Tim-Humble2

Interview with Tim Humble: ‘Ruqyah has become a means of exploitation’

I HAD a wonderful opportunity to interview Ustadh Muhammad Tim Humble during his visit to Dubai in June 2014 for a weekend Islamic seminar. Ustadh Tim Humble is a British revert educated from the Islamic University of Madinah, who has ijaza in the six famous books of hadeeth. He is also experienced in the field of ruqyah, the Islamic method of healing with the Quran, specializing in treatment for black magic and evil eye. We spoke about his life, da’wah and ruqyah practice. Special thanks to Kalemah Islamic Center, Dubai for making this possible.

Quotes from the interview

On embracing Islam

“[My parents] wanted to know why. I mean at the end of the day this was a 14 year old boy…
“Their first concern was that I was being pressured into becoming Muslim and that wasn’t the case because I didn’t have any Muslim friends…”

On time management

“It’s very important to keep ourselves busy but it has to be a balance… the barakah comes from giving everyone else their right.”

For the sake of Allah

“The opportunities in terms of the career in Islam are not great, from a career perspective, from a purely worldly based perspective whereas the opportunities for doing it for the sake of Allah are far, far greater… I try to make as much da’wah work as possible fee-sabeelillah.

On black magic & extreme Sufis

“Some people when they read, they become choked, the Shaytan strangles them…”

“The extreme Sufis are almost universally involved in magic. In their gatherings, people go crazy with Jinn-related things – people spin around, they stab swords at each other. These are things that are openly apparent in their videos and in their writings.”

On Nazim al Haqqani

“As for Nazim al Haqqani, I personally had a number of cases where he was involved, and he and his followers openly do magic. You go to them and ask them to harm someone or to benefit someone and they openly do it for their followers. 

“And you know when you see the kind of ta’weez these people give… I actually had one, and I probably still have a photograph of it from Cyprus from Nazim al Haqqani, which had the names of the Shaytan written on it.”

Advice for magicians & those who go to them

“Don’t ruin your akhirah and everything that you have with Allah by doing this. The one who purchases magic – either one who performed it or the one who goes to have it performed, they have nothing. Not even a single thing in the akhirah.”

On jealousy

“I really believe that jealousy can be fixed by proper belief in Qadar. Because you know that whatever came to you was never going to miss you and whatever missed you was never going to come to you so there’s no point in being jealous.”

On Ruqyah

“Ruqyah is a big temptation because people will literally give you huge amounts of money… This cure is something you can’t pay for. It’s something that comes from Allah SWT and you have to work for it, you can’t pay for it.”

“I’m more interested in teaching other people…”

“People often talk about what kind of jinn is it; what sort of place does it come from; what sort of magic was done. We say, okay, once you’ve calculated all of that, what is your conclusion going to be? Qula’oodhu bi RabbilFalaq and Qula’oodhu bi RabbinNas. Okay it’s a snake jinn,what are you going to do? Qula’oodhu bi RabbilFalaq and Qula’oodhu bi RabbinNas. Regardless of whether it’s this kind of jinn or that kind of jinn, this kind of magic or that kind of magic, you’re still going to read the same ayat of the Quran.”

On how to be cured

“The most important thing – more important than anything you’re going to read from the Quran is that the person turns to Allah. That they repent for what they’ve done – because we’ve all got sins. That they do their best to change their life, to correct their life, turn to Allah ‘azz wa jall in every single way, and to seek a cure from Allah. Because Allah is Ash-Shafi, Allah is the Curer.”

The Full Interview

Faraz Omar: You embraced Islam at the tender age of 14 after attending awareness classes and online research. What were the classes about and how did your family react to it?

Tim Humble: The classes that I attended were religious education classes that are a part of the British National Curriculum; so even now every child in the UK has certain subjects that they have to cover which is mandated by the government. One of those is religious education and within religious education, Christianity is mandatory but also as far as I know — at that time anyway — it was Christianity and one other religion. Generally they would do Christianity and Islam and some schools would do Christianity and Judaism but in that particular year, we did Christianity and Islam. 

What really struck me about the classes was that when we would hear about Islam, it was not like anything I had ever heard about before,  it was something that was completely new to me in many many ways. I had seen Muslims, I had not really met or had any real sort of close relationship with any particular Muslims or close friendships with any particular Muslims but when I heard about Islam, it just struck me. I was very critical thinker…I didn’t like to take everything that I was given but when I heard about Islam it really changed me completely and so that’s what I followed up with research. 

As for how my family reacted, it took me some time to get to that stage or to get from 

the stage of first hearing about Islam  to my parents finding out. I don’t know how long exactly it took but it took a number of weeks and probably I’m guessing a number of months it’s very difficult to remember ..quite back far now.

