or through fortune-telling, sorcery, astrology, or any other practice. What some charlatans and impostors actually do—telling people where lost or absent items are, or claiming to identify the causes of certain illnesses by saying, “So-and-so did such-and-such to you, and that is why you fell ill”—is nothing more than their enlistment of jinn and devils. They present it to the public as though it were achieved by those arts, merely to deceive and defraud.

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah said: (1) “The soothsayers often have a companion from among the devils who tells them many unseen matters, snatching bits of information he has overheard. They mix truth with falsehood.… Among them are those whose devil brings them food—fruit, sweets, and the like—that does not exist in that place. Some of them are even carried by a jinn to Mecca, Jerusalem, or elsewhere.” End quote.

At other times their information comes through astrology—that is, deducing earthly events from celestial conditions: