ANGELS DEMONS AND ADDICTIONS

I was thirteen years old when I started smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. It didn’t take long for drinking to become social, while smoking became regular. I was young when I found dirty magazines, which ignited my lust for women. I liked what I saw. I was sixteen when I went to a strip club for the first time.

I smoked cigarettes throughout high school and college and drank at nearly every social gathering from Thursday through Sunday. Any excuse to get together and drink with friends seemed like a good one. I was social, enjoyed meeting girls, and loved hanging out with friends. Girlfriends were a constant in my life until I got married.

The first time I smoked marijuana was a year after graduating from college, during a trip to Amsterdam. I fell in love with it immediately. Within a year, I started smoking weed regularly. Cigarettes did not decrease when I started smoking weed. In fact, I started smoking more and tried not to smoke a whole pack in one day.

By the time I got married, I was drinking alcohol and smoking weed every night, while smoking one to two packs of cigarettes a day. Early in my relationship, I got introduced to prescription pills, and I became hooked. I called them “happy hours”.

Until that point, the decisions I made were mine. I chose to drink. I chose to smoke, and I chose to do drugs. I made those decisions myself, without any outside influence.

Then, an evil human being called Harami came into our lives. He brought demons and evil spirits with him.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of what was happening around me from a spiritual perspective. I didn’t see evil beings or recognize anything as a spiritual influence.

Looking back, however, I realize that there were other influences pushing me further toward darkness.

My mother strongly believed in black magic and believed people could perform evil rituals intended to harm others, channeling through spirits and demons. Islam widely accepts the existence of angels and demons, as the Quran mentions them. People find ways to communicate with demonic spirits so that they can do evil things to benefit themselves or to hurt others. Those who perform demonic rituals do so to gain power, chase greed, or take revenge. My mom spoke about black magic often throughout her life.

I learned more about demonic rituals while I was in Pakistan when my mother suffered a stroke there. I found out that spiritual forces could influence people’s lives, and the lengths people go through to perform rituals and sacrifices to make that happen.

I had seen the shrine Harami assembled and the mechanical aspects of his rituals. Fire was his preferred method to connect with the spirits. Even then, I didn’t see demons, nor was I consciously aware of evil spirits surrounding me.

What I did notice was how rapidly my behavior changed. My drinking became heavier. I smoked more cigarettes, smoked more weed, and took a lot of pain pills, and eventually added sleeping pills too.

The atmosphere inside my home seemed to grow darker, and my marriage deteriorated. Arguments became constant. I became angry, abrasive, impulsive, irrational, and impatient.

Lust, desire, and temptation increasingly consumed me.

And it wasn’t only me. Everything around me seemed to change, including my job, our business, and my social life.

It felt as though it was the right moment and the right time, for all the wrong things.

Every argument and every bad decision somehow seemed justified in the moment. Driven by addiction, I was drinking six or more alcoholic drinks a day, smoking one or two packs of cigarettes, using marijuana morning, noon, and night, and taking the maximum dose of oxycodone, as many as six times a day, Xanax to sleep.

Then, I added cocaine to my list of bad habits.

I spent more and more time gambling in casinos and chasing lust and desire in strip clubs. I took frequent solo trips to Las Vegas. With every step, the boundaries I once had moved farther away.

When the partying ended, I became further isolated and alone.

The amount of drugs and alcohol I was consuming should have killed me on any given night. When things became especially dark, thoughts of death were never far away. And I was never able to leave a bullet in the chamber when I pulled the trigger against my temple. I knew suicide was wrong, so instead of deliberately ending my life, I hoped that each day would simply be my last.

Looking back, I believed the invisible demons were accomplishing exactly what they wanted, slowly leading me toward my own eternal destruction.

Death by overdose or suicide.

I had always believed strongly in Allah and in the Five Pillars of Islam, but I had never truly practiced my faith. Until I graduated from college, I acknowledged Ramadan by avoiding alcohol, showing a little more restraint to temptation during the month, and fasting whenever it was convenient for me.

All that stopped as soon as Harami came into my life.

