Whattheguidancesaysaboutruqyah,andouranswer

Two observations, and our answer to each

It would be easy for a site like this to treat official guidance mentioning ruqyah as hostility and to say nothing. We would rather answer it, because the guidance is largely right and because the answer is a good advertisement for how this should be done.

The safeguarding material makes two observations: that the Quran itself does not speak of demons or possession in the terms the practice is often framed in, and that the risk arises where individuals performing ruqyah claim to diagnose possession during the ritual.

The first, taken honestly

This one needs care, and we are not going to pretend it says more than it does.

The Quran speaks of the jinn extensively and describes a man being beaten by Satan into insanity. Muslim scholars across every school have affirmed that a jinn may touch and harm a human; that is not in doubt among us, and this site says so in several places.

What the observation is getting at is narrower and fair. The Quran does not present itself as a manual for exorcism, does not describe a diagnostic procedure, and does not authorise anybody to identify who is possessed. A safeguarding officer reading the text will not find the practice that has grown up around it, and that gap is exactly where the harm lives.

The second is our own position

The risk is the diagnosis, not the recitation — which is what our courses say in almost the same words, arrived at from the sources rather than from policy.

Nobody can identify what is inside another person. The classical fatwa on raqis assessing cases holds that a practised reciter builds on strong probability rather than certainty, that not every reciter has the ability, and that some claim it whose claims do not match reality. Our Raqi Course makes a public no-diagnosis rule out of it. So when a safeguarding board says the danger is practitioners claiming to diagnose during the ritual, they are describing something the scholars warned about first.

What a family should expect

If anybody is going to recite over your child, this is the standard, and it is ours rather than a compromise with anybody.

No diagnosis: nobody tells you, or the child, what is in them. Nothing said in front of the child about what might be wrong with them. A parent present, always; short, calm, in a normal voice. No touching beyond a hand on the head, no force of any kind, nothing removed. No fee attached to a finding, and nothing you must buy. And you may stop it at any moment without explaining yourself.

What we would ask of professionals

That the distinction be kept. Reciting Quran over a child is not a safeguarding concern — it is an ordinary religious practice in a Muslim home, closer to a bedtime prayer than to anything clinical.

The concern is a practitioner who diagnoses, who charges, who insists on privacy, who instructs against medical care, or who uses force. Those are the markers, and Muslim families are, in our experience, the first to want them stopped.