My mom had actually guessed, she had actually said to me that I’d become Muslim. And I said to my mom that I hadn’t or I said to her that, I don’t know why you are thinking this, I haven’t. But I guess that it was because once I had become Muslim, my life changed, I mean, I changed. I started to meet Muslim people, I started to maybe defend Islam verbally and  I think that sort of let her know. But then when I came to tell her they sat me down, they wanted to know why. I mean at the end of the day this was a 14 year old boy, they wanted to know why it is that you’ve decided to do this.

But once I had explained my reasoning… I think they had two main concerns. Their first concern was that I was being pressured into becoming Muslim or peer pressure and that wasn’t the case because I didn’t have any Muslim friends at that time. They were also concerned a little bit about what they have heard about Islam in the news. Now, at that age it was just when Islam was just starting to appear in the media in the negative sense. I don’t remember all the details but you’re talking about a couple of years, maybe three years or so before the big events that sort of brought Islam into the media all the time, but it was still in the media. Once we got over that, they were quite understanding and they said it seems like you know what you are doing. And we have never been able to stop you doing what you want to do and so they gave it their approval to a certain extent.

Faraz: You studied at the Islamic University of Madinah, have ijazas in the 6 famous books of hadith, you practice ruqyah and I understand you were an IT consultant, you have family with 3 children, you are also starting a charity called Humble Foundation. Alhamdulillah barak Allahu feekum. How do you manage work, family, studies together with teaching and ruqyah?

Tim: I’d like to say that I have a really good formula for doing this but I actually don’t. It’s not an easy thing to do and, there’s no doubt that it requires constant self-review because I’ve tried all sorts of things — giving everything a set number of hours, giving certain days for certain things, most of the popular books written on the topic by famous management consultants and all of these different things. At the end of the day the most important thing is reviewing the time that you’ve spent and remembering the hadith of Salman al-Farsi (may Allah be pleased with him) that he narrated from the Prophet ﷺ‎ when he mentioned that different people that have a right over you, he mentioned that your Lord has a right over you, your family has a right over you, your body has a right over you. Give everyone who has a right over you their right. And that requires looking at yourself and reviewing the work that you do because I don’t always get it right.

What I do right now is I spend my mornings working, once I’ve done my daily work – and I’m blessed that I have a very flexible job in the sense that I work for myself and am able to kind of pick and choose my hours — then I do the most important things on my daily timetable and task list in terms of the charity and da’wah work.

As for ruqyah, ruqyah is something that if you don’t control, it just explodes, I mean you could almost have an infinite stream of people constantly needing your attention, so what I first did is I stopped taking phone calls and I started taking emails instead which means that I can control the time that I spend on it a little bit more and I changed my number of days to basically one day a week plus emergencies, or I give up the afternoon of that day to spend basically doing ruqyah. It’s all about trying to find a balance but my basic answer to the question is that there isn’t a single one solution to fitting it all in but it’s a matter of looking at yourself. At the end of the day, I love keeping myself busy. It’s very important to keep ourselves busy but it has to be a balance between the different rights people have. I mean if it was up to me, sometimes you want to give a 100% of your time to Islamic stuff especially with the new charity, you want to give a 100% of your time but the barakah comes from giving everyone else their right.

Faraz: Subhan Allah, that’s a very beneficial advice. Have you not considered making your Islamic work a regular, full time profession?

Tim: That’s something I’ve toyed with especially since coming back from Madinah in 2011 and since then it’s really been on my mind. I think there are a number of reasons why I didn’t want to do that: the first is, I was a little concerned over sincerity and over the fact when you start to make it your main source of earning — and there is nothing wrong with earning from it — but when you make it your main source of earning, I fear that there comes a time when you stop looking at what benefits the people and you start looking at what benefits you, (your) bank balance at the end of the month.

I might be accepting invitations where people pay you more, going to places or moving out of my city, move from Newcastle  to London where I would get much higher salary and much higher standard of living, I didn’t want it to be about that. That was one of the first reasons. Also, I must admit that I feel that the opportunities in terms of the career in Islam are not great, from a career perspective, from a purely worldly based perspective whereas the opportunities for doing it for the sake of Allah are far far greater. As much as I can, and it’s still a difficult balance, I try to make as much da’wah work as possible fee-sabeelillah. One of the reasons I set up the charity, the Humble Foundation was so that some of the money that was coming in through da’wah related activities could simply just be put into the charity and it would keep it something that we can build for the future.

Faraz: Alhamdulillah, that’s actually really good to be honest and something that’s rare these days and one would have to appreciate that because you don’t even charge for ruqyah.

