Noteverythingthatcomesoutofthebowelissihr

Some raqis and many patients fall into a confusion over what leaves the body (from the mouth or from the colon), especially once a patient starts taking laxative or emetic herbs. Different substances come out, in different colours, often unlike anything the patient remembers eating, and the assumption is immediate: “the sihr has come out.”

A raqi of long experience writes this out of concern for practitioners and patients alike, and asks the squeamish reader’s pardon: the subject is unpleasant, but it is everyone’s reality.

What happens

A patient being treated for sihr who takes softening and purging herbs — senna, rhubarb, aloes — or emetics, may pass from the bowel, especially the colon: hard blackish matter; yellow fatty lumps; sticky strands that look like innards; and other things besides. Passing it may relieve him, and the sihr may have come out with it, or may not have. The relief may be psychological, or the result of the colon being emptied of old, harmful waste.

Colon-cleansing procedures show the same: faecal deposits that have sat against the colon wall for years come away in strange shapes, and milder versions of the same come away with purgatives like senna. He reports trying this with patients: some passed traces of food eaten a month or two earlier.

The decisive rule

Our note: anything involving purgative herbs, vomiting, or unusual material passed from the body belongs in front of a doctor first. Blood, persistent vomiting, black stools or ongoing bowel changes are medical symptoms with medical causes until a doctor says otherwise; ruqyah runs alongside medical care, never instead of it.