AlMaghrib Institute

Someone looks at your car, your watch, your child, and says something. Nice watch. Your kid has so much energy. Then something happens to it. Imam Ammar Shahin explains the mechanism behind that. A shaytan comes and causes the effect, pushing the object, moving it, breaking it.

Sh. Ammar AlShukry asks whether that is the person's own qareen. It is not, it is a different shaytan.

Which also explains why sometimes nothing happens at all. Someone can admire your watch and it stays exactly as it is. The harm depends on whether a shaytan is present to act on the comment, and usually one arrives as soon as it is said. It makes far more sense than imagining eyes with some kind of laser effect.

This is a clip from the AlMaghrib Podcast on the evil eye with Imam Ammar Shahin.

Imam Ammar Shahin names two habits sisters should be careful with. Music playing constantly, and admiring your own beauty in front of the mirror. Sh. Ammar AlShukry raises the obvious question to that: what about a camera phone, filming dances, posting it all online?

It cuts both ways. Why is a brother standing in a bathroom mirror taking photos of his muscles, or showing them off at the gym? That can attract attention you did not account for.

He describes a case of a brother afflicted for ten years by a female jinn who became attached to him and stayed. When he married, it became a mess. She would demand he isolate himself in a separate room two nights a week, away from his wife. When they recited over him, the root of it was that attraction.

This is a clip from the AlMaghrib Podcast on the evil eye and ruqyah with Imam Ammar Shahin.

Homeschooling, Islamic school, state school. Sh. Abu Eesa makes the point that Allah did not prescribe one particular schooling system. What matters are the objectives, and chief among them is protecting your child's deen.

Every option on the table can end in disaster, and every option can be recovered from and turned into a success. Better systems exist and some will help you more than others, but the deciding factor was never the school. It is the parent. The one thing you cannot do is leave your children to their own devices and hope it works out.

AlMaghrib Institute is a nonprofit Islamic education organization founded in 2002. We teach seminars, online courses, and a full Quran program to students in more than 45 cities worldwide.

The jinn have no more interest in interacting with us than we do with them. We are usually the ones who bring them into our lives.

Imam Ammar Shahin explains that inner possession, a jinn actually entering the body, is rare, roughly one in a thousand, because it is not easy for them to do. It happens in four states: complete fear, complete excitement, complete sadness, and complete misguidance, such as when someone is drinking or deep in sin. Entry is through the openings of the body, the mouth, the nose, the ears.

Watch the full AlMaghrib Podcast episode: How Do I Know If I've Been Afflicted By Magic?

San Francisco, 2005. An American man, not a Muslim, would collapse outside the masjid and scream in a language nobody recognized. People assumed it was a seizure. Imam Ammar Shahin and another brother brought him inside and recited over him, the jinn spoke, and after some exchange it left his body.

When he woke up he said it was the first time in months that he felt relaxed instead of stressed. He kept returning to the masjid every other week just to be recited over, and told them the position he felt most at peace in was sujood.

He eventually took his shahada and applied to the Islamic University of Madinah. Last Imam Ammar heard, he was doing his master's in hadith.

Watch the full AlMaghrib Podcast episode: How Do I Know If I've Been Afflicted By Magic?

Some people are known in their communities for their eye. Imam Ammar Shahin describes one such man. Once, on his way to play football, the man remarked on how his legs never stopped moving. A car reversed onto his foot and it was broken for four months. Another time the man told him his voice was so loud it could split wood. He lost his voice for months and later had a growth removed.

When warned to stop, the man boasted that his own heart was strong enough. He was taken to hospital with a heart attack, having never had heart trouble before. He had turned his eye on himself.

Watch the full AlMaghrib Podcast episode: Hasad, Ruqya & the Signs

When you are in doubt about how to fight Shaytan, whatever the whisper is, return to the isti'adha and seek refuge in Allah from him. It is not a formula. It is an act of worship.

People tell him they said it once and it did not help. So how many times should you say it? As many times as you need to repel him. And alongside it, enliven in your heart that Allah is more powerful than Shaytan. Whatever trial or temptation he is pulling you toward, Allah can protect you from it.

Watch the full AlMaghrib Podcast episode: How Shaytan Actually Attacks You