The Most Precious Gift of Allah to Mankind is the Intellect (Part 4)

On Witchcraft

Witchcraft, uchawi or uramali, call it whatever you like, is the most believed-in and most-feared in East Africa. But it has no power, except the power of suggestion. All its power depends upon creating a psychological impression of fear etc., in the mind of the victim. So, ultimately, the victim himself accomplishes his own undoing. Such an impressionable person is his own enemy.

Be it sickness of a child, or discord between husband and wife, or failure in the business – everything here is attributed to some kind of witchcraft. Even if you point out that the parties concerned are themselves responsible for, say, the discord in marriage, they would still say that their objectionable behavior towards each other was the result of their ‘being be-witched’.

I have seen people of every color and creed shifting the responsibility of their trouble to some imaginary ‘enemy who is being -witching me.” And so deep-rooted is this superstition that when you tell them that they were mistaken in that belief, they will go out to find “someone who has real ‘elimu’.” Such people are happiest when they are exploited by some unscrupulous ‘wise-man’. When they provide him with goat of a particular color and pieces or clothes of specific designs to counter-act the supposed witchcraft, they think they would now be relieved of their worries. Actually, they are relieved of their money only.

On Backbiting

﴾O’ ye who believe nor backbite each other. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother; Ye lothe it!﴿ The Holy Qur’an (Surah 49, The Dwellings, verse12).

Backbiting, in Muslim language, means to mention or allude to the actual defects (physical, moral or otherwise) of a person in his absentia (provided the victim of that backbiting prefers to hide that defect). If the alleged defect is not found in him actually but was the invention of the imagination of the backbiter, then it is false accusation and its sin is far graver than the backbiting.

Personal bitterness and enmity is caused by backbiting, false reports and baseless accusations which are the stock-in-trade of the flatterers. The analogy given in the Qur’an is very apt. it is an act similar to eating one’s dead brother’s flesh. He is like a dead body because he is not present and the tale-bearer is feasting on his flesh because he is nibbling at his prestige.

But the flesh of dead man is a source of physical harm for the partaker himself. Likewise the backbiting creates spiritual disease to the tale-bearer. It is the worst bane of human life and makes a man enemy of his brothers.

It is the backbiter who sows the seed to bitterness, hatred, intrigue and enmity. It is he who causes disruption in the homes, disloyalty in the office, disintegration in the social and religious institutions; it is he who spells the downfall of the society and tears apart the fabric of social harmony.

A backbiter becomes the worst type of hypocrite. In order to save his own prestige, he poses as a friend of very man whom he actually tries to destroy. When he is suspected of evil designs, he takes refuge behind false oaths. Thus he damages his own spirit and, more often than not, when he falls, nobody comes there to lift him up.

^{* Source: imamreza.net}