The Shaykh Al-Albani’s remarks on the issue of jinn entering the human body, and his mention of the statement he made in al-Silsilah al-Sahihah, number 2918, in the sixth volume

Abu Layla : Please, our Shaykh, please go ahead.

The Shaykh : Praise is to Allah; we praise Him, seek His help, and seek His forgiveness. We seek refuge in Allah from the evil of our own souls and from the badness of our deeds. Whomsoever Allah guides, none can misguide, and whomsoever He misguides, none can guide. I bear witness that there is no deity but Allah alone, with no partner, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His slave and His Messenger. As for what follows, on the occasion of what has become widespread in this age regarding the issue of jinn entering the human body—some believe in it and affirm it, some exaggerate in it and seek the help of jinn to extract them, and some deny it all and interpret the Qur'an in a manner that follows their desires, denying all the authentic hadiths that establish it, even if they are sound—on this occasion, I saw it fitting, in the spirit of hastening to good and offering advice, to record an important research of mine on this issue, which I believe is significant. I had deposited it in my book *al-Silsilah al-Sahihah* at the end of the sixth volume, numbered two thousand nine hundred and eighteen, which has not yet been published. I said there: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said: He did this three times. This is from the hadith of Uthman ibn Abi al-'As al-Thaqafi (may Allah be pleased with him), and there are four routes from him. The first is from 'Abd al-A'la, who said: "Abdullah ibn 'Abd al-Rahman al-Tayfi narrated to us from Abdullah ibn al-Hakam from Uthman ibn Bashir, who said: I heard Uthman ibn Abi al-'As say: I complained to the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) about forgetting the Qur'an, so he struck my chest with his hand and said: [then he mentioned the hadith]. Uthman said, 'I have not forgotten anything of it since. I loved to mention it.'" Al-Tabarani narrated it in *al-Mu'jam al-Kabir* in the ninth volume, page thirty-seven, number three hundred and forty-seven after eight thousand. Al-Haythami said in *al-Majma'* in the ninth volume, page three: "Al-Tabarani narrated it, and in it is Uthman ibn Bashir, whom I do not know, and the rest of its narrators are trustworthy." I say: Yes, he is well known. Al-Bukhari gave him a biography in *al-Tarikh*, and Ibn Abi Hatim did the same. It was narrated from Ibn Ma'in that he said, "Uthman ibn Bashir al-Thaqafi is trustworthy." The rest of the narrators in the chain are trustworthy narrators of Muslim, with slight weakness in the group, except for Abdullah ibn al-Hakam. It appears he is al-Balawi, who is biographed in *al-Tarikh* and in *Thiqat* by Ibn Hibban, and that he is from this class. The chain is good. This Abdullah al-Tayfi has another chain that is more authentic than this one, which is the second route. Mu'tamir ibn Sulayman narrated it, saying: "I heard Abdullah ibn 'Abd al-Rahman al-Tayfi narrate from his uncle 'Umar ibn al-Aws from Uthman ibn Abi al-'As, who said: 'The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) appointed me, and I was the youngest of the six who came to him from Thaqif. That was because I had recited Surat al-Baqarah, so I said: O Messenger of Allah, the Qur'an is slipping away from me. So he placed his hand on my chest and said: I have not forgotten anything of it since that I wanted to memorize.'" Al-Bayhaqi narrated it in *Dala'il al-Nubuwwah* in the fifth volume, page eight after three hundred, and its chain is authentic. The third route is narrated by al-Hasan from him, saying: "I complained to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) about my poor memory for the Qur'an, so he said: Then he placed his hand on my chest, and I felt its coolness between my shoulders. Then he said: [and he mentioned it]. I have not heard anything since then but I have memorized it." Abu Nu'aym narrated it in *al-Dala'il*, and al-Bayhaqi likewise, through the route of Uthman ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Thaqafi, who said: "My father narrated to us from Yunus, and 'Anbasah from him." I say: This is an authentic chain, were it not for the *'an'anah* of al-Hasan, who is al-Basri, for he used to practice *tadlis* (concealment of a defect in a chain), and its narrators are trustworthy narrators.The Shaykh : ...other than Uthman ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, and Ibn Hibban graded him as trustworthy in the eighth volume, page 453. The original of the hadith is in Sahih Muslim with different wording, and it is in the description of the prayer of the fourth method. It is narrated by 'Uyaynah ibn 'Abd al-Rahman, who said: My father told me from Uthman ibn Abi al-'As, who said: "When the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) appointed me to Ta'if, something would occur to me in my prayer until I did not know what I was praying. When I saw that, I went to the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), and he said: I said: Yes, O Messenger of Allah. He said: I said: O Messenger of Allah, something occurred to me in my prayer until I did not know what I was praying. He said: So I approached him, and he sat on the tops of my feet. Then he struck my chest with his hand and spat in my mouth, and said: He did that three times, then said: " Ibn Majah narrated it, and ... in his Musnad, both with the same chain from him, and it is a sound chain. In the hadith is a clear indication that Satan may possess a person and enter him, even if he is a believer and righteous. There are many hadiths