Ruqyah

Ruqyah is the Islamic practice of reciting verses of the Qur'an and prescribed supplications over a person to seek healing and protection from illness, the evil eye, sorcery and the harm of malign spirits. It rests on the belief, grounded in the Qur'an's description of itself as a healing and a mercy for the believers, that the sacred word carries a real power to protect and to cure. The one performing the ruqyah recites over the afflicted person, often particular chapters and verses long associated with protection, such as the opening chapter, the Throne Verse, and the two short chapters of "taking refuge", sometimes accompanied by light blowing over the person or the passing of the hands, and by supplications asking God for healing.

Islamic scholars distinguish a legitimate ruqyah from a forbidden one. The permitted form uses only the words of God and lawful supplications, is understood as a means through which God alone heals, and contains nothing of idolatry or reliance on other powers; the forbidden form invokes spirits or unknown names, uses talismans and amulets of dubious content, or attributes power to the words themselves apart from God, shading into the sorcery the religion condemns. A person may perform ruqyah on themselves or have it done by another, and the self-recitation of the protective chapters morning and evening is a widespread everyday devotion. The practice overlaps with the Islamic treatment of possession and exorcism, where Qur'anic recitation is the principal remedy.

The line the classical jurists drew between lawful ruqyah and forbidden magic is not merely a theoretical distinction; it is the boundary contemporary regulators and consumer-protection authorities in several majority-Muslim countries have had to enforce against a real and lucrative commercial market. Individuals presenting themselves as ruqyah practitioners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and several Gulf states have been prosecuted or had their activities restricted where investigations found them charging substantial fees, making specific diagnostic claims about jinn possession or sorcery having been performed against a client, or using objects, unintelligible incantations or claimed contact with spirits that fall squarely within the forbidden category the classical manuals describe, rather than the plain Quranic recitation the lawful form is limited to.

Religious authorities in several countries, including Saudi Arabia's Council of Senior Scholars, have issued specific warnings distinguishing legitimate ruqyah, performed without charge or for a modest fee and using only Quranic verses and approved supplications, from a commercialised industry of self-styled healers who diagnose spirit possession in vulnerable or ill clients and charge substantial sums for repeated sessions, warnings that mirror consumer-protection concerns raised about comparable faith-healing markets in other traditions. The underlying theological point the jurists insisted on, that any efficacy comes from God alone and not from the words, the practitioner, or any object used, is precisely what a fee-charging industry making specific therapeutic promises tends to obscure, which is why religious and consumer authorities have found themselves making closely related arguments from different starting points.