Video: The Passions of Aisha: Women, Trauma, and Jinn Possession in Morocco

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: The Passions of Aisha. Women, Trauma, and Jinn Possession in Morocco, April 4, 2024. 

ANN BRAUDE: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for another Women's Studies in Religion program lecture. Before I introduce today's speaker, I just want to remind you that we'll have our last lecture for the year, two weeks from today, on April 18, when Professor Ashley Purpura will be presenting her work in Christian Orthodox feminist theology, which we look forward to. 

But today, I'm very pleased to introduce Professor Fareen Parvez from the University of Massachusetts, where she is an associate professor in the Sociology Department. She is the author of politicizing Islam, the Islamic revival in France and India, which appeared from Oxford University Press in 2017. 

And the project that she's working on, that she's going to be presenting today, has also been recognized by a fellowship at the very prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In addition to her outstanding scholarship, Fareen is a dedicated activist, scholar and public intellectual. 

Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Salon, The Guardian and LA Times, and she works particularly on economic justice and debt justice. She writes with the debt justice working group of the progressive international and for various community and activist organizations. But today, she will be presenting her work in progress, fresh off the press, on the Passions of Aisha, Women, Trauma and Jinn Possession in Morocco. Fareen. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Great. Thank you so much, everyone. Can you hear me? OK, great. Well, thank you all for being here. I feel like I need to apologize for the weather. Yes, I'm sorry for the sleet and the high winds. It's an honor to give this talk. 

And I want to thank Ann and Tracy Wall for organizing things and my brilliant cohort of sister scholars over at the carriage house and, most recently, my wonderful students in my seminar this semester-- Ryan is one of them-- who've been wrestling with some big questions with me. 

Questions, like what does it mean to share agency with a spirit, to what degree are humans responsible for their madness and their behaviors or their sins, why does God make it so hard for some people and not for others, and how do we struggle with our own souls in a world of intense suffering? 

So my students have been kindly engaging me, as we raised these questions, but never answer them. These are the sorts of questions that are embedded in my research, more broadly, in the subject of possession. So what I'm going to present right now is some qualitative research I did in Fez, Morocco on the topic of jinn possession. 

We can think more broadly of spirit possession. The focus of this talk is on the relationship between gender and possession. This will hopefully be a standalone article that will then feed into a book project. It is a work in progress, and it's a relatively new area for me, so I'm looking forward to your feedback. 

So I titled this talk the Passions of Aisha. It's a play on the name of the famous or infamous female jinn in Morocco, named Aisha Qandicha. Not all jinns are known or have names, but she is one of them and, perhaps, the most well known in the North African context. 

Her origins as a mythological creature, unclear. I've seen a few different theories. One that she was a slave woman in the Sudan, another that she was an ancient Carthaginian goddess. And then others have argued that she was actually a Moroccan woman who fought against Portuguese colonizers. 

In any case, she is playful, vengeful, seductive, cruel, nurturing and unpredictable. She possessed a number of my interlocutors who struggle with their passions and their traumas, some of which are caused by her. I'm going to start with an ethnographic vignette that takes place in an Islamic healing clinic. 

This type of healing is called ruqya al shariya or ruqya. And it consists basically of Quranic recitation, where the practitioner recites Arabic prayers and chapters of the Quran to someone who presents as afflicted with something or possibly possessed by a jinn. 

In Islamic theology, jinns exist as a parallel race. They are invisible. They are made of smokeless fire. They have genders and religions and families. They live much, much longer than humans. Some are malevolent, some are good, and some are just tricksters. 

So the existence of jinns is not controversial in Muslim societies because there is a Quranic basis for them. Whether or not they actually impact our world or enter our bodies and possess us is another story and tends to be more controversial. So Nadia is a 23-year-old woman. 

She lives at home with her family, and she chose to drop out of school as a teenager. She, accompanied by her mother, has been going to ruqya clinics and many other healers for a few months for what they believe is jinn possession. Like in many cases of possession, her symptoms are ambiguous. 

She often feels sick. She gets very bloated in her abdomen. She has fear and insomnia at night and, sometimes, acts out in a wild manner. She is engaged to be married, but her marriage is getting delayed because of her sickness. She said she's scared that her marriage will end in divorce very quickly, like within weeks, if she marries while she still has a jinn. 

Her fiancé is not aware that she's had this problem for about five years. So I saw Nadia a couple of times at different clinics. The second time was in this healing space of Sheikh Yusuf, who was one of my main interlocutors, and he has been practicing ruqya al shariya for about 20 years. 

So as is customarily done in the clinics that I saw, Nadia lay down on a mattress on the floor. Her mother, dressed in a ragged djellaba, which is a traditional Moroccan dress. Myself and my research assistant, Amina, were in the room. Sheikh Yusuf began reciting. 

And within seconds, Nadia's jinn started screaming and howling. Yusuf poked her gently above her chest with a stick. This is an indirect form of touch and a reminder that this ritual is based on a connection between souls, in this case, between Yusuf and Nadia. 

The jinn screamed, "no." She was rolling on the mattress, and the jinn pleaded, "Stop. I'm choking," which was a common phrase that I heard. When the recitation and the ritual stops, Yusuf talks to her and prescribes some herbs, some oils, and an order to listen on audio to dulzura al-baqarah, which is the second chapter from the Quran every morning and night. 

However, he was not convinced that Nadia even had a jinn. And what was most interesting in this vignette, to me, was the conversation between Sheikh Yusuf, Nadia, and Nadia's mother. And what follows is a condensed version of that. So Yusuf says, "Nadia, come closer to me. What do you do?" 

"Nothing. I'm just at home." "Do you go to school?" "No, I dropped out." "Have you done anything since then?" "I haven't done anything." "Well, this is a problem, staying home with nothing to do. I see that you have energy, so you must learn to use it. You have dreams and wishes in life. 

When you stop school, you'll become lazy and lose your self-confidence. You will suffer. Tell me, what do you suffer from?" "I wake up in the middle of the night and scream." "Do you do dhikr practices of remembrances of God before bed?" "Yes, but not very much." 

"Are you happy with your life, especially at home?" "Yes." "Are you sure?" "Well, I get angry easily with my brothers and mother." Then her mother finally interjects. "Well, she wakes up screaming and tries to leave the house. Once, she woke me up and tried to strangle me." 

"Does she know what she's doing?" "No." "Do you pray. Nadia?" "I just started praying." "Beautiful. Your hijab and prayer will protect you from the devil and from jinns. Be sure to do dhikr and listen to the Quran. But try to do something fun for yourself. Do something to keep yourself busy. Go back to school. Help people." 

The mother says, "But it's obvious, she has a jinn." "Well, how do you know?" "I see it with my eyes." "Nadia, do you get scared?" "Yes." "You should train yourself to be patient and not anger so easily. When you are scared, you get angry. Anger is from the devil and can open you to possession. 