on this, and I had extracted one of them previously, number 485, from the hadith of Ya'la ibn Murrah, who said: "I traveled with the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) and I saw something amazing from him." And in it: "A woman came to him and said: My son has been afflicted with a touch (mas) for seven years; it takes him twice every day. The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said: So I brought him close to him, and he spat in his mouth and said: " Al-Hakim narrated it and graded it as sound, and al-Dhahabi agreed with him. It is a disconnected chain (munqati'). Then I extracted it from other paths from Ya'la, and I improved one of them. Then I concluded the extraction by saying: In summary, the hadith is good with these supporting chains, and it has many corroborating narrations that strengthen it. The author mentioned below has cited it and affirmed its soundness in general, but he discussed its implication, and the response to him will follow. Then I came across a strange book from the oddities printed in the modern era, titled "The Pinnacle of the Impossibility of Jinn Entering the Human Body," by its author Abu 'Abd al-Rahman Ihab ibn Hasan al-Ashtari—so it is al-Ashtari, the fashion of the era. This title alone is sufficient for the intelligent reader to avoid looking at the ignorance, misguidance, and deviation from the Book and the Sunnah contained in the book, in the name of the Book and the Sunnah, and the obligation to refer to them. He dedicated a chapter to this, and another chapter to Allah is the Greatest, regarding innovation and its condemnation, and that it is in its generality such that one who does not follow what he quotes from scholars in support of his position of impossibility would think he is a Salafi or an Ashtari, as he claimed to be one hundred percent. The reality, which his book testifies to, is that he is a Khalafi, a Mu'tazili from the people of desires. Added to that, he is ignorant of the Sunnah and hadiths to a great extent, and of the Arabic language and its literature, until he is like a semi-illiterate. And yet, he is arrogant with his knowledge, pleased with himself, and gives no weight to the Imams of the Salaf who said the opposite of his title, such as Imam Ahmad, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Tabari, Ibn Kathir, al-Qurtubi, Imam al-Shawkani, and Siddiq Hasan Khan al-Qal'awi. He accuses them of following scholars without evidence (taqlid) on the basis of "She threw me with her illness and then slipped away." This confirmed for me that we are in a time in which some of the signs of the Hour have become manifest, among which is his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): It is a sound hadith extracted from paths previously, number 1887, 2238, 2253, and similar to the hadith is the saying of 'Umar (may Allah be pleased with him): "The corruption of religion is when knowledge comes from the young and the old cannot control it, and the well-being of people is when knowledge comes from the old and the young follow it." Qasim ibn Asbagh narrated it with a sound chain, as al-Hafiz said in al-Fath. How many of these young people speak about the affairs of the Muslims with extreme ignorance! And our experience is not far off: that other Egyptian who wrote "The Prohibition of the Niqab on the Muslim Woman," and a third Jordanian who wrote on weakening his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): And on weakening the hadith of the prohibition of musical instruments, both of which are agreed upon as sound by hadith scholars and others. And others are many, and very many. And among the ignorance and stupidity of this so-called Ashtari is that, despite his statement on page 178, he said: "The methodology of the people of the Sunnah and the community is to refrain (ta'wif) in matters of the unseen (ghayb) at what is established from the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him)." Refraining is a Salafi statement. "Refraining in matters of the unseen at what is established from the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), and that no one, whatever his status, should add a detail or subtract what is established by evidence, or interpret the apparent verses according to his desire or without evidence." I say that, despite his statement of this clear, true methodology, he did not stop in this matter of the unseen at the sound hadith of the title, but contradicted it in a clear contradiction that does not need explanation. I thought he was ignorant of it until I saw that he mentioned it, quoting from others, on page 4 of the appendix at the end of the book. So I knew that he ignored it and did not extract it with the hadith of Ya'la and others mentioned previously. And he did not present any evidence from the Book and the Sunnah for what he claimed of impossibility, but he directed his entire effort to interpreting (ta'wil) the saying of the Exalted, which supports the entry that he denied: He began with an interpretation that ends with denying the touch (mas), which the scholars interpreted as madness, and with agreeing with some of the Ash'aris and Mu'tazilis who interpreted the touch as the harmful whispering of Satan. This is an interpretation by metaphor (majaz), which is contrary to the original, and therefore the people of the Sunnah denied it, as will follow. This is what he explicitly stated, quoting from al-Fakhr al-Razi the Ash'ari, on pages 76 and 78. Al-Razi said: "It is as if Satan touches the person and he becomes mad." "As if" means there is no reality in the touch; this is called metaphor. And he quoted on page 89 from others that he said: "It is as if the jinn touched