Deep in the heart of Taiz, Yemen, the rhythmic cadence of Quranic recitation drifts through every floor of a four-century residential building, broadcast from a decades-old cassette player tucked away on the second level. While recitations of the Quran are traditionally tied to funeral rituals across the country, this daily gathering serves a far different, more urgent purpose: hundreds of people travel from every corner of Yemen to wait for hours, just for a chance to meet with a sheikh offering Ruqyah Shari’ah, a form of divine spiritual healing through Quranic recitation. Many of these visitors also receive cupping therapy (Hijama) alongside recitations, with patients seeking relief from ailments ranging from routine headaches to late-stage, life-threatening cancer. For most who arrive, their turn to spiritual healing is not a matter of choice, but necessity born of a collapsed national healthcare system.
Take 60-something Fatima, who is fighting an aggressive stomach cancer. When she first developed symptoms, she sought care at every major hospital across Taiz Governorate, even making the long journey to Aden in search of a diagnosis and effective treatment. Her search yielded nothing. With no other options left, she followed her sister’s advice to visit a Ruqyah sheikh, after her sister reported feeling better following similar treatment. For six months, Fatima returned weekly, paying the sheikh 12,000 Yemeni riyals – roughly $7 – each week, a sum that drained her limited resources while doing nothing to stop her cancer’s progression. The sheikh repeatedly told her her illness was caused by the evil eye and that healing required patience, but as months passed, Fatima’s condition deteriorated until she could no longer eat and the pain became unmanageable. It was only when her illness reached a critical stage that the sheikh finally urged her to see a specialist tumor. “It was then that I realised the sheikh couldn’t actually do anything; he was just trying to make money by reciting the Quran over patients,” Fatima explained in an interview.
Today, Fatima’s case remains incomplete: she has never had a full scan to check if her cancer has spread to other parts of her body. Cancer care in Yemen is already nearly inaccessible for most: without advanced diagnostic equipment or specialized treatment available domestically, only patients wealthy enough to travel abroad for care can access life-saving treatment, while low-income patients are left to die at home. Fatima’s story is far from unique across a country where decades of armed conflict and catastrophic funding shortfalls have left the national healthcare system in complete ruins. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of all Yemeni health facilities are completely non-functional, and 18 percent of the country’s districts have no doctors at all. Most highly skilled medical professionals have fled the country for better opportunities abroad, leaving Yemen with just 0.1 doctors per 1,000 residents – a figure that is a fraction of the regional average of 1.1, the global average of 1.9, and even the average 0.5 doctors per 1,000 people seen in other conflict-affected fragile states. Overall, more than 20 million Yemenis – nearly half the country’s total population – lack access to basic medical care.
With affordable clinical care out of reach for most, unregulated Ruqyah centers have spread rapidly across every Yemeni governorate, with rural women making up the vast majority of patients, a gap widened by widespread limited access to education in marginalized rural areas. Fifty-year-old Khadijah al-Ghaili, who struggles with chronic shortness of breath, traveled 80 kilometers from her remote village to see a well-known Ruqyah sheikh who also offers cupping therapy. While she acknowledges that formal care is available at private hospitals, the cost is far beyond what she can afford. “Private hospitals require a lot of money that I simply cannot afford, so I chose to come to this sheikh as an alternative,” al-Ghaili said. “This is a good alternative because it was recommended by our Prophet, and our grandparents used it back when there were no hospitals.” After three cupping sessions across six treatment areas, she says her shortness of breath remains, but the accompanying pain has faded, and she remains confident she will recover once she completes her treatment plan with the sheikh.
The rising popularity of unregulated Ruqyah healing has sparked debate among both practitioners and medical professionals, who emphasize that the issue is not the religious practice itself – which is widely recognized in Islam – but the exploitation of desperate patients by unqualified actors looking to profit. Abu Ahmed, a 60-year-old Ruqyah practitioner with more than 20 years of experience who uses a pseudonym for privacy, notes that the practice is meant to address spiritual afflictions such as the evil eye, envy, or jinn possession, not to replace evidence-based clinical care for physical illness. “If I see that a patient is not suffering from the evil eye, envy, magic, or jinn possession, I advise them to visit a hospital to seek medical healthcare, as we cannot help every case,” he explained. He also acknowledged that the lack of any licensing or regulatory framework for Ruqyah centers has opened the door for bad actors: “This work should, first and foremost, be a voluntary act for the sake of Allah. Those who can afford to pay should only pay a small amount, and it should be entirely free for those who cannot.”
Dr. Adel, a Yemeni tumor specialist who also uses a pseudonym to avoid conflict with fraudulent practitioners, says he regularly sees patients who only seek formal medical care after spending months consulting unregulated Ruqyah sheikhs, by which point their conditions have already deteriorated to untreatable stages. “I am not speaking about all Ruqyah sheikhs, as Ruqyah is part of Islam. I am talking about the fraudsters who claim they can treat physical diseases like tumours, deceiving patients for months until their conditions become critical,” he said. Just this month, he treated a female patient with a facial tumor who came to him after months of unsuccessful Ruqyah treatment, but her cancer had progressed too far for any intervention to save her. “It is the needy who fall victim to both the collapse of the healthcare system and the deception of these religious traders,” he added, noting that wealthy patients almost always seek clinical care first before traveling abroad for treatment, leaving only low-income patients exposed to exploitation.
Mohammed Abdulkhaleq, director of health awareness and media at the Taiz health office, confirms that widespread poverty and the sky-high cost of formal medical care are the primary drivers pushing patients to seek out Ruqyah sheikhs instead of hospital care. “Ruqyah is a religious practice and is absolutely not a replacement for medical healthcare. However, there are several factors, including the two I mentioned, that prevent people from seeking hospital care,” he explained. The biggest public health risk, he notes, is that patients delay seeking formal care until their condition is already untreatable. “We urge anyone who is sick to go to whatever hospital they can afford as early as possible.”
For her part, Fatima, who continues to fight her cancer, is now speaking out to warn other Yemeni patients to avoid the trap she fell into. “Those who need medical help should avoid Ruqyah sheikhs, and head straight to hospitals to seek medical treatment from the early stages of their illness,” she said. “Ruqyah is for spiritual healing. It is not for someone who has tumours in their body.”