Tim: There are a number of hadith regarding the permissibility of charging for ruqyah, but ruqyah has become a means to exploit people financially, particularly in the south of UK. There are people who are earning well in excess of what any doctor or engineer or any lawyer would earn, and I’m talking about people earning well in excess of $150,000, equivalent US dollars a year in ruqyah. And they’re doing it for reading qul a’oodhu birabbil falaq and qul a’oodhu birabbin nas.

At the end of the day I wouldn’t blame them for that if it wasn’t for the fact that they were not doing the job properly as well. I mean a person comes with a ta’weez around their neck, a tameema around their neck and instead of cutting it off they say, “If you pay me I’ll cut it off.” They’re not interested in benefitting the people, in taking the people out of the darkness and into the light, they’re only interested in getting paid.

In  some ways ruqyah is a big temptation because people will literally give you huge amounts of money because, at the end of the day, they want to pay for a cure.  But what we’re trying to do is trying to encourage people that this cure is something you can’t pay for. It’s something that comes from Allah swt and you have to work for it, you can’t pay for it. What we’re doing is the money that we receive through ruqyah, we always had a policy that we just give it to charity and that way they benefit and we benefit. And Alhamdulillah it doesn’t take a lot of time.

I’m more interested in teaching other people because I’ve come to the realisation that there are so many people who need help and so few people who can help them and the only way we can address this pandemic that is going on is to teach other people who can do it; and that’s become my focus really.

Faraz: One wouldn’t expect black magic to exist and become rampant in developed countries like the UK, where generally people wouldn’t believe in such things in the first place. How is this the case over there?

Tim: I think it’s rampant in every place. As Muslims we can be a little bit naïve sometimes in thinking that non-Muslims don’t get involved in this stuff, but when people ask me about this, I usually reply with two things:

On one side, you have the fact that magic is present among non-Muslims and it’s something that they do and have done and I get non-Muslim people coming to me and indeed when they become Muslim, I hear many stories. Of course these things may not be put down to magic – I think they were diagnosed in a regular hospital – but that’s what’s happening.

On the second side of things, we also have to be aware that Shaytan is going to focus his efforts where there is the most game for him. And there’s no game for him in taking a person out of disbelief into disbelief. That’s not really a very good investment of his time. What he’s interested in is in taking people who are in a state of belief into disbelief. And that’s why there is far more focus among the Muslims because the Shaytan is going to focus on the area where he thinks he can misguide the largest number of people. And although there are non-Muslims involved –  we have a museum at the south of England in Cornwall which is dedicated to non-Muslim practice of magic and it’s run by non-Muslims and it’s huge and full to the brim of stuff.

We have a reasonable Muslim population in the UK – whenever you get Muslims, you’re going to get this problem, because it’s become the norm for people. When they have a family argument, when they have a marriage problem, they go to somebody, and these people have emigrated to the UK an they’ve set up shop in the UK just like they have abroad; and people still go abroad and get this magic done.

Faraz: Do we really need to go to sheikhs for ruqyah? Can’t we just do it ourselves with the existing information? And in what kind of cases are experts really needed?

Tim: In my opinion, the basic principle of ruqyah is that you do it yourself and that is based on a number of things: it is based on the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ‎ and the hadith of the 70,000 who will enter Paradise without any account or reckoning, and the Prophet ﷺ‎ said in the description of them “they are those people who don’t go and seek ruqyah”. Now we don’t say that seeking ruqyah is something bad. Seeking ruqyah is something that can be obligatory upon a person and it may be absolutely necessary for a person to do.

However if a person is able to treat themselves, let them do so for it’s better for them. It’s better for them in a number of ways: it’s better for their eeman, it’s better for their trust in Allah, and it’s better for them to learn to be able to help other people. If they can’t treat themselves, then the best thing is for someone to offer to treat them without them having to go and ask for it. And that’s only going to happen when people treat themselves and have knowledge. So for example, if you see your children or your see your spouse suffering, you’re going to read ruqyah upon them without them coming and asking – but that’s only going to happen when people know how to do it themselves.

I think there are two times when you might need expert advice :

One is at the very beginning if you’re struggling to understand what’s going on and you want someone to give you a single session just to point you in the right direction. That is, say ‘I’m willing to do it myself but I’m really lost here and I’ve never seen it or done it before, so give me some pointers, show me what to do and send me on my way.” And that’s what we try to do with the majority of the people that we see in the UK.

