Writingversesanddissolvingtheminwater

The practice

Across the Muslim world you will meet it: verses of the Quran written with saffron or rose water on a plate or a sheet of paper, then washed off, and the water drunk or applied to the place of pain. The verifying scholars permit it, and it is reported from a group of the salaf.

Three conditions attach. The substance must be pure: saffron and rose water are what the sources name, nothing impure and nothing harmful to drink. What is written must be the Quran or established supplications, not unknown words, not squares of letters and numbers, not names nobody can explain; everything this site says about unintelligible writing applies here in full. And it is not the better option: the scholars are consistent that reciting directly over the person, or reciting into water and blowing, is superior. Writing is permitted rather than preferred.

Why this needs saying

Our own site could be read as forbidding it.

We carry a firm page on talismans and amulets which holds that hanging an amulet is forbidden, including one containing Quran on the stronger view, and gives four reasons for that position. Every word of it stands. But a reader who has absorbed that page might reasonably conclude that anything involving written Quran is out, and that is not the ruling. Writing to dissolve and drink is a different act from writing to hang and wear, and the difference is not a technicality.

The difference

An amulet is depended upon

It is worn, it stays with the person, it is the thing between them and harm; the heart attaches to the object, which is why the ruling reaches even sincere people who believe that Allah protects — they have taken as a cause what Allah did not appoint.

Dissolved writing is consumed and gone

There is no object to keep, nothing to wear, nothing to lose and nothing to depend on. What remains is water into which the words of Allah were written, which is close in kind to recited water, a practice nobody disputes.

Where it goes wrong

In the ways this site describes everywhere else. When the writing is unintelligible (squares, ciphers, letters split apart, names nobody can read) it has become a different craft, and our Academy course on the unseen describes that craft. When only one man can write it, and the water must come from him at a price, the value has moved from the words to the man. And when the paper is kept rather than dissolved, it has become an amulet, whatever it was written for.

The recommendation we would give regardless is to recite over the water yourself. The scholars call it better; it costs nothing; and nobody stands between you and the water.