President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | National | Sat, January 18 2014, 1:04 PM
In his new book, published Friday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono admits that he and his family had almost fallen victim to witchcraft.
In the book, titled There is Always a Choice, Yudhoyono tells the story of how he and First Lady Ani Yudhoyono had to fight dark clouds hovering inside their house in Cikeas, Bogor, West Java.
Yudhoyono wrote that during one Sunday morning prior to the 2009 election, his wife was reading a magazine in the living room while he was busy in the library.
“Suddenly, my wife screamed and called to me. I ran into the room to find out what happened. It turned out that there was this thick dark cloud hovering beneath the ceiling, trying to enter my bedroom,” wrote Yudhoyono.
“I then asked everybody to pray to seek Allah’s help. I closed the door to my room but left others wide open. The revolving clouds eventually headed out of my house.”
“Alhamdulillah. Praise the Lord. My family was safe. The incident was like footage in a typical horror movie. But this really was happening. It was real,” he said in a chapter titled “Threat to the President can reach the level of assassination”.
Yudhoyono said that there were other incidents that he believed could not be explained logically, but he preferred to keep them closed to the public.
Additional Reading
There are several mentions of Jinns in the Holy Quran and actually a chapter is titled Jinn. But, the devil is in the detail. Who are the Jinns?
Khalifatul Masih II, Hazrat Mirza Bashiruddin Mehmood Ahmed, who led the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community from 1914-1965, gave several reasons why Jinns are not the demons or the ghosts of popular imagination, in his commentary of Sura Hijr, the fifteenth chapter of the Holy Quran. I will mention only two here for the sake of example.
He says that Jinns in the Holy Quran mean foreigners or aliens, for example, we read in the Holy Quran, “And of the Jinn were some who worked under him (Solomon), by the command of his Lord. … They made for him what he desired; palaces and statues, and basins like reservoirs, and large cooking vessels fixed in their places.” (Al Quran 34:13-14) When we try to find out, who were these Jinns that built palaces for the Prophet Solomon, we find in the Bible that he had asked foreign kings to send him engineers for this purpose. In the same chapter we read, “Solomon took a census of all the foreigners residing in Israel, after the census his father David had taken; and they were found to be 153,600. He assigned 70,000 of them to be carriers and 80,000 to be stonecutters in the hills, with 3,600 foremen over them to keep the people working.”
In Hadith we find mention that Jinns also believed in the Holy Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him, but, when we try to understand these Hadith in the light of the Quran, we have no choice, but to understand Jinns to be some hidden groups of men, who did not reveal their identity for different considerations. For example, in the Holy Quran we read, “Say, ‘O mankind! truly I am a Messenger to you all from Allah.” (Al Quran 7:159 ) Khalifatul Masih II argues that if Jinns were a separate species, different from the humans the Holy Quran should have said, “Say, ‘O mankind and Jinns! truly I am a Messenger to you all from Allah.” So, many a use of the term Jinn in the Quran is for humans of one description or the other.
Jinn according to the Islamic tradition may also mean bacteria, which may cause disease or even archaebacteria, which emerged at least 3.5 billion years ago and live in environments that resemble conditions existing when the earth was young, which may have role in evolution of life on our planet, but, that is a subject for another day.
References from the Bible
Chronicles 2:7-14, New International Version.
Chronicles 2:17-18, New International Version.