I can still treat you, but you can cure yourself. I think this is a psychological problem." The mother says, "No. My daughter was a victim of black magic. When the jinn takes her, she speaks like a man." "This is her own subconscious mind. You're making things worse by insisting she has a jinn. 

She's not happy with herself and needs some activities." The mother says, "But Si Azzedine, a different ruqya healer in the city, and another fqih, a religious healer, said she has a jinn." "Why are you trusting these people? People are always using others to make money. 

People are always citing the evil eye or black magic, but they never say God is the most powerful, and so I am protected." Amina, my research assistant, interjects. "Nadia, speak. Don't feel shy." "There's a lady who comes at night and tries to sleep next to me, but I'm awake." 

"These are dreams." "But I was awake." "These are just normal dreams. I don't think Nadia is sick. If she wants to be happy, she has to make herself happy." So there's a lot going on in this one vignette, and it touches on many of the themes that I'm thinking about. 

So here, we have a young woman, navigating both the care and tension in her family. She has a very ambivalent relationship to marriage, desiring it, but fearing it. At the same time, she was trying to become pious, but she was not necessarily raised with strict religious practice, nor was she able to read the Quran for herself because of her poor literacy. 

She has an active dream life, like many of my interlocutors, with a touch of ambiguity around gender and sexuality. Why was she, in a half dream state, seeing a woman who wanted to sleep next to her? And then we have Sheikh Yusuf, an Islamic healer of possession, who didn't believe this young woman was actually possessed and told her so. 

So defying the stereotypes of a strict Islamic healer, he cautions her against assuming jinn possession, against trusting the many alternative healers eager to exploit people. And he wants her to come into her own agency and trust her own voice. This was a man who was, in fact, imprisoned by the Moroccan government, accused of promoting a dangerous form of sectarian Islam. 

But I saw him multiple times, seeking to empower the women who came to see him. But Nadia and her mother were not very happy with Sheikh Yusuf's advice and opinion. They were both adamant that she had a jinn. If only Yusuf could more effectively communicate with this jinn and convince him to leave Nadia alone. 

In the meantime, she continues to suffer. So leaving aside the ontological question of whether jinn possession is real, which I'll come back to at the end of this talk, we are left with a number of sociological questions. And in this talk, I'm asking straightforwardly, in what ways is possession a profoundly gendered phenomenon? 

And in what ways is the healing of possession gendered, but not always in the ways we might expect? My argument is that jinns, in my case study, bear witness to trauma, both their own and that of humans, or are an expression of a wound or what has been called in the literature, the wound of patriarchy. 

For women, especially, these are gender violence, betrayal, and loss. Jinns are also the manifestation of unfulfilled desire, lack of love or marriage, poverty and lack of work. Jinns are centrally tied to gender relations, as they possess men, too, and as they transgress gender boundaries, allowing the expression of wishes that go beyond our gender categories. 

So the connection I'm making to trauma and bearing witness is not original. And there are several others I could be citing here. It's a variation on conclusions that other scholars have come to over decades. What is novel in my research are my observations of a wide range of healing practices, including the relatively recent profession of ruqya. 

So I've complicated diagram here. In Morocco, we have healers who have practiced the arts of divination and sorcery over centuries. And these are typically women. Sometimes, they work with healers and musicians, who perform trance rituals as a form of healing. 

And these are called Lila ceremonies. They happen all night. I've been to a few of them. They treat jinn affliction by working with jinns and trying to appease them rather than evict them or defeat them. Appeasing them might mean animal sacrifice or wearing certain clothing and participating in these Lila ceremonies. 

And the seers tend to be women. They're mostly women. Then, there are healers who work with the Quran, but they provide amulets and talismans. Most of these are men and the term is fqih. And then we have the raqis, the practitioners of ruqya, who assert religious legitimacy over these other forms of healing, accusing them of [NON-ENGLISH] or polytheism. 

They tend to be men, and their goal, generally, is to evict the jinns rather than please them. So there's a hierarchy of legitimacy of healing practices. And we can think of this spectrum as one that goes from struggling against jinns to surrendering to them. 

On the surface, ruqya is a male dominated field, but I'm going to show how it's not actually that simple. So I'm going to illustrate four different themes. Number one, how gender relations are navigated in the space of ruqya, in a way that really defies easy stereotypes of a masculine domain and profession. 

Number two, how jinns speak the wounds of patriarchal violence. Third, how they also speak to a broader relationship, conflicts, and traumas around love, desire, and betrayal. And finally, how jinns transgress gender binaries and also express men's trauma, which are often intertwined with the traumas of the women in their lives. 

So my questions and analysis are intimately in dialogue with decades of anthropological and medical anthropology research on the topic of spirit possession. And one of the most prominent themes has to do with gender, as it's almost universally accepted in the literature that women tend to fall into possession more frequently than men and, in some societies, at pretty high percentages, like 10% to 40% of women in a given village. 

So communities, where possession occurs, have argued that spirits are attracted to women's life cycle transitions around puberty, menstruation, sexuality and childbirth, and therefore, that women are more vulnerable. But at the same time, it's also said that women are closer to the divine. 

So perhaps, the most common argument in the literature has been that spirit possession serves as a form of resistance against patriarchal injustices. Possession compensates for a lack of authority. It allows negotiations with husbands, a channeling of anger in oppressive kinship relations. 

In some cases, it might protect a woman from domestic violence. Scholars often depicted possession as a conscious strategy by women in other work, and more recent work has challenged this notion that these are conscious decisions. And there's also the idea that possession places agency and blame on external figures, meaning the spirits. 

So, for example, the jinn becomes responsible for a woman's infertility, and then the whole family or community becomes implicated in the problem and the cure rather than the individual woman. And then more recent work has shown how spirit healers offer a place of refuge for gender non-conforming individuals. 

Or it complicates gender boundaries when you are possessed by an oppositely gendered spirit. The notion of resistance, again, undergirds some of this literature. There are critiques of interpreting possession as resistance, something that's especially loaded in the case of Islamic studies, where there's this entrenched assumption, always, that Muslim women are seeking release from their religious lives or their families. 

Saba Mahmood, in her pathbreaking book, had respectfully critiqued Janice Boddy's work on the Sudan writing, "Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will or other obstacles, whether individual or collective. 

And indeed, it's not always clear that this is what women are consciously saying or desire. So the theme of resistance is one that we quickly confront, a conclusion that I also come to, but that is also problematic. So my work departs from classic literature to some extent in that I'm not looking at traditional women's possession cults, but rather the context of individual women being afflicted and seeking treatment. 

This gave a more fine-grained look at the specific experiences and traumas that women have had in the contemporary urban context. So a lot of the previous work was in the rural setting and following decades now of a vibrant Islamic revival. 

I also pay attention to the experiences of men, which is relatively understudied, and very few scholars have examined the field of ruqya and what are the gendered dynamics there. And yet, the recent professionalization of this field is now well documented. 

