أطراس

“Sing and be Possessed”: A Reflective Practitioner’s Perspective on the Impacts of Music on Jinn-Human Relations

أطراس July 15, 2026 Muhyideen Olasunkanmi Imam

Music in many West African Muslim contexts is not a neutral aesthetic phenomenon but a spiritually charged medium through which permeable boundaries between the human and unseen worlds are negotiated, violated, and potentially restored. This paper examines a case of a thirty-five-year-old woman allegedly afflicted by jinn possession attributed to her habitual consumption of secular music, using Driscoll's model of structured reflection. It opens with public confessions by Nigerian musicians 9ice and Terry G about the devil's dominion over secular music, providing a popular-culture entry point into the intersection of ethnomusicology, hip-hop linguistics, Islamic demonology, and the anthropology of possession. The study contributes to scholarship on musical linguistics, Islamic therapeutic practices, the moral economy of sound, and gendered dimensions of jinn affliction in postcolonial Nigeria.