him." "As if the jinn," and thus he restricted the touch to one who contradicts the law of Allah. So he said on page 22: "No one would be touched except by distancing himself from the prescribed methodology." This is from his illiteracy. It is a necessary consequence of his pile. And no one would be touched, so it is her nature. One, except by distancing himself from the prescribed methodology. This is denial (ta'til) and interpretation (ta'wil). Even if we hypothetically accept that the matter is as he said, it does not necessitate, according to the scholars, the establishment of the claim of denial, because there is the possibility of the existence of another evidence for the entry, as in this sound hadith. While the man thought that he was refuting the implication of the verse regarding the entry, he established its denial of it. And that is not the case. Even if we accept his refutation, how is it when it is refuted against him by this sound hadith and the hadith of Ya'la mentioned above? With them, the verse is interpreted, and his interpretation of it by metaphor is invalidated. And among the ignorance and contradiction of the man is that, after he interpreted the verse by the metaphor that means there is no real touch, he returned to say on page 93: "The language has agreed that the touch is madness." This contradicts his words, but he interpreted it according to his desire, saying: From the outside, not from the inside. Meaning, Satan touches the person from the outside, not from the inside. He said: Do you not see, for example, electricity? How does it shock the one who touches it from the outside? Dots to the end of his nonsense. He entered into details concerning a matter of the unseen by analogy to observed material matters. And we mentioned earlier that he said: It is not permissible to enter into the details of the unseen. This is contrary to the Salafi methodology quoted from him above. And yet, he ignored what is known in the science of medicine that there are germs that kill from the inside, like the Koch germ in its third stage, meaning the germ of tuberculosis. So there is no logical barrier to the jinn entering from the outside into the human body and doing its work and harm in it from the inside, just as there is no barrier to its exiting from it for one reason or another. And both matters have been established in the hadith, so we believed in it and did not dismiss it, as the Mu'tazilis and their like from the people of desires did. And this author, the Ashtari, claimed to be from them. How could he not, when he ignored the hadith of the title and did not extract it at all among the other hadiths he extracted and cited the wording of, from page 121 to page 126, all of which are hadiths, and it is very sound, as I saw. And in addition to that, he did not take from the sum of those hadiths what this hadith indicated of his extraction (peace and blessings be upon him) of the Satan from that madman, which is a great miracle among his miracles (peace and blessings be upon him). Rather, he set up a contradiction between the narration and the narration . He brought against himself on page 124 the saying of some that Imam al-Albani utilized that Imam al-Albani had graded the hadith as sound. He quoted from some that he said: Imam al-Albani had graded the hadith as sound. Then he responded to it by saying: So this is a fabricated lie. Look at what he said.The Shaykh : Al-Albani, in order to learn about lying, Volume 1 of the Sahih Series, page 795, hadith number 485. Then he quoted my words on it, and the text at the end is as mentioned here. In summary, the hadith is good with this supporting chain. This is Al-Albani's statement, and Allah knows best. I said: Therefore, the refutation of the aforementioned is not valid, and perhaps the opposite is correct. He explicitly stated that it is weak without any detail, page 22, and some people were misled by this. Yes, he did doubt the hadith's indication of entry by pointing to the disagreement in the narrations, and I mentioned two of their wordings earlier. However, it is not hidden from sincere students of this knowledge that it is not part of knowledge to strike different narrations against each other. Rather, we must take from them what the majority agreed upon. And it is certain that the first wording is more authentic than the second because it came in five of the narrations he cited, while the other wording came in only two of them. I see, I see no major difference in meaning between them, for both address a person. One is explicit that the addressee is inside the possessed person, and the other implies it. And what confirms that the first is more authentic is the explicitness of the hadith of the title, which will be the judge, by the permission of Allah, on the book of the alleged impossibility. The explanation that preceded shows that it is merely a claim regarding an unseen matter, contrary to the methodology mentioned earlier. Before concluding my remarks on this topic, I must present to the noble readers, even if only one example, of the ignorance of the Sunnah that I attributed to the man in the preceding text, even if what has passed is sufficient to indicate that. He mentioned the famous hadith prohibiting following the ways of the disbelievers with a wording that has no basis in narration or knowledge. He said on page 27: "And the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) told the truth when he said: 'You will follow the nations before you, heel following heel, inch following inch.'" Heel is the hadith . He does not distinguish, due to his ignorance, between "heel" (hathaa) and "heel" (hathw). Look, he remains... "Heel following