Doubling Gods
One day, a friend called me up, told me to wear the baju kurung and selendang to work the next day, because after Maghrib, we were going to visit a holy man. She had had a bit of a haunting recently, and it was affecting her marriage. While I digested the fact that she, a quantity surveyor and her husband, an accountant, actually believed in mumbo-jumbo, she turned up at my office and kidnapped me for the night. The holy man’s home was just an hour away.
It became more apparent to me, as we headed towards nowhere, that we were not going to meet a Datuk Harun Din type in a Darul Syifa setting. We were heading towards secondary forests and dirt roads. The fact that the trip had exceeded more than an hour made me nervous.
“Who are we visiting?” I asked my friend.
“Uncle Din.”
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Uncle Din was renowned as one of the top bomohs in Malaysia. He was supposed be over a hundred years old and had had 14 wives. He was an expert in Malay, Siamese, Indonesian, and Orang Asli witchcraft. He took on clients when and if he felt like it. His client roster was the surrounding villages at the bottom of the hill, the odd celebrity, one who came in a few days ago to remove her ‘bad luck’ moles and implant a pelaris, and a few Ministers. Sometimes he was paid, sometimes he wasn’t. What mattered was whether he wanted to help.
Twilight Zone
He infused recitations of the Quran along with Buddhist chants and Siamese curses. He prayed to the Lord Ganesha, inciting Djinns and ifrits to help him send the curses and cures with the wind. One whisper, and it could kill you.
“And why are we visiting a bomoh?” I asked.
“Because I was told that if you kena Siamese mundrum, you have to find a Siamese bomoh to cure you. Likewise if you kena Orang Asli mundrum, you gotta find an Orang Asli bomoh. Only they would know how to get rid of it.”
“I am not the most perfect Muslim, my dear friend, but one: this is syirik. This is not what I want to get involved in. Two: it is fasting month. It’s a holy month, for crying out loud!”
“Islam said we have to ikhtiar, do our best. And God knows I want to save my marriage. I know it sounds awful to see a bomoh during bulan puasa, but maybe because it’s a holy month, it’ll be blessed. Just shut up, and be a friend.”
You, dear reader, may wonder at the logic of it all. How can we Muslims believe in such heresy? For all our prophesising and posturing on what is halal and haram, indulging in syirik – doubling Allah, i.e. believing in someone or something other than God, is sinful; yet some of us at the end of the day turn to shamans and intermediaries, so our problems are solved.
We pray five times a day and pray the optional prayers, such as Sembahyang Hajat (loosely translated as the Wishing Prayer) and ask from God to give us sustenance, protect us from evil and challenges we face, we ask for everything from God. Yet that is not enough, so we turn to holy men, as in our Ustaz and Ustazahs, and the odd quack, because their reputed piety and purity give them so-called direct access to God.
Alam ghaib
In Islam there are two worlds: the material world and the spirit world, the Unseen. Islam forbids witchcraft and syirik. The Surah Al-Falaq, which is read in accompaniment with two other Surahs – Surah Al Ikhlas and Surah An-Nas – is especially specific when it comes to witchcraft:
In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful
Say: I seek refuge with Allah, the Lord of the daybreak
From the evil of what He has created
And from the evil of the darkening (night) as it comes with its darkness; (or the moon as it sets or goes away)
And from the evil of those who practise witchcraft when they blow in the knots
And from the evil of the envier when he envies.
These three Surahs, along with the Ayatul Qursy (from Surah AlBaqarah, verse number 255), are recited for the protection of the reader.
Like most Muslims, I have been brought up to recite these prayers wherever I go. Once before I go to work and once more before I retire to bed. This is the least I can do to keep myself protected from harm. It has become part of my life that if I forget to recite them, I find that my day just cannot go right. You may scoff at it and say, ah superstitious rites!
The question is: since Islam recognises sihir (witchcraft), why is it considered doubling Gods when we seek cures and prayers? Especially from more learned personalities such as Datuk Harun Din for example, or the bomoh we saw?
From the little I have gleaned from teachers such as Dr Fatma Al-Zaharah among others, to cure yourself from these ailments, you speak directly to God. On your prayer mat. In your car as you recite dzikirs. Wherever. You do not seek help from shamans, for they rely on the support of Djinns and whatnots.
“The best bomoh is you yourself,” Dr Fatma once told our class.
“But if it’s a huge ghost and scary too, how on earth are we going to be rid of it?” a student asked.
“Chant then: Allahu Akhbar! Many times! It will build your strength, and you will be able to face that ifrit.”
If you have to visit a ghostbuster, visit a Muslim one, for these men and women only rely on the Quran and God’s will, to help you. And remember, these individuals do not have the power to cure, and it is God’s will whether you are cured or not. We go to them because they may have the experience and knowledge that we lack. Hence, a healer like Datuk Harun Din and his peers are legitimate for they base their healings on Quranic verses.
The journey
To get to Uncle Din’s house, you have to drive to Jelebu, to meet the guides that would take you to his place. You can only see Uncle Din on Tuesday nights, malam api. If he is in the mood to receive you, the journey will be smooth, but if he’s away or in a foul mood, the arms of the jungle will reach out for you, and turn you away. The sky will turn dark, and the stars will sleep.
The drive to Jelebu was nauseating. Long, windy roads met with half completed infrastructure projects. Trees bent, weary from the sun and abuse they received from loggers. Night appeared, and soon everything became dark.
