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Contemporary Islam
Published in: Contemporary Islam 1/2019

25-08-2017

Islamic exorcism and the cinema fist: analyzing exorcism among Danish Muslims through the prism of film

Author: Christian Suhr

Published in: Contemporary Islam | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya). I show how these exorcisms operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of al-ghayb—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the jinn spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in the sense of immediate “well-being” or “relief from pain” but in the sense of moral witnessing, an opportunity to testify to the limits of human seeing and action and to the ways in which invisible and divine forces give shape to the tangible world.
previous article Spirits as technology: tech-gnosis and the ambivalent politics of the invisible in Indonesia

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Metadata
Title
Islamic exorcism and the cinema fist: analyzing exorcism among Danish Muslims through the prism of film
Author
Christian Suhr
Publication date
25-08-2017
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Contemporary Islam / Issue 1/2019
Print ISSN: 1872-0218
Electronic ISSN: 1872-0226
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0394-6

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