Whentreatmentdoesnotseemtowork—wherethefaultlies

When a patient is slow to recover, the blame lands on the raqi. The source lists the accusations everyone has heard: phrases that sound right on the surface and carry truth, falsehood and slander mixed together.

• “These are no raqis, or their patients would be healed.”
• “The sword is only as good as the hand that swings it — and these took up the sword without right.”
• “How much they recite, and the cases never end!”
• “Their ruqyah has no effect because their religion is weak.”
• “The real cause is that they deny psychiatry and convince psychiatric patients they have spiritual afflictions.”
• “They forbid patients any treatment except the Quran.”
• “They do it deliberately — stringing out the treatment to bleed the patients.”

Some of it is fair. Most of it is not, and the fault often lies elsewhere. (One of those accusations deserves its own answer first: this site’s position is that no one should ever be told to abandon medical care. Medical treatment runs alongside ruqyah, always. A raqi who forbids medicine is wrong, and that page of red flags stands on its own.)

Blaming the inexperienced healer

Consider these answers:

1. Not for lack of results. After the poisoned sheep at Khaybar, the Prophet ﷺ had his Companions cupped, and some of them still died, their appointed terms having come. No one blames the Messenger of Allah ﷺ because those he directed to treatment were not all healed. He cauterised Sa‘d ibn Mu‘ādh, and Sa‘d did not recover. No one asks “why did he not heal?” about the best of physicians.
2. Not for simplicity of method. The Companion who recited over the stung chieftain knew nothing but al-Fātiḥah; he did not even know it was a ruqyah until the Prophet ﷺ told him. Yet today people rate a raqi’s “expertise” by how much he recites and how much jinn-lore he commands, and count a man who recites only al-Fātiḥah no expert at all.
3. Not for doing his best, and “his best” may be al-Fātiḥah alone, or more.
4. We do blame him for one thing: claiming to be an expert (learned in ruqyah, in extracting jinn, in nullifying sihr) and then proving a liar who knows none of it. The fault is the false claim, not the unhealed patient.

The raqi’s piety

1. There is one respect in which blame may attach: a man who sets himself up for this work without the weapon it needs (strength of faith) has exposed himself and his patients. (Even this is not absolute.)
2. But piety is not a condition for benefit. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Whoever among you is able to benefit his brother, let him do so”; he did not stipulate that the benefactor be among the God-fearing.
3. Even People of the Book may recite over Muslims. In Muwatta’ Mālik: Abu Bakr entered upon ‘A’ishah while she was unwell and a Jewish woman was performing ruqyah over her, and he said: “Perform ruqyah over her by the Book of Allah.” Al-Bājī explains: with the remembrance of Allah, or a ruqyah consistent with His Book, verified by having her show what she recites. Al-Shāfi'ī, asked whether People of the Book may recite over Muslims, said: “Yes, if they recite what is known from the Book of Allah and His remembrance” (al-Umm 7/228). Al-Māzirī records the difference of opinion (Mālik disliked it lest they recite from what they altered), and Ibn Hajar concludes it varies with the person and the circumstances (Fath al-Bārī 10/197). Ibn Bāz, asked directly whether a Christian or Jew may perform ruqyah over a Muslim, answered: “If they are not people at war with the Muslims and it is the lawful ruqyah, there is no harm”, and asked about reciting from the altered Torah or Gospel: “That is not permitted; but with du‘ā and the Quran, no harm” (recorded fatwa, 8 Sha’bān 1419 AH).

What is in the healer’s hand

Nothing. No practitioner holds healing, or guarantees it. Yet many patients’ hearts have attached themselves to the raqi, as if he nullifies sihr, expels jinn, and dispenses health. The truth of the matter: Allah is the One who tries and the One who heals. Practitioner and patient are two weak parties with no power except by Allah’s permission; everything they do is only a means, and the One who makes means work is Allah. The poor man prays for wealth his whole life and remains poor; the sick man supplicates for decades; the diabetic spends his money and the illness stays. Every ruqyah is a du‘ā, and two hadiths light the way:

رَبُّنَا اللَّهُ الَّذِي فِي السَّمَاءِ تَقَدَّسَ اسْمُكَ، أَمْرُكَ فِي السَّمَاءِ وَالْأَرْضِ، كَمَا رَحْمَتُكَ فِي السَّمَاءِ فَاجْعَلْ رَحْمَتَكَ فِي الْأَرْضِ، اغْفِرْ لَنَا حُوبَنَا وَخَطَايَانَا، أَنْتَ رَبُّ الطَّيِّبِينَ، أَنْزِلْ رَحْمَةً مِنْ رَحْمَتِكَ وَشِفَاءً مِنْ شِفَائِكَ عَلَى هَذَا الْوَجَعِ

Rabbunā-llāhu-lladhī fī-s-samā'i taqaddasa-smuka, amruka fī-s-samā'i wa-l-arḍ, kamā raḥmatuka fī-s-samā'i fa-jʿal raḥmataka fī-l-arḍ, ighfir lanā ḥūbanā wa-khaṭāyānā, anta rabbu-ṭ-ṭayyibīn, anzil raḥmatan min raḥmatika wa-shifā'an min shifā'ika ʿalā hādhā-l-wajaʿ

"Our Lord is Allah who is in the heaven; holy is Your name. Your command runs in the heaven and the earth. As Your mercy is in the heaven, place Your mercy on the earth. Forgive us our sins and our errors. You are the Lord of the good. Send down a mercy of Your mercy and a healing of Your healing upon this pain." — Abu Dawud 3892