We stopped at an abandoned construction site. It had to be the most isolated place in Malaysia. My friend honked the car a few times, and out from the darkness, light shone into the car. Three men, holding guns, with bullet belts draped across their shoulders, came to the car and spoke to my friend. A few grunts were heard. Money was exchanged. They left the car, and in a few minutes, a jeep appeared, and one of the men called out so we could follow them.
We drove into the dark night, and broke our fast on dates my friend brought and kept in her handbag.
I had to ask. “Why were those men carrying guns?”
“There’re still Commies living around here. Plus the odd tiger.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a quantity surveyor.”
We arrived at our destination, to find that we had to climb a muddy hill. Atop the hill, was a hut surrounded by howling dogs and squealing cats. Barbed wires guarded the bottom of the hill, and had white and yellow ribbons tied on them. Pails of water lined the hill, right up to the hut.
The hut itself was a revelation in interior decoration. Pails hung from the roof, windows and were scattered beneath the hut floor. Dogs and puppies growled and snapped, while grey eyed cats stared back, insolently. Bare shrubs and trees guarded the hut. Let’s just say, it would never make the cover of Vogue Living.
The guides spoke in Minang, and shouted for Uncle Din. The dogs kept up their opera when the door slammed open, a few bones were thrown out of the hut, and there was Uncle Din.
“Come in.”
A lesson in social economics
There were a family and a pair of friends waiting to be treated by Uncle Din. The hut was really a shack, and I recalled my mother telling me once that fortune tellers and shamans were always poor because they took everyone’s bad luck with them.
The family wanted Uncle Din to cure a bed-ridden uncle, while the two men wanted the Sihir Pasir. Sihir Pasir was a pretty simple spell to do; all the elderly man had to do was draw spirals in the sand and the victim would be constipated until he fell down dead.
Bloody hell.
I looked up to see a newspaper clipping of the 2002 Cabinet. Some of the Ministers had their faces crossed and blackened.
“What does this mean?” I whispered to one of the guides.
“He has been cursed.”
Hanging from the zinc roof and ceiling were dolls. Dolls and more dolls wrapped in yellow or saffron coloured cloth. Most of them were male and female dolls, and presumably from the position they face, i.e. if they faced each other, they would be together forever, and if they faced in opposite direction, it meant separation.
Don’t quote me on this; this is just an assumption. Most of the dolls looked like they were bought in the road-side stalls that lined the links and highways to other states, though there were the odd Ken and Barbie dolls. I figured: the rich must have bought Ken and Barbs. Ah, the things one could learn at a shaman’s.
So this was what a real bomoh looked like, I thought. He looked absolutely normal. Actually, he looked pretty young for his age. For a hundred-year old, he was spry. He didn’t look Malay or Chinese or anything at all. It was as if his ethnicity had been erased from his face, to blend with the crowd.
All my life, like many other Malay women, the closest we got to something supernatural was mandi bunga and drinking Air Yassin (holy water). Mandi bunga was a flower bath to ward off evil and illness, and if you’re single, your beauty – and if you don’t have any to begin with, this bath’s kow for this – would attract hordes of admirers and then you get married to the perfect man ever. Air Yassin’s something all of us have been subjected to since we were young. Our mothers made us drink gallons of it just so we would score straight As and become model Malaysians.
Truth be known, such rites are big business in Malaysia. Trawl the Malay newspapers and tabloid magazines, and you’ll find advertisements and articles plying a healer’s name and number. Walk around KL, and you’ll definitely find tiny cut outs of an Ustaz’s details, promising you eternal happiness and that he can banish the ghouls residing in you to Gunung Tahan.
The influx of Indonesian migrants have also increased the number of bomohs in Kuala Lumpur. If you really want to see a bomoh convention, wait for the Elections. My father would always warn me not to be near any election area and PWTC, because he didn’t want something strange growing out of my forehead.
Crossroads
To say I was fascinated by Uncle Din’s model of cures and hexes would be an understatement. I was horrified, mortified, scared and yet I could not stop watching him at work.
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He prayed to Lord Ganesha, chanted the three Surahs that I prayed for my protection, before speaking in another language. From time to time, he threw ashes and peppercorns into a burning fire, while incense stank up the hut.
He turned to my friend and spoke. Our jaws dropped, how did he know?
“I can help you, young lady, but you must be willing to do whatever it takes.”
My friend was to find two virgin chickens from a kampong, none of the farmed and hormone-filled chickens you get these days. One had to be white, the other black. And no, they weren’t going to be his dinner; he was going to slit their throats and use the blood to return back the Djinn haunting her home and kill its owner, her enemy.
I thought: it’s one thing to double Gods, it’s another to sacrifice two poor chickens. Besides, how did one verify a chicken’s virginity? Did you poke its butt with a thermostat and wait for it to bleed on a white cloth? Chickens have virginities?
“I can’t do that, it’s syirik,” my friend said.
“What do you mean it’s syirik? Surely you know that Islam has said to ikhtiar, make effort, and that it is permissible? You came here and wasted my time. I ask you again: are you willing to do whatever it takes?”
She looked at me.
“No.”
Back in the car, she ranted, “I can’t believe I said no. They were just chickens! Birds! Me and my animal rights’ sensibilities!”
“Well, think about it. You won’t have clucking chicken ghosts haunting you.”
She began weeping. “You don’t understand. Only God knows that I am doing whatever it takes to save my family. Kahwin ni membina masjid (marriage is like building a mosque). To ruin it would mean hell on earth and the afterlife.”
We drove back in silence.
Afternote:
A month after that, my friend called to tell me, that she had checked all the maps of that area we visited. She had done her calculations and measurements. She even spoke to her colleagues about her visit.
The place we visited did not exist.