It's worth noting that ruqya is generally seen as more threatening to states, so from Turkey to Morocco. Whereas, women healers have been considered less politically threatening, according to some of the literature. In terms of my methods, I did ethnographic observation. 

And this is, again, in the city of Fez. I worked with, sometimes, one and, other times, two local research assistants, one of whom spoke French and another English, which helped me navigate. They both also did translation work, and I worked very closely with them. So I observed approximately 25 healing sessions or encounters. 

I also had a spontaneous set of observations at a public hospital, as well as at a psychiatric hospital. Four of these sessions were with the fqih and the seers and not ruqya Islamic practitioners. Most of these were at the clinic or space where the practitioners see their patients. 

And one of these was with a woman ruqya practitioner who conducts group treatment for other women. I attended two all night lila ceremonies, which, again, are collective rituals, where musicians come, people go into states of trance. And there are a series of rituals in order to cure someone of their possession. 

To be clear, again, these types of rituals, the lilas, are condemned by the ruqya practitioners. I did in-depth interviews. I did 27 interviews and had a number of shorter conversations with people who had come to the clinics. 12 of these were with patients who were possessed by a jinn, and the rest were with healers, including one medically-trained psychiatrist. 

And everyone was from rural and working class backgrounds, except the psychiatrist. So most ruqya practitioners or raqis are men. And there are some exceptions to this. In fact, there is a locally known female raqi in fez, whom I had the chance to observe and interview. 

In general, a woman raqi would only treat women. Whereas, a male raqi treats both men and women. And the majority of patients I observed in these clinics were women. Sheikh Yusuf said that ruqya requires a lot of strength because the jinns can be powerful and dangerous, and so women are less suited for this. 

And with [? Si Hajja, ?] the woman that I observed, the raqi, there was certainly a masculine tenor to her treatment style. She has a deep and powerful recitation voice. She, sometimes, smacks the women to suppress the jinn. I was once the recipient of one of her slaps. 

And yet, the space of ruqya that I observed is also a very feminized space. So every day, women come in with marital troubles, family tensions, and symptoms of jinn affliction. They're often accompanied by their sisters and mothers and grandmothers or women friends and neighbors. 

So you have this interesting ritual where the men, maybe one, two or three of them, at most, listen quietly while the women express their problems or, indeed, their wounds. And when they recite the prayers, the jinn is provoked and expresses himself or herself in different ways, sometimes, weeping or shaking or growling, sometimes speaking. 

Because these rituals are more or less collective, there would, sometimes, be a collective discussion of what's going on. My research assistant, Amina, was pretty proactive and would find herself, sometimes, counseling one of the patients, almost sidestepping the raqi and creating the space for the women to process the problem. 

While raqis do suggest that women increase their pious practice, they were gentle and patient in their approach. For example, Sheikh Yusuf had once treated a woman who worked as a seer, and the term there is [NON-ENGLISH]. I think he was firm, that her business was un-Islamic and that she needed to get out of it. 

And she struggled very much with her own religious guilt about this. But he accepted this explanation that she was possessed, and her jinn would not allow her to quit this sinful work. She would, apparently-- I did not observe this-- tear off her clothes in some settings, which is socially unacceptable, especially as a woman. 

But he never saw this as her own fault. I also saw him take a more sympathetic, perhaps even feminist approach to the problem of, for example, infertility. Mona was a woman in her 20s and had not been able to get pregnant. Her husband wasn't particularly concerned, didn't have much to say. 

Sheikh Yusuf was insistent that he needed to speak with the husband, and that he's the one who might have the fertility problem. So he was lamenting to me, well, in our patriarchal society, it's always seen as the woman's problem. So he counseled Mona to forget about people's gossip and rumors about why she wasn't having a baby and to focus on herself. 

Certainly, not all raqis are like this, but the two, maybe three that I observed had this approach. Again, ruqya, in its ideal, is a spiritual connection between the healer and the one who is afflicted. Some are better at others than establishing this, but this is the ethos. 

In terms of what's been called the wound of patriarchy, a phrase that I'm using in my work, I'm focusing here specifically on domestic and sexual violence as a theme in some of the women's lives. To be clear, it's not all or even most of the women I interacted with, but it was not exceptional either. 

Nora is a 53-year-old woman with three children. She was abandoned as a child and raised by a family friend. She visited many healers, hoping to get relief from her symptoms. She has several jinns, including Aisha, and she believes that her husband has a jinn. 

He is unemployed and refuses to find a job or support the family. They live in poverty and experience hunger, and he is physically abusive with her and the kids. And she, in turn, became abusive with her kids. She says he never respected me, since I did not have a real family and no home.

He always used that as an excuse to beat me. So he finally left the family and returned to his childhood village, so she is now free of him, but still very unhappy. My jinns always give me a hard time. They don't let me sleep at night. I have been suffering like this for 10 years. 

My research assistant asked her if she would ever consider remarrying, and she said, "No, never. I hate men." Hannah was 28 years old and unmarried, which is somewhat unusual. And she said, "When someone proposes to me, I run away. Something stops me from getting married and doing the right thing. 

I agree to the marriage, but when it gets serious, I cancel the whole thing. It's not me. It's my jinn. He threatens me that he will kill me if I marry. But of course, I want to be married. I dream of having children. And when I wake up, I have nothing. I'm alone." As part of her affliction, Hannah often feels sick and she faints. 

She's tried many different healers, but nothing has helped. She tries to attend the lila trance rituals that I referenced. She says, "One day, I was invited to a lila. It was a Jilala band," which is a certain Sufi fraternity. "My mother didn't want me to attend, so she locked me in a room to stop me. 

I broke the window and jumped from the second floor and left. That shows the passion of Jilala in me. My mother was shocked when she found out." So Hannah was deeply drawn to this particular healing ritual rather than to ruqya. When I probed a little bit more about Hannah's blocked desire to marry, she told us that her sister's husband used to beat her sister, one time, almost killing her. 

"And since then, I've hated the idea of being married." So I think there was some trauma related to her sister's domestic violence. And she's been possessed for about 10 years since then. There's sometimes a fuzzy boundary between gender violence and tensions around love, desire, and betrayal. 

Layla is a seer. She's 44 years old, possessed by two jinns, one of whom is Aisha Qandicha. She was married at 13 and has seven children, and she became possessed, not long after she saw her husband being intimate with another woman. She followed up on some rumors, decided to follow him, and then saw him with this other woman. 

And she gradually lost her sight after this and became blind for over three months. She went to a Sufi Shrine of a saint, where she chained herself to the gates of the shrine for three months. And she gradually regained her vision, but also gained divinatory visions that she attributed to the jinns. 

And then she became a healer. At one point-- at one point, she said that her husband has a jinn, and this jinn prevents him from being affectionate with her, from kissing her or holding her. Though, he does have sex with her, and she used a crude term for that. 

