Abstract
This article examines the emergence and constitution of a new affliction category in contemporary Egypt: wahm, meaning (self-)illusion, locally defined as the condition of being falsely convinced one is possessed by spirits called ‘jinn’, all the while exhibiting real possession symptoms. As I show, wahm transcends the domain of revivalist Islamic healing from where it originates by mobilizing and entangling Islamic and psy concepts and practices. It both exploits the local dichotomy of jinn afflictions/mental disorders and grows from the cracking of this binary. In this manner, wahm provides a new idiom for critiquing current therapeutic practices, for understanding suffering, and for analyzing modern life in today’s Egypt. Through the analysis of wahm, this article contributes to scholarly investigations of ontology and the emergence of diseases by moving the lens from biomedical categories to the terrain where biomedicine meets religious healing, highlighting not only intersections but also the new formations they engender.
Highlights
One afternoon in April 2011, a few months into my field research in Cairo, I met my longtime friend and interlocutor Ahmad to watch televised shows about jinn possession available on YouTube.1 Mentioned in the Qur’an, jinn are invisible creatures created from fire that have long been the target of numerous, contested, attempts to entice or repeal them
As I demonstrate in this article, wahm as a category of illness emerged from Shaykh Ibrahim’s attempts to overcome the dichotomy of jinn afflictions5/mental disorders that dominates public discussions and to circumscribe the diffuse concern with questions of illusion and deceit circulating in this therapeutic ecosystem
Wahm is constituted as a distinct malady through the complex articulation of knowledges and practices that belong to two domains that many, including in Egypt, take as separate, despite their historically constituted entanglement: religion and psy sciences
Summary
One afternoon in April 2011, a few months into my field research in Cairo, I met my longtime friend and interlocutor Ahmad to watch televised shows about jinn possession available on YouTube.1 Mentioned in the Qur’an, jinn are invisible creatures created from fire that have long been the target of numerous, contested, attempts to entice or repeal them (see for example El-Zein 2009; Zadeh 2014). As I demonstrate in this article, wahm as a category of illness emerged from Shaykh Ibrahim’s attempts to overcome the dichotomy of jinn afflictions5/mental disorders that dominates public discussions and to circumscribe the diffuse concern with questions of illusion and deceit circulating in this therapeutic ecosystem.
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