Groupruqyah:whyitexists,whatitcando,andthecontrolsitneeds

Our note: this is a practitioner’s essay, written for a country where ruqyah halls exist. We publish it as part of an experienced practitioner’s thought on how ruqyah is organised. It is not an advertisement (we do not run sessions), and where the author accepts payment for recited materials, our own rule is stricter: ruqyah and anything sold as ruqyah must never be charged for.

The provocation he opens with

The author begins with a deliberate challenge: look at the mass healing services of the churches (thousands gathered, healing claimed “in the name of Jesus”), and sometimes, he concedes, relief does occur. Then ask: if that can happen there, what of a gathering where the recitation is in the name of Allah, by His power? “Is anything too hard for Allah — even thousands of sick people at once?” The comparison is his, and it frames the whole essay: group ruqyah needs discipline, not abolition.

How group ruqyah arose

Nearly every raqi, he says, began one-to-one. Then demand exploded. Raqis found themselves reciting from ‘Asr past midnight and still not covering the need. At that point they split: some kept individual sessions but cut them shorter and shorter, from an hour to fifteen minutes, some to five (he has seen twenty patients “treated” individually in two hours), until a patient’s turn came once a month; others fixed days for men and days for women and recited over everyone together. Group ruqyah, in other words, was born from arithmetic, not from greed.

He is honest about the trade-off: one-to-one ruqyah, all else equal, can have the stronger effect. He once recited over a single patient for three days, night and day, pausing only for prayer and sleep with a recording playing even then, and Allah granted recovery. But no raqi can live like that, and the moment word spread, thousands would be at his door. So the fair questions to the advocates of individual-only ruqyah are: How many raqis are there? Are they competent? Do they cover the need? The answers, he says, are all “no”.

His analogies

• Everything has benefits and harms; the ruling follows what predominates, like the bee, called beneficial despite its sting.
• The Friday khutbah reaches hundreds at once; private counsel moves an individual more deeply, yet nobody calls for abolishing the khutbah.
• Schools teach in classes though a private tutor teaches better; group study carries its own benefits, and no one demands one-teacher-per-pupil.
• A known clinic with an address and hours serves the sick better than a search for a private practitioner who may or may not be found, and every open, known ruqyah venue is one door fewer for the sorcerers.

The benefits he lists (grouped)

(He reports, factually, that experienced women attendants assist women who collapse, and see his controls below on dignity and covering.)

The loudspeaker question

Group ruqyah usually uses microphones. The essay grounds the practice of reciting into the ear: the adhān given in al-Hasan’s ear at birth (Tirmidhi); the report of Ibn Mas‘ūd reciting the end of Sūrat al-Mu’minūn into an afflicted man’s ear (“Then did you think that We created you uselessly and that to Us you would not be returned?” — al-Mu’minūn 23:115), with the Prophet ﷺ saying: “By the One in whose hand is my soul, had a man of certainty recited it over a mountain, it would have moved” (as cited by Ibn Kathir); and Ibn al-Qayyim in Zād al-Ma‘ād on Ibn Taymiyyah often reciting that verse into the ear of the afflicted. Amplification, the essay argues, delivers the recitation clearly to every ear, overrides the whispering that distracts the afflicted, and keeps attention awake — as in the mosque. The report of the Prophet ﷺ approving Abu Bakr’s quiet recitation, ‘Umar’s loud recitation (“I wake the drowsy and drive off Shayṭān”) and Bilāl’s mixing of sūrahs (“each of you has done well”) closes the point.

The case against — a guest essay he reproduces

With characteristic fairness he pastes a fellow practitioner’s full list of drawbacks, then answers each. The drawbacks: no proper case study before diagnosis; suggestible attendees imitating the reactions they see (“psychological” collapse); children frightened by scenes and cries; gathered devils growing bolder, aiding and colluding with one another; embarrassing scenes and foul words; patients’ secrets voiced aloud during reactions (he has seen a raqi interviewing a jinnī on a microphone before the whole hall); patients’ dignity trampled; the ill staying away for fear of becoming gossip, or for fear a jinnī will “jump” to them; self-admiration creeping into the famous raqi; and, the sharpest, raqis turning the hall into a shop: recited water, oil, honey and herb mixes at inflated prices plus a file fee and entry ticket, of which the guest author quotes Sheikh al-Albani’s complaint about those who “made it a trade to consume people’s wealth” and wishes the authorities would ban the selling outright.