Ramadan became like any other month. I continued drinking, smoking, using drugs, and partying as usual. By then, I felt as though darkness had gained a powerful hold over my life. Even during my worst moments, however, I still didn’t recognize where the inner voice pushing me deeper into destructive behavior was coming from.

And then, during the darkest period, an Angel came into my life.

He was in the form of a cat, and his name was Kiki.

For every demon created, God has created two angels to protect us from them.

A young stray cat began following my daughter and her nanny whenever they walked along the path to our neighborhood park. He would stay a few steps behind them and follow them around.

We already had three large dogs, and we were definitely not cat people.

But Kiki turned out to be perfect for us.

He wasn’t quite a kitten, but he wasn’t fully grown either. He was cute, sweet, and seemingly helpless because he had been declawed. He had little ability to defend himself outdoors.

We gave him some milk and took him to the veterinarian. He had no microchip, although he had already been vaccinated and neutered. We notified local veterinarians and pet stores that we had found a cat, put flyers around the neighborhood, and monitored social media pages for reports of missing cats.

No one came looking for him.

It seemed as though Kiki had simply appeared out of nowhere.

Kiki entered my life during my worst moments, and he rarely left my side. Somehow, his presence helped me do less of the things I shouldn’t have been doing.

My desire for drugs, alcohol, gambling, and partying diminished.

I found a vent in my dark, suffocating room.

I began reading the Words of God, writing stories and poems with Kiki beside me.

I read all three Holy Books.

·       Torah: Five Books of Moses.

·       Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments.

·       Holy Quran.

I read them from beginning to end, in that order.

During this period, I was able to eliminate the things that were most immediately destroying my body and soul. I stopped using cocaine and I stopped taking prescription pills. I stopped gambling and going to strip clubs.

It look a long time, but I finally quit smoking cigarettes as well.

I quit everything except for alcohol and weed.

But as I was reading through the Holy Books, circumstances surrounding my life began to change gradually.

My contact with Harami ended, and things started to gradually improve.

However, the problems had not truly disappeared. They weren’t resolved, they were dormant.

As my life improved, I became happier and more social again. I got divorced, but I reached out to my family and made amends.

Eventually Kiki moved on as well.

I began spending time with family and friends again. My financial situation improved, and I started traveling more.

I was happy and content. More importantly, I was wiser. I wasn’t looking to repeat the same mistakes.

But as my social life and family life returned, so did Harami.

This time, everything happened much faster and with much more intensity.

Lust and desires started leading me back toward pills, alcohol, drugs, and temptation.

However, this time the presence of demons was much more noticeable and their actions much more aggressive. The darkness that I remembered from before seemed to return with greater force.

The events that took place made it evident that evil spirits were in our house and around us.

The turning point came during a sage-burning ritual I participated in with Harami. The ritual was intended to cleanse our workplace of evil spirits. I watched Harami prepare the mixture that would produce the smoke to help sage the entire building. I held the tray as he was lighting the fire, and I found myself engulfed in the heavy smoke.

As I stood there in that smoke, I saw his evil eyes staring at me as his lips moved with inaudible speed. His evil smirk matched the sense of his demonic eyes perfectly. I could never forget that look. I was looking directly into a demons eyes.

We walked throughout the building, spreading the smoke for saging. The following morning, I woke up with severe back pain unlike anything I had experienced before. It felt as though there was a tremendous weight on one side of my body while the pain radiated through the other. I couldn’t stand straight. I was in immense physical pain.

I also learned that our “sage leader” had gone into isolation to further help expand the efforts. That’s when I realized that the saging wasn’t for the building, Harami was performing black magic on me.

But I wasn’t willing to surrender easily. I believe in God and I have strong Faith.

I retaliated with Prayers and Worship. I asked for Allah’s Mercy and Protection.

Just as I had done when Kiki entered my life, I started reading the Holy Books again, listening to recitations of the Holy Quran, and writing stories.

Most importantly, I started reciting the few verses of the Quran I knew out loud as I walked around my house.

