Readerquestions:longillness,hospitals,andwhereruqyahfits

About this page — and it matters more here than anywhere: these letters describe serious, diagnosed diseases. Two of the writers had drifted away from medical treatment.

Ten years of illness, and two sets of experts who gave up

A relative described a devout, well-mannered woman: two miscarriages after marriage, then kidney failure, then ten years of combined medical and Quranic treatment (slight improvement always followed by relapse) after several sheikhs agreed she carried sihr and ‘ayn. For the last two weeks she has been completely bedridden: severe pain through her body, especially the right shoulder, chest and right leg; near-total absence from consciousness, and when she surfaces, fierce agitation and quarrelling; refusing everything: medicine, tests, X-rays, washing, and even the prayer she had always guarded. The doctors are baffled because her tests come back fine; the sheikhs have despaired; the family called the consultation page “a glimmer of Allah’s mercy on the horizon”.

Our note: a patient refusing medicine, food and washing while drifting from consciousness is a medical emergency, whatever else is true: that state needs a hospital the same day. And the letter itself carries the detail: “her tests are fine” does not mean untreated kidney failure is fine. Families in this position should never face the choice as ruqyah or medicine; it is both, always.

Twelve years of multiple sclerosis, and treatment abandoned

A man with MS wrote at length: diagnosed twelve years ago and told there was no cure and no known cause; six or seven years on the standard treatment, then he stopped (worn out by it, as he saw other patients refuse it too) and travelled through Britain, Germany and China chasing herbal treatment, where he noticed fellow patients seeming to improve while he relapsed. He had begun, years earlier, with Quranic treatment and recited olive oil, showing no reactions then. Later an imam gave him ground sidr to bathe with, “to reveal whether there is ‘ayn”. (The imam had been recommended to him, ironically, by an “energy-medicine” doctor; the imam himself rejected energy healing and told him the Quran was better.) After bathing: vomiting, dizziness, heavy legs, and green bruises on his arms that darkened over days. Daily al-Baqarah for ten days changed nothing he could see; when he switched to Āl ‘Imrān, patches of redness flared on his body and began lasting up to a day.

Our note: multiple sclerosis has effective disease-modifying treatments today, and the years matter. Whatever place recitation holds in this brother’s life (and it holds a true one), walking away from neurology was the most dangerous line in his letter, and nothing in the answer should be read as approving it. If this is your story, go back to your neurologist this week, and keep your al-Baqarah too. Unexplained bruising is also, on its own, something to show a doctor.

An object found in a car

A man described helping a friend who had turned irritable at home and dreamt of black figures and black dogs after changing jobs. He wrote out ruqyah verses, verses for annulling sihr and verses of reconciliation, washed the writing into pure water for him to drink, and had him recite Yāsīn, al-Sāffāt and al-Mulk in the evenings. The friend felt great relief and began sleeping deeply — “the water makes him sleep,” he reported. Reciting ruqyah in his presence brought tears to the friend’s eyes, drowsiness, then involuntary trembling in his left arm. The friend then found a sihr bundle at the front lights of his car and destroyed it in recited salt water; after further dreams about the car, the writer himself retrieved a second bundle from behind the right tyre — a tied bag holding tissue-box papers with burn marks but no visible symbols.

Our note: two things in this letter need saying. Washing written verses into water (mahw) is a practice scholars differ over — see our separate piece on it — and finding strange objects should be handled as these two did at their best: destroy the object with recited water, without fear and without taking it to any “specialist in undoing sihr”, a favourite door for charlatans. The dreams, reliefs and reactions are reported as the writer told them.