The author’s replies, briefly

• Poor diagnosis afflicts rushed individual ruqyah too; the fix is written case reports from every attendee.
• Imitative collapse is rare and fades with treatment.
• Children should not attend adult sessions at all: he keeps them separate; if unavoidable, a separate room.
• Colluding devils: possible in some cases, but the observed rule is the opposite: gathered they weaken, and their cries and falls show it; some jinn even submit or accept Islam upon seeing what happens to others; the claim that they “exchange plans” needs evidence.
• What a jinnī says about anyone is never to be believed anyway, so no one’s secrets stand exposed on a devil’s testimony.
• On dignity: he answers with a comparison to hospitals (thin gowns, exposed ‘awrāt), and, more constructively, with his own controls below.
• The fear that a jinnī exits one person and enters another he flatly rejects: the Quran is recited for healing, expulsion and burning: devils do not get free transfers inside a ruqyah hall of all places; in markets and festivals, he notes drily, they move far more freely. In years of practice he has never once met a verified case.
• On selling recited products he differs with the guest author: ruqyah sits in the fiqh chapters of medicine, and if a doctor may charge for consultation and medicine, a raqi may charge, without exaggeration, with generosity to the poor, and he notes many raqis give treatment free. Our note: we do not accept payment for ruqyah or recited materials in any form; the author’s view is recorded here faithfully as his.

The controls he endorses

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• No trading in the name of ruqyah and the blessed nafth (the guest author’s demand; see our stricter rule above).
• Divide the venue: a room for cases that react strongly; a room for children, the elderly and disabled; a room for new and non-reacting cases — and keep numbers manageable (he suggests thirty to forty, with no more than ten new cases; he has seen halls of one hundred and fifty women and heard of four hundred, which he clearly regards as beyond proper case-handling).
• Do not address the jinn except at need: command it to leave, take the covenant, and no more; no interviews, no microphone dialogues.
• Guard the patient’s dignity without exception: no striking, no tearing of clothes, nothing that demeans. For women who collapse he describes a full covering garment — a tent-like cover closed on all sides — so that nothing is exposed no matter how she falls; his own practice uses it, and he insists on strict hijab throughout.
• Require a written account of each case, its history and causes — to distinguish true affliction from psychological mimicry and to treat the person, not the scene.
• Separate strongly-reacting cases from the gathering and recite over them individually.
• Make sessions long enough to matter: a full hour rather than fifteen minutes; and even in individual ruqyah he scorns the five-minute recitation, “unless necessity leaves only a minute — then say seven times: I ask Allah the Magnificent, Lord of the Magnificent Throne, to heal you.”

The fatwas he appends

Ibn Jibrīn, asked about reciting over a gathered crowd by microphone: reciters have tried it and it has benefited, and recovery has occurred for many: the afflicted hearing the verses affects the jinnī, and the Quran is healing for the hearer even without nafth; yet the Sunnah form (the raqi near the patient, reciting and blowing and wiping) is superior, so whoever can recite individually should, and the group form with the microphone is for genuine need, its effect being less. Ibn Jibrīn again, on whether gathering women for recitation constitutes khalwah: it does not — forbidden seclusion is one man with one woman; a trustworthy, upright reciter with a group of two or more women, reciting from behind a screen, touching nothing of any woman’s body, with guardians present to attend to any woman who faints, is permissible. Dr Rashid al-Alma’i (Islam Today, 1424 AH) sees no bar to the practice where need calls for it, but adds two cautions that could have been written for our site: many who present for ruqyah are suffering diagnosable bodily illness, or illusion and waswasa; never assure such people they carry ‘ayn or sihr; direct them to the proper specialists and to du‘ā; and teach people to perform ruqyah for themselves, for no one’s du‘ā for you is more sincere than your own.

That last counsel is our path too: begin with self-ruqyah (our guides and the recordings in our library are free) and treat any group setting as a regulated exception, never a spectacle.