As to her children, she said, "We are all children of the jinn, because both the mother and the father were possessed." Reflecting on her daughter, she started crying, as she said her daughter started showing signs of possession and going down the same path and entering this world of jinns. 

So in her work, she says, as many of the seers do, that she takes in the jinns of others in her attempts to heal them. In a way, having suffered so much herself, she now sacrifices herself to heal others of their possession and finds a lot of meaning in that. 

So there are other kinds of traumas that have to do with loss. I was a bit surprised at how many people lost their parents quite early, their siblings, and also lost their mothers who died in childbirth. I think the powerful force of grief and loss is something that's been downplayed in some of the literature on possession. 

Morocco has a fairly high maternal mortality rate. Though, it is slowly declining now. Munira is age 40, divorced, never attended school, and became possessed in adolescence. She inherited the jinn from her mother. And she was 7 when her mother died while birthing her sister. 

And she was then raised by a stepmother, who mistreated her and didn't allow her to go to school. And then her father died quite soon after he remarried. She was still an adolescent at the time. Rihanna is a 34-year-old woman, possessed by an infamous male jinn, alongside two female jinns, including Aisha. 

And then there's another male jinn who sleeps with her at night. She does have sexual relations with men outside of marriage, which she considers sinful, that she says are the fault of the jinn. She's unmarried, as are all of her sisters. And she says the whole family is cursed by jinns. 

"We believe that we are madrobin." And I can't quite place the exact meaning of that term, but I think it refers to the idea that the whole family is cursed. "My father had problems with my mother because of a jinn. He had a jinn who was in love with him, so he couldn't love my mother." 

Her mother died when Rihanna was 20. And according to her, she was in pain for 15 days, and then she died. It was the jinn who killed her. Rihanna, like Munira, was very lonely, blocked from having love or a good relationship, and suffered the loss of a parent quite young. 

The relationship between one's own desire and the jinn's desire for intimacy is complex. We can have a lot of discussion about what causes what. But for them, it's the power, the agency, and desires of the jinn that makes all of these events unfold. 

And finally, I want to mention the story of Safiya, a 55-year-old working class woman. She became possessed at the age of 16 and shortly after her elder brother died. Her brother developed some mysterious illness that they attributed to the jinn. 

He had a degenerative condition. He ended up in a wheelchair in his early 20s and eventually passed away. And Safiya was, in fact, his primary caretaker during his illness. And it was during the end of this caregiving period and then his loss that she became possessed by Aisha and two other jinns. 

Safiya's husband was really supportive of her and clearly her best friend. And it's important to point out here that I'm emphasizing gender violence. There are plenty of harmonious marriages. Sophia works as a cook in the Fez Medina, in the old city, but her jinns told her that she is forbidden from doing housework in the evenings. 

So she stopped cooking dinner for her husband and son, and they both accepted this and support her. Safiya went through many trials and attempts at healing. This is a photo of a public psychiatric hospital, where I interviewed the psychiatrist. You can see the literally crumbling infrastructure, which is symbolic of the state of psychiatry and literal. 

So she had a very negative experience with Western medicine. So, again, possessions seemed to begin, following a trauma or a major loss in a woman's life. The jinns caused trouble for sure. But sometimes, they protect the women, demand pleasure, arrest. 

And they are always searching to express or heal a wound that never completely closes. So this picture of trauma and possession would be incomplete without looking at some of men's experiences, as well as the ways in which gins transgress the boundaries of gender. 

It's less common for men to be possessed, but it does happen. They do come into ruqya clinics. Some see the [NON-ENGLISH], the seers, who, again, are women for chronic unemployment, problems with money, sometimes vague symptoms, like what I described with my women interlocutors, and then, most commonly, for sexual dysfunctions. 

It's often said that they were victims of black magic, which is slightly different from jinn possession. But men have their traumas and losses, too. Khalid was a 61-year-old man I met at a lila trance ceremony, and then I also interviewed him. He inherited his jinn from his mother, who practiced trance in the Jilala Sufi community. 

This is an old photograph I found online of one of those rituals. As a child, he would watch her in the trans rights, reacting very profoundly to the music. And it, perhaps, frightened him. And then he, too, became possessed. He said he was a boy when he heard the Gnawa music at a lila ceremony. 

And Gnawa refers to the Sufi tradition of music and possession that descends from slaves who were brought to Morocco. "Somehow, I was flying and lost control of my body and fell into possession. I began jadba," which is a very vigorous form of trancing. "My mother was shocked and started crying and screaming." 

So I encountered this moment a few times where a mother or a grandmother realizes that she has passed on her condition to her child. And it's a sad, perhaps, tragic moment. Khalid lost three of his siblings in childhood. As an adult, he had worked as a truck driver but had two major accidents and almost died. 

Now he is unemployed, which he blames on his jinn. "You have to do a lila every year. That way, you can keep your job. It's like you have to renew your contract with the jinn. If you stop, they will cut you off. They say, 'if you forget us, we will forget about you.' And now, look, I'm jobless." For Khalid, ruqya was never quite successful. 

Instead, it was important for him to continue doing the trance rites and to surrender to his jinn. He's actually in a better place now. Though, he's still, sometimes, has symptoms. Mostly, he says he has to please his jinns because he and his wife made a pact with their jinns, that as long as they please them, the jinns will leave their children alone. 

Like many others I met, they don't want their children to suffer the way that they do. But he said he likes his jinn now because he is always with me. So Khalid was a man possessed by a male jinn, whom he struggles with, but also has a companionship with. But it's often the case that men have a female jinn. 

Several scholars have written recently about what does it mean to be a gendered being when you are possessed by a jinn of the opposite sex. While jinns, themselves, have a gender, they don't necessarily behave in gendered ways. Like I said, Aisha can be aggressive and angry, as she can be seductive and feminine and playful. 

And indeed, I observed a certain amount of gender fluidity in these different healing circles, especially in the world of the seers and the practitioners of trance. In this transgressing of gender boundaries and categories is, again, sometimes, intimately tied to trauma. I hope I'm OK with time, by the way. 

So Nabil was one of my interlocutors, a 40-year-old man, a healer in the arts of divination. When Amina, my research assistant, first took me to meet him, she said to me, "Oh, by the way, he's not really a man or a woman." I nodded and took that in. 

This is a photo of the alleyway in the Fez, Medina, where Nabil worked and where I spent a lot of time. So Nabil has a wide following of both men and women, but more so women. I saw women clients come to see him. They would hug him and kiss him. 

Normally, this would not be so socially acceptable in Moroccan society, but he occupies this kind of liminal space in terms of his gender identity. So during some of the ritual ceremonies he facilitates, he dresses in a gender ambiguous way. Nabil, himself, is possessed, and he has to satisfy his jinns through many types of rituals. 

Similarly to Layla, he takes in the jinns of his clients, sacrificing his own self. In a way, he's deeply embedded in the spirit world. Nabil grew up extremely poor and disadvantaged. His mother was very young when she married, and his father didn't support the family. 