أَسْأَلُ اللَّهَ الْعَظِيمَ رَبَّ الْعَرْشِ الْعَظِيمِ أَنْ يَشْفِيَكَ

As'alu-llāha-l-ʿaẓīm, rabba-l-ʿarshi-l-ʿaẓīm, an yashfiyak

"I ask Allah the Magnificent, Lord of the Magnificent Throne, to heal you." Said seven times at the bedside of a sick person whose appointed time has not come, Allah cures him of that illness. — Abu Dawud 3106, graded sahih by al-Albani

And the barrier may be in the patient

The source relates a report from practitioners it calls trustworthy: Quran was recited, with the intention of treatment, over a patient with AIDS, and Allah healed him; the same was recited over another patient with the same disease, who was not healed. The raqis wondered, until it emerged that the second patient had deliberately continued the behaviour that spread the disease, and had no conviction in the recitation, while the first had contracted the virus through a transfusion accident and received the recitation with strong faith. (This is related as the report stands, the source’s account of a case, not a clinical claim. AIDS is a medical condition treated by doctors; nothing here replaces medical care, and this site makes no promises of cure. The point being illustrated is the classical one that follows: receptivity matters.)

Ibn al-Qayyim (al-Jawāb al-Kāfī, p. 10): among the blights that block the effect of du‘ā is that the servant grows hasty, finds the answer slow, gives up and abandons the du‘ā, like a man who sows a seed or plants a sapling, tends and waters it, then finds its ripening slow and abandons it.

And there is a condition that is the very foundation of answered du‘ā: repentance, declaring one’s return to Allah. ‘Umar said: “It is by scrupulousness about what Allah has forbidden that Allah accepts du‘ā and glorification.” One of the salaf said: “Do not find the answer slow when you have blocked its roads with sins.”

Ibrāhīm ibn Adham, asked “why do we supplicate and receive no answer?”, gave his famous reply: because you know Allah and do not obey Him; you know the Messenger and do not follow his Sunnah; you know the Quran and do not act on it; you eat Allah’s favours and do not give thanks for them; you know Paradise and do not seek it; you know the Fire and do not flee it; you know Shaytān and do not fight him but agree with him; you know death and do not prepare for it; you bury the dead and take no lesson; and you drop your own faults and busy yourselves with the faults of others.

Who is holding the list

That list of barriers is a real one, and everything turns on whose hand it is in.

Your own list about your own heart is guidance, and a good thing. Somebody else applying it to you (particularly somebody being paid) is a tool being used on you.

Three things make it a weapon in the second case. You cannot check it: nobody can see your heart, including you on a bad day, and certainly not a man who met you an hour ago. It cannot fail: a treatment that has not worked is always explicable by a sin somewhere, which puts it in the same family as the worsening that proves success and the refusal that proves affliction, and a claim no observation could contradict is not weak evidence but no evidence. And it works on the person: told this, somebody who is suffering does not push back. They agree, and add shame to what they were already carrying.

Four things that come first

Before anybody’s spiritual state is even a reasonable question, four things should be checked. Every one is checkable, actionable and blameless.

Was the effort real? From a written record, not from memory. People routinely believe they were consistent when the page shows eleven sessions in twenty-eight days — which is not a failed treatment but one that has not been tried.

Has enough time passed? Healing comes in degrees and on no schedule.

Is the medical side finished, tests taken, results seen, follow-ups attended? A great many plateaus resolve there, into something with a name and a treatment.

And does the approach fit? Change one thing rather than five, and give it weeks.

There is a sentence nobody says: I don’t know why this hasn’t worked yet. It is available in every case, it is usually true, and it is the clearest single marker of somebody who is not selling you anything.

Why ruqyah benefits — and when it does not

Ruqyah is a means to healing which the God-fearing and the sinner alike may use. Ibn al-Qayyim (al-Dā’ wa’l-Dawā’, p. 3): the adhkār, verses and du‘ās used for healing are in themselves beneficial and healing, but they require the receptivity of the place, and the strength and effect of the one who applies them. When healing fails to occur, it is from the weakness of the applier’s effect, or the absence of receptivity in the receiver, or a strong barrier in him that stops the remedy taking, exactly as with physical medicines. The same with du‘ā: among the strongest means of repelling harm and obtaining what is sought, its effect may yet fail, because the du‘ā itself is deficient (containing what Allah does not love), or the heart is weak and not gathered upon Allah at the moment of asking, like a slack bow from which the arrow leaves feebly, or because of a barrier: harām food, injustice, the rust of sins on the heart, and heedlessness that has the soul in its grip.

Ibn Hajar (Badhl al-Mā’ūn, p. 171): the benefit of these verses and words comes to the one whose heart is clear of turbidity, sincere in repentance, regretting what he neglected and what he committed; otherwise, when the causes of the disease overpower the causes of the cure, the medicine’s benefit may lapse.

And Ibn al-Qayyim again (al-Tibb al-Nabawī, pp. 142–143): the divine remedies benefit after the disease occurs and also prevent its occurrence, and if it occurs, it does not occur destructively, however painful, while natural remedies benefit only after the disease exists. The protections and adhkār either prevent the causes striking or stand between them and their full effect, according to the completeness and strength of the seeking of refuge. So the ruqā and protections serve both to preserve health and to remove illness.

Al-Muwaffaq al-Baghdādī (al-Tibb al-Nabawī, p. 236): the ruqā and ta’wīdh benefit when taken with acceptance and when they meet an answer and an appointed term: they are a flight to Allah, who grants healing through them as He grants it through medicine.