear by now that

possession cannot be dismissed as superstition. The trans-cultural approach still upholds the

dominant bio-medical paradigm in that perhaps it fails to see possession as “reality”.

It is worth pointing out that the patient from the case study above is of Turkish

background and spirit concepts in that context may not be as impregnated with imagery and

symbolism as in African possession cults. Hence coming to a symbiotic relationship with the

spirit is difficult. Yahya’s case has shown however, that even a djinn with no name and no

identity carries enough symbolic meaning to come a descriptive analysis in revealing the

social meanings of possession in the local context. The field of trans-cultural psychiatry has

grown in recent years with publications such as Curare, but there is a decisive void in the

descriptive interpretation of such phenomena as spirit possession.

Modern Islam, Bio-Medicine and illness

I have shown in this paper that to some extent, distinctions between modern Islam and

folk religion are constructed. We have seen one example of a healer who hardly fits into such

rubrics and indeed combines modern technology with prophetic medicine. Yet the discourses

within Islam are sharply contested when it comes to spirit possession and the healing systems

associated with it. The Wahabbi movement (the definition of Islamic “modernity” perhaps),

judges the veneration of saints, and any healing activity which transcends firmly laid out

shariah guidelines as polytheism and therefore apprehensible. It is difficult to find any

perspectives whatsoever from the secularist Turkish religious ministry (Diyanet) or its Milli

Görüs counterpart. I hope that this paper has been able to illustrate some of these rifts.

Yahya’s imagined (or real) Wahhabi stalkers are in a very surreal sense symbolic of this. At

the same time, the Sehitlik mosque owes its existence to the historical event of Ali Aziz’s

burial but few know of the healing attributes ascribed to the column by certain isolated Sufis,

if indeed the saint himself holds any significance at all.

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A prerequisite for the legitimacy of healers under the hegemonic discourse of for

example, the Saudi ulema, is that they be “proper Muslims”. What this means of course, is

highly variable in itself:

When asked if a pir I had met was a fraud, I found that revealing interchanges occurred when I responded by asking, “How would I know if this pir were a fraud?” The answers I received made explicit the criteria by which people judged the legitimacy of pirs and often revealed nuances of ideological positioning. Variations in usage are associated with different positions in the struggle over interpretations of shari’at (Pratt-Ewing 1997: 110).

The kind of conflicted ideological backdrop upon which a healer such as Sheikh

Suleyman (being of Alevi persuasion) works, can be illustrated here. He might not be

considered legitimate in the views of many Muslims. Moreover, he works under the tutelage

of Khidr, a figure who in himself is controversial in modernity (Franke 2000: 361-365). Yet

for his patients this holds little or no significance. A Muslim bio-medical, psychiatric

approach states the following:

Magie und Zauber sind als Phänomene zwar existent, allerdings nicht in dem Sinne, dass es sie eine objektive Wirkung haben, sondern in der Weise, dass der Glaube daran viel Konfusion und Unheil stiftet und zu Täuschung, Betrug und Suggestion verleitet, indem mit den Ängsten der Menschen gespielt wird. (Laabdallaoui/Rüschoff 2005: 37)

This perspective goes on to state that:

Ob der Psychiater der Meinung ist, dass die Medikamente die Überträgerstoffe in den Gehirnzellen und dadurch eine schizophrene Symptomatik beeinflussen, oder ob eine Patienten der Meinung ist, dass durch die Medikamente der Einfluss des Dschinns oder des „bösen Blickes“ vermindert werden kann, ist so lange von untergeordneter Wichtigkeit, wie der Patient die notwendige Medikation einnimmt (ibid. 38).

Finally, provided that the healer is perceived to be a “good Muslim” and avoids any

kinds of “magic” practices from outside of Islam:

Es kann daher durchaus therapieentscheidend sein, den Kontakt einer Patientin zu einem Hodscha nicht abzulehnen, da dieser Einfluss auf Ressourcen der Patientin hat, zu denen die Therapeutin selbst keinen Zugang findet (ibid. 224).

