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. The harm is real and the suffering is real. 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 as a category of creation distinct from humans, made of smokeless fire, possessing will and moral accountability. The verse above places jinn alongside humans as moral agents created for worship. They are subject to the same divine address, can be guided or astray, and will be judged on the same Day of Judgement.
Affirming the existence of jinn as a category does not entail that any particular human condition is caused by jinn, in the same way that affirming the existence of bacteria does not entail that every illness is bacterial. The category is one element of the Islamic account of the creation. Diagnosis of any specific case requires evidence about that case.
What the tradition says about medical treatment
Classical Islamic jurisprudence treated seeking medical treatment for illness as permitted, encouraged, and in many cases obligatory. The duty to care for the body God entrusted to the person extends to seeking competent care when the body fails. The hadith literature is unambiguous on this:
This hadith is the foundation of a sturdy tradition of Islamic medicine that produced figures like Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), whose Canon of Medicine shaped European medical education for several centuries, and Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (Rhazes), whose treatise on smallpox and measles remained standard reference well into the modern period. A tradition whose Prophet issued the instruction to seek treatment, and whose civilisation produced the early hospitals (bīmāristān) of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, is not a tradition that defaults to exorcism in place of medicine.
The medieval Islamic psychiatric hospitals
The first dedicated psychiatric wards in recorded medical history were established in the medieval Islamic world. The bīmāristān of Baghdad, founded under the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in the early ninth century, included specific units for the mentally ill, where treatment included music therapy, dietary adjustment, herbal remedies, and structured rest. Similar institutions existed in Cairo (the Bīmāristān al-Manṣūrī, founded 1284 CE) and Damascus.
The patients in these hospitals were treated as ill, not possessed. al-Rāzī wrote extensively on conditions that contemporary medicine identifies as melancholia, epilepsy, and what we would now call schizophrenia, and his approach was systematically clinical. The framework in which mental illness is automatically diagnosed as jinn possession is a framework Islamic medical history simply did not endorse. The historical pattern is the opposite: mental illness was treated by physicians, in hospitals, with medical methods, in the expectation that the patient could recover.
The category of junūn in Islamic ethics
Islamic jurisprudence developed a category called junūn (loss of reason, often translated as madness or insanity), which functioned as a legal status with specific protections. A person classified as majnūn was exempt from the religious obligations that require sound mental capacity, exempt from criminal responsibility for actions committed in that state, and entitled to the protection of guardians who were obligated to act in their interest.
The hadith establishes that mental incapacity is a recognised category that suspends legal-religious accountability. The framework presumes that mental disturbance is a real condition, that the person experiencing it deserves accommodation rather than punishment, and that the appropriate posture toward such a person is care, not condemnation. Communities that respond to psychiatric distress with violence have departed from the tradition’s own framework.
The distinction between doctrine and misapplication
The abuse of mentally ill people through exorcism rituals reflects a conflation of spiritual categories with medical ones. Mainstream Islamic jurisprudence has consistently affirmed that medical conditions should receive medical treatment, that ruqyah (Quranic recitation for healing) may be used as a spiritual supplement and not a medical replacement, and that harm to the person seeking treatment is categorically impermissible.
The cases of abuse, where people are beaten, restrained, or denied medical care on grounds of jinn possession, violate Islamic ethics as well as the person’s basic rights. The misapplications are 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, including in the United States and Europe within the past decade. 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 acknowledges that some Muslim communities have failed to distinguish theological categories from medical ones, and that this failure has caused real harm. The critique is valid, and the tradition has resources to address it: the emphasis on medical treatment, the prohibition of harm, the legal protection of the mentally ill under junūn, the historical record of psychiatric medicine in the Islamic world, and the Quranic instruction to use reason in evaluating evidence.
Those who suffered under exorcism abuse were failed by their communities. They were failed by a confusion that the Islamic intellectual tradition has the resources to clarify. The remedy is a return to the framework the tradition itself provides: jinn are a category of creation with their own moral standing, mental illness is a medical condition that calls for medical care, and the work of distinguishing one from the other is the work of competent diagnosticians, not untrained ritual specialists. Those distinctions are not innovations on the tradition. They are the tradition, applied honestly.