“O people! Shall I tell you on whom it is that satans descend? They descend on every forgerer steeped in sin, on those who whisper hearsay in the ears of people; and most of them are liars.”
(Al Qur’ān – 26:221-23)
The people meant by the expression “on whom it is that satans descend” here are sorcerers, soothsayers, fortune-tellers, geomancers and false claimants to special supra-sensory powers who pretended, on that basis, to know the secrets of the unseen world and, hence, claimed that they could tell peoples’ fortunes, or that they had control over jinn and spirits and, thus, the power to make or mar people’s lives.
The expression that ‘most of them are liars’ means that sometimes satans are able to get wind of things that happen. This they pass on to their agents who, in turn, mix much falsehood with it. This expression also means that deceitful and unscrupulous soothsayers hear something from satans, mix it with falsehood, and then go whispering it into people’s ears. This is elucidated by a tradition from the Messengerﷺ. Aisha says that some people asked the Messenger about soothsayers. He said: “They are nothing.” Those people then said to the Messenger: “O Messenger of God, sometimes they do tell the correct thing.” The Messenger ﷺreplied: “The correct thing is overheard by the jinn who whisper it into their friends’ ears, then mix a great deal of falsehood with it, and make it up into a whole story.”