The abuse exists and it deserves to be named directly. In some Muslim communities, people experiencing psychosis, epilepsy, depression, or other mental health conditions have been subjected to exorcism rituals — sometimes involving physical harm — on the assumption that their condition reflects jinn possession rather than a medical problem. This is real, it causes real suffering, and no honest account of Islamic practice can pretend otherwise.
The question is whether this abuse reflects Islamic doctrine, or whether it reflects a cultural misapplication of doctrine that Islamic teaching itself condemns.
What the Quran says about jinn
The Quran affirms the existence of jinn — a category of creation distinct from humans, made of smokeless fire, possessing will and moral accountability. This is a theological claim about the structure of creation, not a medical diagnosis. The existence of jinn as a category does not entail that any particular human condition is caused by jinn, any more than affirming the existence of bacteria entails that every illness is bacterial.
What the tradition says about medical treatment
Classical Islamic jurisprudence treated seeking medical treatment for illness not merely as permitted but as an obligation — a duty arising from the responsibility to care for the body God entrusted to the person. The hadith literature is unambiguous:
This is the foundation of a robust tradition of Islamic medicine that produced figures like Ibn Sina (Avicenna), whose Canon of Medicine shaped European medical education for centuries. A tradition whose Prophet issued this instruction is not a tradition that expects medical conditions to be addressed through exorcism rather than medicine.
The distinction between doctrine and misapplication
The abuse of mentally ill people through exorcism rituals reflects a conflation of spiritual categories with medical ones — a conflation that the Islamic intellectual tradition has not been uniform in endorsing. Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence has consistently affirmed that medical conditions should receive medical treatment, that ruqya (Quranic recitation for healing) may be used as a spiritual supplement but not a medical replacement, and that harm to the person seeking treatment is categorically impermissible.
The cases of abuse — people beaten, restrained, or denied medical care on grounds of jinn possession — violate Islamic ethics as well as the person’s rights. They are misapplications shaped by cultural frameworks about mental illness and stigma that exist in many societies, not only Muslim ones. Exorcism abuse has occurred in Christian, Hindu, and secular contexts as well. The common factor is the stigmatisation of mental illness and the substitution of spiritual explanation for medical inquiry — a failure that is human, not specifically Islamic.
Where the legitimate critique lands
The legitimate critique is not that Islam teaches jinn cause mental illness. It is that some Muslim communities have failed to distinguish theological categories from medical ones — and that this failure has caused real harm. That critique is valid, and the tradition has resources to address it: the emphasis on medical treatment, the prohibition of harm, the respect for human dignity, and the Quranic instruction to use reason.
Those who suffered under exorcism abuse were failed by their communities. They were not failed by Islam. The answer is to insist, from within the tradition, on the distinction the tradition itself provides: between what jinn are (a category of creation with moral accountability) and what they are not (a default explanation for conditions that have medical causes and medical treatments).