I repented my sins with Allah and sought His Help, Guidance, and Protection.

And I felt the change almost immediately.

I became increasingly aware of the evil spiritual presence around me. During the day, I noticed these feelings more strongly when drinking alcohol. I realized that alcohol placed me in a weakened state of mind in which my judgment was impaired, making me susceptible to destructive decisions.

Islam prohibits intoxication, and Muslims cannot recite prayers after drinking alcohol. If I wanted to pray, I couldn’t drink alcohol.

The presence of evil spirits was far more intense during the night, especially during the early morning hours, when the night was at its darkest.

And then I finally saw a glimpse of the demon late one night. It was an outline of something hiding against the ceiling above the doorway to a room. It was a smokey and dark figure.

The best way I can describe it is the small streak of black smoke left behind after blowing out a matchstick in a closed room, but in reverse. It was as though the room itself was filled with darkness, a cloud of clear smoke, rising up, outlined the shape of the demon. Against that contrast, I could barely make out a darker, smoky shape of the demon pushing back against the ceiling.

Being able to tell where they were and feeling their presence pushed me deeper into prayer and encouraged me to learn and recite more of the Quran verses aloud.

I knew Harami was the reason these demons were in my house. He has the ability to communicate with evil spirits and he was evil enough to attack me in such a cowardice way.

But I became more confident in my worship. The more I learned and recited verses of the Quran, the stronger I felt.

The strange experiences continue to worsen. Doors slamming without explanation, items gone missing, unusual noises from walls, and times waking up in a panic in the middle of the night as if I was being asphyxiated. On one occasion, my wife woke up in the middle of the night and saw an indentation in the blanket over me, as though something was lying on top of my body, underneath the blanket. On other occasions, I could see the figure of the demon hanging on the door where my wife would hang her robe as if it were wearing it. That became a nightly sight for me.

But I was no longer afraid. I wanted these demons out of my house and my life.

I began performing the required prayers five times a day and learning to read and recite more verses from the Holy Quran regularly throughout my home.

My devotion to prayers took away any time for drinking alcohol or doing any other bad thing. By the Grace of Allah, I changed my habits drastically.

I stopped drinking completely and gave up all the other habits that had repeatedly led me down the wrong path.

I changed my lifestyle completely by the Grace of Allah.

I started following the Commands of God as revealed in the three Holy Books and by His Messengers. I started praying five times a day and reciting and memorizing the verses of the Quran.

Through faith and prayer, I started feeling more powerful than the demons.

My conviction started to intimidate them.

Still, I felt as though something was keeping them connected to my home because they weren’t leaving, even though they had no power over us.

My attention repeatedly returned to my wife’s robe that hung on the door each night. As much as she loved the robe, I got rid of it. 

After that, the demons were gone. I could no longer feel their presence in my house. It became peaceful again.

Ramadan ultimately became an important turning point in overcoming my addictions and habits. Without alcohol and other addictions in my life, I could concentrate more on praying and worshiping.

I found comfort, peace, and strength in praying and worshiping. Ramadan showed me the ease of reciting the extended five daily prayers on time every day. When Ramadan ended, I didn’t abandon the extended prayers, instead made them a habit and a priority.

Faith and Worship helped me get rid of all the habits and addictions that were destroying my Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul.

I was exposed to my addictions and habits long before evil spiritual beings came into my life. Demons may have been the reason I returned to prayers, but I am reaping the benefits of God’s Blessings in this life.

I fought off a real devil worshipper and the evil spirits through Prayers.

That is strength.

I became stronger physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually because of praying and worshipping.

All I had to do was resist all my temptations, repent for my past sins, and seek His Mercy and Guidance.

Praying has had a direct and powerful impact on my life.

Everyone goes through different situations and circumstances in their lives, and everyone has pains, suffering, and past mistakes that they have endured.

Everyone has their own demons to fight.

Humankind is ever ungrateful, flawed, and easily susceptible to influence. But that does not put anyone beyond God’s Mercy and Grace.

I fought my addictions, demons, and temptations by worshipping and praying to the One True God.