The superiority of Western psychiatry is made quite clear by these scientists. While

the efficacy of the hodja is not completely left out of question, this decisively modernist

viewpoint certainly posits itself above Koran-based therapy, relegating it once again to

superstition. It is quite similar to the statements of the atheist, Turkish psychologist in the

documentary discussed earlier. It was also seen there that in modern orthodoxy, illness and

possession are interpreted as divine punishment while coming to any kind of agreement with

the spirits is deemed as polytheism.

Conclusion

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So where does all of this leave Yahya? In the context of Berlin, there are few

possibilities for a “break-through” to occur. His djinn might legitimise his bizarre behaviour

in the tariqa context but to dominant German society (to which he also belongs) he is an

untreated paranoid schizophrenic. In a society as complex and multi-faceted as contemporary

Germany with a now ever-growing Muslim population that is so divided upon ethnic and

ideological lines, the possessed individual, whether schizophrenic, epileptic, depressed or not,

is left to his or her own devices in coming to a deeper understanding of personal affliction.

Presumably with medication the voices would be halted, the Wahabbis would disappear, and

the possibilities which his case presents would be left unnoticed. The meanings behind the

delusions would not be interpreted. Yahya would find relief but the root of his affliction,

which is social as well as biological would be left untouched. I believe that in a case such as

his, not one but several systems of healing would be necessary in attaining long-lasting health.

As I write the final sentences of this paper, he has decided to search for open doors in

the healing systems presented earlier. After meeting a Haqqani murid recently, his new

acquaintance had arranged for him to consult with the disputed sheikh of the Neukölln Neo-

Ottoman association. Yahya quickly called off the meeting when shortly thereafter he was

told by someone else that this healer was not a legitimate sheikh. In the end, the contested

discourses which surround Koran-based healing, bio-medicine, and spirit possession only

leave the doors closed for the people who are truly affected.

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Glossary: (terms are from Arabic unless otherwise indicated)

alim: formal religious scholar

aurad: Set formulations

baraka: Blessing, divine favour, spiritual power

bida: innovation in religious matters

büyü (turkish): black magic curse

dhikr: Sufi ritual in which certain divine names and formulas are repeated. It is performed communally as well as individually

djinn: unseen spirit beings of Islam, forming parallel societies to human ones

djinniya: female djinn

fena fi sheikh: state in which Sufi is annihilated in the sheikh

hadra: communal Sufi dhikr ritual in the form of dance

hal: state of spiritual ecstasy, trance

haram: religous taboo

hawliya: Sufi commemoration of a saint’s passing, same as Persian urs.

hodja (turkish): see alim

ijaza: authorization to teach Sufism or to heal.

jihad: divine struggle, either within oneself (greater jihad) or in warfare (lesser jihad)

karamat: miraculous feats of saints, divine intervention

majub: one who is insane, “burnt by Allah” and therefore ou

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marabout: North West African term for saint or healer

maulana : Sufi master

murid: Sufi adept

muharram: sacred month (especially for Shiites) commemorating the massacre at Kerbala

murshid: Sufi teacher, can be a representative of a higher sheikh

qasida: Sufi devotional song and poetry

ruqya: literally, “spiritual doctor”

sahaba: companions and family members of the prophet

shahada: the verbal profession of Muslim faith. Converts tend to refer to their conversion to Islam as “speaking shahada”.

shariah: divine law or moral code, based on Koran and sunnah

sheikh: Sufi master or pir, honorific title

shirk: polytheism, infedelity

silsila: Sufi chain of spiritual descent, usually starting with the prophet and continuing through to the founding pir and current sheikh of each tariqa

sunnah: secondary source of Islamic jurisprudence, the life and customs of the prophet and his companions

tariqa: Sufi path or organisation

taweez: koranic amulet

ulema: governing body of religious scholars, especially in legalistic matters. There is no centralised body today

ummah: global Muslim community or nation

qutb: major saint, “pillar”

zawiya: Sufi lodge or gathering place, often including tombs of deceased sheikhs

ziyaret: visit to Sufi shrine or tomb

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II

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