In terms of his own backstory of how he became possessed, there was sort of a sexualized and disturbing undertone to the story. Aisha, the jinn, entered his room when he was a teenager. She struck him and paralyzed him, and he said, left a hole between his legs. 

"I spent three months with no sleep, day or night. I just asked God to let me die. I was bleeding. I couldn't walk." He then entered the world of possession and specifically trance rituals, and he was temporarily healed during a lila trance ceremony. 

As soon as the song, as an offering to Aisha, began, and they turned off the lights, someone came and held me up, a woman. And I was able to stand. I was in the middle of the group, and the hole disappeared. And he went on to describe this very powerful collective ceremony and how it healed him, this part of him that was, in fact, broken. 

And by the way, I'm not trying to make the problematic causal argument between family trauma and gender nonconformity, but rather, I'm showing how trauma is interwoven throughout so many different possession stories. But today, Nabil has a full and vibrant life as a healer, and he knows how to manage and work with his jinns. 

He is surrounded by a subterranean community of gender non-conforming friends in a space of these trance rituals. So these are only a couple of cases that I presented, but I think they illustrate the loss, the pain, and the passion that men also experience, as they become victims to jinns or develop an intimacy with them. 

And the jinns, for their part, don't exactly respect our gendered categories or gendered bodies. They will do as they please, even if it transgresses some of society's most sacred categories of being. And the victim chooses whether to struggle or to surrender. 

So as I try to wrap up and tie some things together, I'm going to offer some tentative conclusions. So almost all of my interlocutors were influenced by the religious hierarchy of legitimate healing. In other words, everyone who had a jinn felt that the truly Islamic method of healing was ruqya or relying only on the Quran and the prophetic tradition and nothing else. 

They accepted the idea that rituals of working with the jinns are sinful, because they go against the strong monotheistic foundation of Islam. So even Nabil, who I just talked about, would say, well, one of these days, I have to get out of this profession. 

But I also suggest that this tension between struggle and surrender is inherent to the Islamic tradition, where you're compelled to surrender to God's will, to the fact of suffering, the existence of evil out there in the world and also within ourselves and our own egos. 

Yet, at the same time, you also must not despair. In her epic book, Knot of the Soul, Anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo writes about how loss of hope, desire for death are considered victory of the devil or a demonic jinn. And struggling against the temptation of despair and also against one's own ethical shortfalls is incumbent upon Muslims. 

So I think it's interesting that the social, religious struggle between what it is to submit versus what it means to struggle plays out on this terrain of religious healing. And women are very much part of these debates in everyday life, especially as they are the ones who fall into possession more frequently. 

Ruqya is changing the terrain of how to think about possession and healing. On the surface, it's changing in a way that marginalizes women or positions that they traditionally held as seers. But I think this remains to be seen. And what I observed was a much richer and more complex picture of gender relations that are unfolding. 

Meanwhile, in Fez, jinns continue to assert their own needs for revenge, for love, control or pleasure. In some, to express their passions. And in doing so, they bear witness to the ordeals of life, the sufferings and traumas of individuals. And sometimes, of entire communities. 

Women, especially, bear the wounds of patriarchal relations and violence that need expression. But men are not entirely spared of suffering and tragedies, as you saw. And finally, jinns enable queer expressions that are otherwise socially stigmatized. 

So returning to Nadia for a second, whom I started with, on one hand, Sheikh Yusuf wanted to establish a connection with her and to empower her. On the other hand, he was ironically taking away her self-diagnosis of possession. And we can begin to understand why she didn't like that or why she needed her jinn to speak for her or to continue as her witness. 

So in a way, it's the raqis who are enacting a more Western individualized notion of the self above the traditional Moroccan one. So I'm going to end with pointing to the unanswerable nature of the most persistent questions on this topic, one theoretical and the other methodological. 

They, of course, overlap. Is this a phenomenon of women's resistance, or is it the communication of trauma? And of course, we're forced to ask, what's the difference, right? I don't know that there's a way to answer this, when our interlocutors reject both of these explanations. 

But as Janice Boddy says in her influential book on possession in the Sudan, there is so much ambiguity built into the phenomena, not unlike human relations or of illness itself, that multiple interpretations become possible. Then, there's the question that I'm often asked, at least in the field or among friends, about do I believe this is real? 

And over time, I've come to find this question less engaging, almost like the question of, is there a God? For my interlocutors, there's evil things happen in the world, grotesque forms of suffering, victimized people, especially women every single day. Despair and fear are part of being alive. 

And it almost doesn't matter, as the researcher, if jinns are real and inflicting these wounds, or if it's some other agent that is visible or that exists in the rational realm that we could measure. No matter what, the wounds exist. No matter what, patriarchy, at least for the moment, exists. 

But as a social scientist, I see a relationship between trauma and possession that I think helps us have a better understanding and compassion for the millions of people in Muslim societies and in non-Muslim societies who are afflicted and struggling with their spirits and turning to whatever forms of healing that might ease their suffering. Thank you for listening. 

AUDIENCE: Hello. Can you hear me? So thank you so much for this. I know I've read some of the work and stuff, but seeing it put out like this, it was really just a new perspective. And I really appreciate that. And so if your subjects don't see this as resistance or trauma, how best would they describe it? 

I see that these are binaries we want to enforce upon them to explain their experiences. But how do they talk about it? I mean, you gave us some examples. And obviously, I'm asking you to give us a couple of words on very broad experiences. 

But they wouldn't see it as resistance. They wouldn't see it as trauma. Is it just these evil things in their lives? I mean, is there something a little more concrete that we can nail down. Or how would we do best to think or talk about these? 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah. I mean, in general, you know, they really see this as the actions of the jinns. And so it's an entirely their agency. And we've talked a lot in class about-- Can I use this? 

ANN BRAUDE: Yeah, if you can use that. Yeah, that will help us. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah. So I was saying that, in general, it's so interesting, all the scholars are having a conversation about resistance and trauma and psychological factors versus madness. And for them, this is entirely about the agency of the jinns and this invisible world that they're attuned to or victimized by. 

I mean, then there's always the question, sociologically, of, functionally, what is the jinn serving for the community and for individuals? And it's hard not to see. Well, it's easier to say, it's the jinns that are causing infertility, that are causing divorce, that are causing violence. 

So it serves a functional purpose. But again, for them, they're victimized by this. And in a way, it makes sense to just explain the vicissitudes of life. You know, why do some people suffer and others don't? There's always the question-- and this is where ruqya plays this complex role. 

There's always the question of, to what extent you're responsible? You know, did you sin? Was it your lack of piety because you're not wearing the hijab and all sorts of things. But that's still massaged in a way that bad things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. 

