JEDDAH, 17 April 2003 — Stories about the supernatural haunt the Saudi media, with both readers and journalists betraying an endless fascination with stories of genies and witchcraft.
One local newspaper reported last week that the Laith area and its highway are haunted by a female genie. The camels running along the highway are her sons, the paper said, and the genie will harm or kidnap anyone who comes near her sons.
Quoting local residents, the paper reported the story without comment or irony.
Al-Jadeeda magazine recently ran a cover story about marriages between genies and human beings, which caused a great deal of controversy.
It is not unusual for the Saudi media to feed such superstitions to its public, with stories about the supernatural often appearing facing a newspaper’s IT pages.
Dr. Abu Bakr Ba Ghader, a sociology professor at King Abdul Aziz University, told Arab News the media should be more responsible when dealing with such stories. “The media should not report stories about the supernatural without commenting on them. Most of these stories have a logical and scientific explanation. In this country, the media has an educating role. So they should guide people away from their belief in the supernatural.
“There is an undeniable cultural attachment to such stories among the people of the region. These stories always are exciting and exotic, and they’re very popular with readers,” he said. “Such stories often appear in women’s magazines. I believe women make good listeners for these stories, and they like to resort to the supernatural to solve their personal problems, especially in marriage,” he added.
Ba Ghader concluded that the media is a reflection of the beliefs of a society, and as such there was nothing wrong with reporting the things that occupy people’s minds. However, the media could bring a plethora of scientific approaches to these stories including medicine, psychology and physics.
Ba Ghader confirmed that many people who perform witchcraft were made famous by magazines or newspapers, especially those claiming to have healing powers.
“Genies and the supernatural have been part of our culture for a long time,” Muhammad Sadeq Diyab, Al-Jadeeda’s editor in chief, told Arab News.
“When we journalists report it, we should work on increasing public awareness about the issue. And we should be careful not to nurture any legend or imaginary stories in the public mind. When we reported the story about people of both sexes claiming that they have married genies, we did not support that interpretation at all. Anyone who read the full article will find that we concluded that all these stories are the result of hallucination or schizophrenia.”
Nonetheless, Diyab said, there was nothing wrong with reporting stories about the supernatural so long as journalists did not confirm or promote them.
