Herbs,medicineandruqyahtogether—araqi'sexperienceof"twostrengths"

A note from us: nothing in this article replaces your doctor. Its whole point, in fact, is the opposite — the experience it relates, from one raqi's long practice, is that medicine and ruqyah work together. Never stop a prescribed treatment for ruqyah, and never take herbal doses on a raqi's word alone; herbs are drugs, and doses belong to qualified practitioners.

First, a word about "alternative medicine"

The source defines the term simply: the schools of treatment that predate modern medicine — herbs, cupping, massage, fasting and the rest; "everything other than modern medicine is called alternative". But it objects to filing Prophetic medicine under that label: the Prophet's medicine is not the alternative, it is the original. As for herbal treatment itself, it notes it is the historic base of all medicine, taught today in schools and colleges, with old books full of recipes — sound and unsound, lawful and unlawful — and that in practice herbs have a real role in the spiritual afflictions (sihr, 'ayn, mass) as well as bodily ones.

He started with herbs — and moved to ruqyah

The raqi's own path is telling. He worked with herbs before he ever practised ruqyah — and gave himself to ruqyah precisely because he found herbs had little effect on most cases of mass and sihr, especially the stubborn ones. What he kept from those years is a refined view of where herbs do help:

• Some herbs affect the jinn and some kinds of sihr directly — but only some.
• Most helpful herbs work as assistants alongside ruqyah, or mechanically. His example: a patient with severe constipation caused by sihr or 'ayn, whom laxatives alone could not help and ruqyah alone helped only temporarily — but laxative herbs with Quranic recitation resolved: "two strengths — the strength of the Quran and the strength of the medicine".

The same logic covers conventional medicine

This is the passage that matters most. The principle is not "herbs plus Quran" but lawful means plus Quran — explicitly including modern pharmaceutical drugs. He describes the familiar scene of a chronic patient's home pharmacy: drawers of part-used prescriptions from different doctors and hospitals, none of which satisfied. With ruqyah, he says, something useful happens: the patient's complaint clarifies — a wandering pain settles and localises in one place — and then he sends the patient to a doctor to prescribe for that area, the medicine to be used alongside continued ruqyah. The raqi may also recite over the medicine itself and blow upon it, as over water or oil; and likewise over herbs, single or mixed.

Two small stories

He offers two experiences as illustrations rather than proofs:

• A herbalist friend prepared an edible mixture for a man afflicted by sihr whose legs and feet were so swollen he could hardly walk; ruqyah was recited into it. Days of eating it did nothing — so the man rubbed it on his legs instead, and the swelling went. The herbalist laughed in astonishment.
• A mixture the raqi used to give the afflicted to eat ended up with a friend's wife, who offered it to a student with stomach pain. The girl could not stomach the taste, rubbed it on her belly instead — and the pain left.

(Stories like these are related as experiences — "it is related that" — not as evidence that any mixture treats anything. That is exactly why doses and diagnoses belong with professionals.)

His closing principle — and our caution on it

Herbalists differ in diagnosis and dosage, each by his school, he observes; and raqis may dose differently again, because treating a spiritual affliction is not like treating an organic disease — he notes that even senior hospital consultants differ over the same patient, and that large drug doses sometimes produce no change in the afflicted. Our caution, plainly: this is a description of his own practice, not permission for anyone to exceed a qualified herbalist's or doctor's dosing. The safe form of his principle is the one his own examples teach — keep the lawful means, keep the Quran with them, and let each professional stay within his competence.