heel, inch following inch, until if they entered the hole of a scorpion, you would enter it after them." They said: "O Messenger of Allah, the Jews and the Christians?" He said: "Who else?" or as he said (peace and blessings be upon him). End. The scope for criticizing him, or my criticism of him, in his citation of the hadith is very wide, but I only wanted to criticize him on one letter in it, by which he corrupted the meaning of the hadith with his saying "heel" (hathaa). This is an ugly distortion of the hadith that is not hidden from the least cultured person. The correct is , and it is not a typographical error as some might think. He repeated it in another place, page 34, accompanied by another error: "Heel (hathaa) the inch (al-qadhah) by the inch (al-qadhah)." It is al-qudhah, and he repeated the word "heel (hathaa) the inch (al-qadhah) by the inch (al-qadhah)" as he checked it with an open qaf, whereas it is with a closed qaf. It is published in the Sahih from various paths with similar wordings, number 3312, and the like, which indicates his ignorance of the Sunnah. His statement on page 240: "By the saying of the Salaf, 'Information is not like witnessing.'" This is a marfu' hadith narrated by a group of imams, including Ahmad from Ibn Abbas as marfu', and it contains a story. It is published in the Sahih of al-Jami' al-Saghir, number 5250. And among the examples of his ignorance of what the Salafi methodology requires is that he included, on page 74, in the group of accepted tafsirs, Tafsir al-Kashshaf and Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi. Have you seen or heard a scholar say such a thing? Tafsir al-Kashshaf is Mu'tazili, and Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi is Ash'ari. Would he say they are among the tafsirs of the Salaf? Allah is Great. And among the examples of his ignorance of what the Salafi methodology requires is that he included in the group of accepted tafsirs Tafsir al-Kashshaf and Tafsir al-Fakhr al-Razi. Have you seen or heard a scholar say such a thing? So it is no surprise after this that he deviates from the Sunnah, influenced by them, and interprets the verse of riba figuratively following them. As for his spelling errors indicating that he is almost illiterate, they are almost innumerable. He says in more than one place: "Exalted be He with me, Exalted be He, Allah the Exalted said..." He says "Come with me" instead of "Exalted be He with me." And he said on page 131: "Then Exalted be He, for His saying, Exalted be He..." May Allah guide them. May Allah be sought for help. The worst of the calamity is what makes one cry. Yes, and he mentioned the verse "Then come" instead of saying "Exalted be He, for His saying, Exalted be He," and mentioned the verse. And on page so-and-so: "So it is impossible that this issue would be missed by these two noble imams," instead of saying "these two noble imams." And on page so-and-so he says: "Add to that that the two imams are not doctors," ... he says "are not doctors." He raises the accusative case repeatedly and constantly. In conclusion, I say that my purpose from what preceded is only to establish what the Shari'ah has established of unseen matters and to refute those who deny them. But on the other hand, I strongly condemn those who exploit this belief and make summoning jinn and addressing them a profession for treating the possessed and those afflicted with epilepsy. They adopt in this means that go beyond merely reciting the Qur'an, which Allah has not authorized, such as severe beating, which may sometimes result in the death of the afflicted, as happened here in Oman and in Egypt, which became the talk of newspapers and gatherings. Those who used to recite over the epileptic in the past were few righteous individuals, but today they are in the hundreds. They are in the hundreds today, and among them are some women who display their adornment. So the matter has gone beyond being a Shari'ah means that doctors usually do not perform to other matters and means that neither the Shari'ah nor medicine knows. So it is, in my view, a type of charlatanism and delusions that Satan suggests to his enemy, man. And the devils suggest to one another the adornment of speech, deluding. And it is a type of seeking help from the jinn, which was the practice of the polytheists in the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, mentioned in His saying, the Exalted: . So whoever seeks their help to break a spell they claim, or to know the identity of the jinn possessing the human, whether it is male or female, Muslim or disbeliever, and the one seeking help believes him, and this one believes the one seeking help.Those present : with him, it encompasses them all, and the warning of the saying of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him): . And in another hadith: , narrated by Muslim and others, and it is published in Ghayat al-Maram, number 284, and narrated by al-Tabarani from another path with the condition , and it is denounced with this addition, and therefore I published it in the Da'if, number 5555. The hadith before it is also authentic, and it is published in al-Irwaa'. One should be alert to this. I have known that many of those afflicted with this profession are heedless of this reality. And I advise them, if they continue in their profession, not to exceed in their addressing the saying of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him): , reminding them of His saying, Blessed and Exalted is He: . And may Allah be sought for help. And there is no power and no strength except with Allah.

The questioner : May Allah reward you with good, our Shaykh. You are tired with us, O Shaykh.