I attend some special night meetings with the sheikh where perhaps twenty men would stand in a large circle in a room chanting “Allah, uh! Allah, uh!” with the “Allah” being exhaled and the “uh” being a deep inhalation. The black-clad participants would simultaneously bend forward at the waist in a bobbing motion, with each “Allah”. (I irreverently thought they looked like a flock of penguins.) Then some of the men would then begin slowly revolving in place—and then begin to spin like tops, faster and faster, circling the empty space in the center of the group.
Of course I was free to join them spinning, but I only observed and never joined these “whirling dervishes”, which is exactly what they were.
One evening some worried parents brought their six-year-old daughter to the sheikh for a consultation and he asked me to join them.
To me the little girl seemed to be “inhabited” by a very mature and very wickedly sensual spirit—she was not at all the “little girl” she should have been at her chronological age.
The sheikh asked me what I thought about the girl and when I told him what I thought, he said that WAS her trouble. She had been taken over by an evil spirit—a seeming case of “spirit possession”.
He gave the parents instructions for prayers and gave them a charm, which he said would induce the evil spirit to vacate the body and leave the child alone.
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