we know that communication between humans and jinn is a reality, and that a jinn conveys to the soothsayer certain true reports. The soothsayer then adds other fabricated tales of his own, relates them to the people, and they verify the accuracy of part of what he says. Nevertheless, the Divine Law has forbidden visiting these soothsayers and has warned against believing them, as we have already mentioned.

On this occasion it must be said that soothsaying, fortune-telling, and astrology still wield great influence over many people—even in our own age, which its inhabitants proudly style the age of science, rational thought, civilization, and culture. They imagine that soothsaying, quackery, and magic have vanished and lost all power. Yet anyone who observes carefully, and peers behind the scenes of what is happening here and there, knows with certainty that they still dominate many; they have merely donned a new garb and adopted modern forms that only a few can recognize. Spirit-summoning, spirit-communication, and the various modes of “contact with the dead” are but one face of this modern soothsaying. It misleads people, diverts them from their religion, and binds them to delusion and falsehood, while they suppose it to be reality, knowledge, and religion—whereas reality, knowledge, and religion are altogether innocent of it.

In sum, neither natural causes nor what is imagined to be a sharʿī cause may be affirmed or employed until their permissibility has been established by the Sharia, just as natural causes must be verified as sound and beneficial through observation and experiment.

It should also be understood that once something has been proven to be a genuine natural means, its permissibility and use are sufficiently established so long as the Sharia contains no prohibition against it, and in such a case the jurists say