Regardless of that, you still have your ethical struggles as a Muslim. But there is a randomness to why it happens. I don't know if that answers your question, but it's-- 

AUDIENCE: It does. And then one really easy follow up. How prevalent is this in other parts of the Islamic world? You're working in Morocco. Is this something in many parts of the Islamic world, specific to the North African context or-- 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah, it's pretty universal to the Islamic world. It's actually interesting because it is, apparently, growing a little bit in Western contexts. So in Europe and Canada, there's been a lot of literature now. But that said, it's not all Muslims, by any means, believe in jinns. 

Like I said, it's not so controversial that they exist. And there's not a good survey research about what do people actually believe that they can possess people. That much, we don't know. It's certainly a phenomena. I hesitate to say if most Muslims don't believe or most Muslims do. 

Anecdotally, it seems like it's more prevalent among more working class and rural communities. It's a little bit harder to see among the more educated communities. And then you have this whole dynamic of many Muslims really denouncing this and think this is a serious problem that people go to these types of healers. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Thank you. It was wonderful. I have one comment and one question. About the comment, I'm wondering if it's a matter of resistance, in the sense that for what I heard, it seems more a question of anomie. They are abandoned. It's a matter of violence and not loved. 

I don't see what Saba Mahmood described in relationship with norms, discipline, and disciplining the body. Now here, I see more this abandonment. But I would like to know more, if you agree with me. Just an idea. And the question is about-- I mean, you described this phenomenon in marginalized group, in extreme cases with domestic violence and so on. 

And I would like to know if there is something more, I don't know, everyday life more common. I mean, not big trauma, but something more-- yeah, for, I don't know, middle class jinn possession without this extreme cases. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah, Thank you for those. Yeah, that's so interesting, your comment. It raises lots of issues. When I was rereading-- in my class, we just read Janice Boddy's book about the Sudan, and then I was reading Saba Mahmood's critique of it. And I'm not sure where I fall with that.

So I'm wondering, to what extent it's not a fair critique of that particular book. I mean, there is always this notion that women are doing various things because they're unhappy in their families or that Islam is so oppressive, that they're trying to figure out ways to channel that feeling of being oppressed. 

And I think that is an important critique. And the very important point that women themselves often don't articulate this, right? It's the scholars who are interpreting it this way. But, yeah, the anomie and the abandonment, I mean, for me, that raises questions of like, well, what is the theory of trauma and what is the definition? 

So I'm using this phrase, trauma, which a few the idea of trauma in therapy, in possession has a-- scholars have actually used this before. But I am wanting to look into this a little bit deeper. So I don't really have that background. 

But so there's like, so what's the relationship between anomie and abandonment and something that actually shocks your system beyond what you're able to cope with, which is one of the definitions of trauma. Another definition that I find really interesting is that it's a break in your experience of time in a way. 

So you're out of the moment and in the past or other eras, even historical eras, can come rushing in to your experience of being. So I guess it's an interesting thing to think about how much of this is a feeling of lack of love or abandonment or disconnected from the social, right? 

But I think that is actually deeply connected to the way we're starting to understand trauma is that you're deeply socially disconnected. So, yeah, I guess I would-- you're right, to some extent, that I'm looking at so-called extreme cases, but I think I would challenge that a little bit in terms of what is everyday life for marginalized communities? 

It often does consist of a little bit of violence, unemployment, the death of a child. So unfortunately, in these poor and rural communities, those are not uncommon experiences. For people that have more support and income or education, it could be trouble looking for a job, an unhappy marriage. 

You haven't met the right person to marry. So it might look a little bit more like that, less obviously connected to situations of domestic violence or assault. Does that answer the question? Yeah. Sarah. I'm sorry. Somebody? 

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Fareen. It was very interesting. And your methodology and endeavor to staying away from judging these people was very thoughtful. I have a question about the discourse and terminology that has been made about this jinn possession. 

Is this terminology and discourse made within the conversations of the healers and the patients, or it is made in the patient's descriptions about their experiences and their symptoms, or in the interpretations of the healers from those experiences. Especially, it came into my mind when you said that many of those patients say that they are experiencing the presence of Aisha. 

Who is telling them that this is Aisha? Is the jinn herself is telling that I am Aisha or the healer distinguishes that this jinn should be Aisha, for example? And how it is being developed, this terminology and this course? Is it like something that makes women more powerful or it represent them as less powerful and more weak? 

FAREEN PARVEZ: I have to write things down before I forget. Yeah. So I guess I'll answer a little bit more concretely, I guess, in terms of how do they come to know that they are possessed by a certain jinn? So usually, it's their own. So it's their own self-diagnosis. 

So, I mean, I guess I'd have to think about specific cases where-- I mean, there's such like a-- so Aisha Qandicha, for example, is such a powerful known figure. So Nabil saw her, so he knew that it was her and that she was coming to take control or to wound him and take possession. 

And so the jinn makes themselves manifest, basically. Thank you, Darren. So the jinn makes him or herself manifest to the patient. And then, sometimes, it's in the therapeutic session with the ruqya healer that the gin speaks. And so the raqi will say angrily, like, tell me who you are, why are you bothering this person? 

And there's some struggle back and forth. And then, sometimes, but not always, they'll say, I'm such and such. I'm Aisha. I'm [INAUDIBLE]. And then there's this conversation where he says, well, why won't you leave? Because she hurt my child, or she did this. And so then they have a conversation. But it's actually the so-called patient who's speaking-- the jinn is speaking through the patient. Yeah. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you. That was really great to hear. And it also reminds me one of the reasons why I'm so drawn to ethnography. It is very beautiful. So I guess I was thinking, ruminating on your theoretical, methodological unanswerable questions. And I guess I was really struck by how similar the ideal spirit possession is, how you described it in the way that I understand it within a different context in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

And given just the both location of Morocco and then also like the history of slavery and colonialism, I wouldn't be surprised, perhaps, if there are foundational shared beliefs. And so there's something interesting that I thought about, at least within the context, when my interlocutor are people that I know are speaking about spirit possession. 

And the idea is that-- and you mentioned this briefly when you talked about there a malevolent, benevolent, neutral spirits and whatnot. The idea is that people who experience trauma actually end up spiritually attracting these negative spirits. It's almost like chaos attracts. 

And so I thought like, perhaps, rather than a theoretical question, perhaps, there's a spiritual component to it as well, where, perhaps, the reason why we see jinn possession amongst women and people within these different or these difficult economic situations is because there's a particular chaos in their life that is attracting these spiritual things. 

So that's more on the belief level. And so I guess the question that I have is about the, perhaps, spectrum of jinns. And I'm wondering, is the understanding that jinns are always a negative thing, or is it, sometimes, does jinn help me with my business being successful? 

Is it always like a kind of negative component. And I guess, if so or-- yeah, if so-- or if not, actually, if there are potentially positive and/or neutral aspects to it, why is it tha-- I guess I wonder. Yeah, are there more positive or neutral experiences of jinn possession and then what then does that say to this larger theory about resistance and trauma with jinn possession? 

FAREEN PARVEZ: That was great. Thank you. I think my students can probably answer some of that. So, yeah. So first of all, there are so many shared, concepts, approaches, experiences of it across different contexts, so I find that super fascinating. Of course, that the anthropologist finds it super interesting. 

So in Morocco, and I think in many Islamic societies, it definitely-- concepts and practices within Islam, merged with the Indigenous practices. And so you certainly see that here. So there's different kinds of sub-Saharan African practices that merged with this belief in jinns. 

I mean, Aisha, herself, it's not even clear where she comes from. That's an Arabic name. But it clearly predates Islam. So there's that. It's a very syncretic phenomena. Yeah, I mean, I think that's super interesting. Like, I'll definitely have to think about that more the spiritual interpretation. 

Does that differ from what the interlocutors are saying or not? Yeah, this idea that they're attracted to chaos. And then, among jinns, here, it's also said that they're attracted to extreme emotions. So emotional volatility, if someone's really angry or extremely depressed and in despair, the jinns will prey on that. 

They're also attracted to beauty, so somebody that really goes overboard, I suppose, in pampering themselves. The jinns might be attracted to that. Conversely, they want people to pamper themselves, so they might demand that a woman wears perfume and things like that. It's not always negative. 

So for the ruqya healers, the goal is to evict them and to defeat them, with always this under-- with this subconscious understanding that it may never be possible. They may always come back, which, of course, for us, raises questions of like, can you ever really be healed from a wound? 

Or do you just learn to live with it and to manage it? So the cases where it's well managed, like Safiya. I interviewed her a couple of years apart. And the second time, she's like, I love them now. She takes care of me. Or Khalid, he said, he's like my companion. He's always with me. 

So there are those situations. And Nabil, especially for some of the healers, they think that they became successful at healing because the jinns are enabling that. So, yeah. Thank you. 

ANN BRAUDE: Go ahead. Go ahead. Actually, yeah. 

AUDIENCE: OK. Amazing. This was amazing. Thank you so, so much. I'm in your class, and I still learn so much today, so thank you so much. I was just curious if you could expand on what you make of the class differential, with regard to people that seek out this type of healing. 

Because I'm curious. I was thinking about potential reasons why. And I think people with more economic resources are able to go to private clinics, perhaps, can afford more Western psychiatric care. But I think also-- I mean, in the US, you have examples of incredibly wealthy people that are still disillusioned by Western care and seek out these alternative forms of healing. 

So I'm curious, both, what you make of as the reason that a lot of the people engaging in this work, not only as healers, but also as patients, are coming from more working class and low income backgrounds, if you saw anyone that did have economic means to seek out other care but came back to this type of healing after disillusionment with it. 

And then, also, just more logistically, whether these ruqya healers make a good living. Is this something that's economically, I don't know, something that they seek out? Are they able to build wealth in this career? Is this something where they're still living month to month? I'm curious, just the degree of economic success that this type of healing work grants the people that engage in it as well. 

AUDIENCE: If I can. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Sure. 

AUDIENCE: Yeah. So I'm sorry. Passing back and forth. I'm so sorry. So I was just struck because of the question about how marginal are these communities. So I did a very quick Google search, first, on domestic violence rates in the US and then in Morocco. 

So in the United states, 41% of women experienced domestic violence in their lifetime and 27% of men. Those are CDC statistics. And then in Morocco, according to the 2019 National Survey on Violence Against Women and Men found that 57% of women in Morocco, so more than 7.2 million people, had experienced some form of violence during the preceding 12 months. 

And so the reason I think that's so connected is because, all right, so that's like not quite 2/3 of the women in the country have experienced some form of domestic violence in the past year. And so it seems like there's the range of solutions to that problem is going to be so deeply economically dependent, both in terms of the economic status of the household and not necessarily in clear way, if the breadwinning is coming from the same sources, the violence. 

But just the resources available to you, does that map onto class, or does it not because of ways in which nature of domestic violence and secret keeping build out? At first, I was thinking, it'll be totally mapped onto class, but then, of course, that's not really how domestic violence works.

FAREEN PARVEZ: Right. Yeah, I feel like I should, given many years of thinking about these kinds of things and even some of my activism, I feel like I should be able to answer that question. But I can't, and I don't know how clear it is even in the US about the class differentials, about where domestic violence is happening. 

I mean, we often used to say, right, that it's like the assumption is that it's among the poorer classes, but that's not true. And so I'm guessing it's probably similar in Morocco. And I definitely don't want to speak like beyond what I know or my expertise. I'm not particularly surprised at the 57% figure. 

Of course, there's all sorts of methodological questions about where we get these numbers. So I don't know, basically, if it's accurate or fair to say that that's something that's happening among more the working class, as opposed to the more educated classes. And I'm not sure. Yeah. 

AUDIENCE: Well, and to be clear, my assumption was that it was happening broadly based, but the solutions or management of the situation. I was curious about whether or not that would be tied to resources, just because, so often, solutions to problems are tied to resources. But so often, for women experiencing domestic violence, the resources and the violence are coming from the same person, so it doesn't necessarily track. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Right, right, or the ability to get the support of wider kin. So going back to your natal home or to your parents instead of with the in-laws type of thing. Yeah. I mean, I guess the linking the two questions, I mean, it's a broader question about access to medical care and other types of care. 

And yes, I mean, it's certainly the case. Like, the more wealth you have, there's a wider range of options that you can try, as you're seeking different kinds of healing. I was so enmeshed in the working class communities, that I actually know very little about what's happening among the more middle classes and educated classes. 

In general, my understanding is that there's a real lack of psychiatric care or psychological care. So I think it's definitely less accessible. And people told me stories of trying to go to the hospitals and waiting six hours and then being treated really dismissively or quickly being told to get like CT scans. 

So they were always referring to scanners. They did the scans. They did this and made me wait six hours, and then they say nothing's wrong. So that's a very common experience. But it's surprising how many of them actually do seek out Western medical care first. 

So it's after lots of things have not worked, that then they start to think that there's a jinn. So many of them do try it. I don't know if that really answered your question about the class differences. But in terms of the people who are working in the field of ruqya, I think there's a variety. 

And so Sheikh Yusuf, who I really came to like very much, he hardly takes any money. It's definitely like he runs a little shop. He's definitely working class. He really does it, because he feels it's a calling. So there are cases where he won't charge anything, or he'll quietly accept a little bit. But it's not why he does it. 

Then there was another interlocutor I spent a lot of time with. And he would-- somebody was just not getting better. They would keep calling him back. They kept wanting to do the ruqya. And it's not cheap, to my surprise. So people would often think that Western medical care was too expensive, and it is. 

But if you're doing ruqya every week or a couple nights a week, that actually adds up, too. So he's probably comfortably making a living off of it. Nobody's getting wealthy, from what I understand. But yeah, some are able to make a living off of it. 

And then there's the question we've talked about in class, like how many of them are charlatans? They know they're not helping, but they're doing it anyway, which is true of all medical fields as well, right? How many of them are exploitative and, you know? 

