Soothsaying & Augury

The people of the Jahiliyya believed the reports of soothsayers, seers and astrologers ^{1 2}.

A kahin (soothsayer) is one who undertakes to report future events and claims to know secrets. Some soothsayers claim to have a jinn companion who casts news to them. Others claim to perceive the unseen through an understanding given to them. Others claim to know things through premises and causes, by which they infer where things are from the speech, act or state of the one asking them. This last kind is called an 'arraf, such as one who claims to know what was stolen, where the theft took place, where a lost animal is, and the like ^{1 2}. A munajjim (astrologer) is one who looks at the stars, meaning the heavenly bodies, and calculates their courses and times, in order to know by them the conditions of the world and the events that will happen in the future ¹.

The author holds that believing the reports of astrologers is, in reality, faith in the stars. Among their faith in the stars was faith in the anwa' ^{1 3}.

The hadith forbidding going to soothsayers and the rulings on soothsaying in jurisprudence will be presented under their own entries. The mentions of soothsayers in the sira (the soothsayer of Quraysh, Shiq and Satih) will be presented in their places.

The speaker describes fortune-tellers who buy advertising, with sums in the millions, to mislead people (needs_source: the figure of millions is not sourced from the recording). ⁴ He holds that channels of astrology and fortune-telling should be shut because of the harm they do, that Muslims should not engage with them, and that the world advances in research while Muslims lag behind. ⁵

The speaker recalls a hadith about the one who goes to a soothsayer and believes him, and counts cup-reading, palm-reading and the reading of horoscopes as belonging to this category; he stresses the severity of the warning. ⁶ He recalls another hadith about the one who goes to a soothsayer, and says that his prayer is not accepted for forty nights (needs_source: the number and the source of the hadith were not stated in the passage). He says that the answers of such people are mostly false, and warns of what it costs to seek them. ⁷

The speaker says that weak knowledge, weak religious upbringing and absence from mosques push people towards such figures, who cost them this world and the next; the real remedy, he says, is taqwa and righteousness. ⁸