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have another question. This is an ethnography question. So one of the things with ethnography is that because we, as people, are the tool of data collection, this is where self-reflexivity, autoethnography, these type of things come into play. 

Just because we always understand that the type of truth that we're getting is very much based off of our own interaction and perspective in the field, right? And so I was curious about your translator, because there were a few moments where she's like doing more than translating. 

And I'm curious about how her presence, in particular, do you think affected the truths that were given to you or not given to you, et cetera. And then also how that played in relation to just your own presence as well. What was that interaction like. I'm curious, if you could talk about that a little bit more and reflect on it. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks for that question. So, yeah, she was very proactive, like more-- I mean, she was really a collaborator and opened all the doors for me. She has a lot of experience and had local contacts. I would not have been able to access the field at all without some assistant. 

And she was pretty brilliant, as an interviewer and just working out relationships. There were probably-- I'm sure there were situations, not always, but maybe in the beginning, where the healer really wanted to perform for us. 

And so we're really trying to make it happen, you know? Please let the jinn speak so that she can see it. So I think there was maybe a little bit of that in the beginning. But I mean, I think it was very minor. Because, ultimately, when they're really in the heat of the moment, and somebody is clearly possessed, they're just really focused on the patient. 

And they're not really worried about what I'm doing or thinking. But I think, sometimes, some women really like the fact that we were there. It was just more people to support them or show support. And she would-- Amina would talk to them and counsel them a little bit. 

And they felt kind of reassured by her presence. Partly, that was just her own charismatic presence. But yeah, in terms of me, for the most part, because a lot of the healing sessions are so collective-- they're collective rituals-- again, it didn't matter that I was there. 

I mean, this is unthinkable in the US context, because there's such emphasis on privacy. And there is stigma around this. So I think if I was a local, there would be more concern. Like, OK, she's going to gossip. But I was so clearly clueless and was not-- I wouldn't even know how to gossip locally, if I wanted to. 

So I wasn't a very threatening presence. There were a few cases where people were very disturbed that I was recording and asked me to stop. There were a couple cases where they were worried I was going to take a video and post it on YouTube. Again, I wouldn't even know how to do it, if I wanted. 

But I had to reassure them that I wasn't going to do that. So there's a-- there is an emphasis on privacy, but it's also such a collective culture that it wasn't particularly threatening. Amina thought it was best to introduce me as being from Pakistan, which I'm not, rather than American or even from India. So I think the shared Muslim background helped a lot. So I just blended in to-- I would like to think 

ANN BRAUDE: I have a-- this is just a-- the question is really about ethics and honesty. I'm really interested in the idea that she thought you should be identified as being from a place where you're not. And what's informing my curiosity about that is when I wrote my first book, one of my dissertation committee members spent a long time asking me questions about my own religious background so that I could practice answering, depending on where I was. 

So in some settings, I'm going to offer this explanation in other settings, but they all had to be true, right? So you were always telling the truth? You were just not ever telling all of-- or you were selective in what truth to tell? And so I'm interested in the actual dissembling and how did you think about that? 

Was it something that worried or troubled you? Do you think it mattered? I totally get that you're also following the guidance of the local person, but I'm just really interested in that piece of this. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah, it was a negotiation with me and her, so she was more aggressive in what she felt like she needed to do. So there were, for example, times where I could not follow her advice, where she somebody said, stop. I don't want to be recorded. 

So I would quickly turn it off. It was totally, I didn't want to do anything that my interlocutors didn't want. They all knew I was a researcher. And Amina would be like, turn it on, turn it on. It was like-- it was just like, no, I'm not going to do that. 

So there were a situation where we had to negotiate that way. So in her judgment, things happen. It's OK. But with my sensibilities, which, of course, are shaped by being an academic, who has to deal with IRB all the time, I wasn't comfortable doing that. 

The India versus Pakistan thing was-- my family is from India-- I felt like was enough of a white lie or fudging of reality that I could live with. And if anybody really probed me on it, I actually would try to correct them. I'm actually from India. And actually, there's millions of Muslims in India. And so I didn't feel like it was an egregious enough thing that it really violated an ethical principle. 

ANN BRAUDE: Yeah, it really points to the social constructedness of national boundaries-- 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah. 

ANN BRAUDE: --what did it mean-- why did she think it was important for you to be from Pakistan. So thank you so much. I'm just going to take the prerogative of the last question to close our session. I do-- this is like, don't tell anybody. The program director asked this, but wouldn't it be great to-- 

AUDIENCE: We're filming the whole thing. 

ANN BRAUDE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Wouldn't you love to read a book about Amina? I mean, this sounds like such a fascinating relationship, the two of you working together on this project. But that's a really different book from the one you're writing. 

But you've got that in your back pocket. But just to close the discussion of this really remarkable research, I wanted to ask you to return to what you said at the very beginning about how the way that pain and loss tends to be neglected in studies of possession. 

And it seemed to me that was an underlying motive to everything you were telling us was to make that point and to lift up the pain and suffering of the people who are seeking healing in a way above the possession experience itself. 

And I just wonder if you could comment on why you think that is. I mean, many of us in this room have studied possession. And why you think that is a problem in the study of possession, and what is the intervention that you're trying to make there. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Yeah. And thank you for picking up on that and raising this. So we just read in my class just this week, Janice Boddy's work on the possession called-- it's called zar in Sudan. And I mean, I was struck by how many women like lost baby after baby, and then their husband, and then their sister. 

And it's tricky because when that's part of life, like it was in this country at the turn of the century, for example, or whatever, maybe it's not as traumatic, as we might think of it. So I don't want to project that sentiment, as to how women are affected by that. 

But I do think-- so in Boddy's book, which was amazing and brilliant, I felt like there was just so much about how it's about resistance, or it's about positioning herself socially, her fear of losing her husband because he's going to divorce her, because she can't have a child or because too many babies died. 

And the whole time reading that, I was like, oh my god, the trauma of anyone losing a child is something that-- it just doesn't seem to-- none of these feminist scholars actually give it the weight that I think it's due. And so, I don't know what's the value of that intervention for me to make it. 

But to me, it's so clear that these are individual women who are going-- who are going through such painful situations. And yes, it's a part of their social life, and it's a part of being alive. But to always have a sociological explanation for what they're trying to do-- and maybe they're actually just grieving, you know? 

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much for that comment. It just really brings full circle for me, when I was thinking about how to introduce you. I thought, well, here's this distinguished scholar, but also, throughout the year, I've seen you being a mother and a daughter and in all these familial roles. 

And I was thinking, well, but that's not relevant to her research. And of course, you've just pointed us to how holistic we are as scholars and need to be-- and need to bring all that to the surface. So thank you so much for bringing your whole self to this really remarkable project. 

FAREEN PARVEZ: Thank you for engaging. 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Women's Studies in Religion Program. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.