The next thing is if things get so difficult that they are unable to read upon themselves. Some people when they read, they become choked, the Shaytan strangles them and they can’t speak anymore and they stop and start again, and they say “no, I can’t even finish Surat al-Fatihah.” So in this case they need somebody else to read on them, until they can get to the point. But all we’re doing is reading on them until the point where they’re able to read upon themselves. And since I’ve changed my system to this, the rates of success, walillahilhamd, are a lot higher, of getting people to do it themselves. In that way, a single raaqi – who is an expert in the field – can deal with 50-60 people, instead of being able to deal with 2 or 3.

Faraz: Can sisters do ruqyah and where can they learn from?

Tim: Sisters can do ruqyah no doubt, however, I personally differentiate between two different types of ruqyah for sisters. Sisters doing it on themselves, there is no problem with this and there are plenty of ahadith. There is the hadith of A’ishah (may Allah be pleased with her) that when the Prophet ﷺ‎ became sick, she would perform the ruqyah and she would use his hand rather than hers. This is something there is no issue with her doing ruqyah on herself and on her close family.

Where I would have the concern is the sister going out from house to house, from place to place, because it contains a lot of things in there that Islamically are concerning. When you’re dealing with someone who’s throwing you across the room, when you’re dealing with someone who’s extremely violent, these are things that we don’t want our sisters in Islam to be dealing with; where they might compromise their hijab or their haya in order to do this.

I think sisters have a major role to play in supporting other sisters who don’t have a mahram to come with them, and that is quite common. I mean, you have revert sisters who don’t have a mahram to come with them. You have sisters whose mahram is not willing to have ruqyah done – “I don’t believe in it.” In this case, that sister needs someone to come with her and support her because we don’t read on a sister on her own, ever. Except in an absolute emergency when she drops down on the floor in front of your face, we would not read on a sister on her own. So we would ask another sister to come along with her and take care of her. Make sure her hijab is on, make sure that she’s comfortable. Make sure that if her hand needs to be held, there’s someone there to hold her hand. So I think in those areas, they have a major role to play. But I wouldn’t recommend for a sister to become a fully fledged raqi, where she’s going from house to house to house, because every case is different and you deal with different things. Firstly this concept of the women going from house to house is not Islamic, and secondly, the danger involved in some of the more difficult cases is difficult for a sister to deal with in many cases.

Faraz: People who go to healers follow them in good faith because to their best of knowledge, the sheikh is guiding them in the light of Islam. How responsible would they be for the wrong practices of deviant sheikhs?

Tim: I think there are two types of people. There are some people who know very well what they are doing. The Prophet ﷺ‎ mentioned in a hadith, “Not from us are those people who perform magic and those people who have magic performed for them.” And so he equated between the person who performs magic and the person who goes to the magician and asks for magic to be done. Some of these people might hold up their hands and say “I didn’t know what was going on.” But, you know, when they asked to bring a rooster and slaughter it in the bathroom at midnight, you would think that they are responsible.

However you do get some people, especially when they go on for a cure, they’re not aware of what’s going on and they should be. But they’re not aware of what’s going on. And I think those people have a responsibility to learn Islam and they are blameworthy for being ignorant in this regard. And this is not a light form of ignorance. We’re talking about acts of disbelief. And if you’re ignorant about acts that take you out of Islam, then that’s an ignorance that is blameworthy.

In reality, you get people who are more or less aware of what’s going on and you get people who have no idea. The people who have no idea, they are blameworthy, because at the end of the day, every Muslim needs to know those things that take you out of Islam, and every Muslim needs to be able to recognise those things that are going to take you that way. But at the same time, there is no doubt that the second group needs to be educated and the first group needs to be admonished; and there’s a difference in how we deal with the two, even if the two are both blameworthy.

Faraz: You mentioned about the late Sufi peer Nazim al Haqqani’s involvement in magic. Perhaps you have details that many of his followers do not know about?

Tim: I think that we have to establish something as a principle, and that is that the extreme Soofis are almost universally involved in magic – every single one of them, and this is something they don’t actually particularly hide. In their gatherings, people go crazy with Jinn-related things – people spin around, they stab swords at each other. These are things that are openly apparent in their videos and in their writings. And yes, there are some people who, especially from the moderate Sufi, have allegiance to a person like Nazim al Haqqani, and that allegiance is based on not really knowing them – they wouldn’t say that they have actually attended his sessions or that they’ve actually been to see him, or that they’ve connected with him in some way; it’s only an allegiance – those people might be very surprised.

Someone who knows these individuals very well will not be surprised about this at all, because these people – every single one of them – from the extreme Sufis from the Nakshabandi and the Tijaniya, all of them, every single one of them, are involved in magic. And they openly declare so. They might call it Karamat ul Awliya, they might call it the ability to control the Jinn, they might call it ruqyah even, but you can see it openly.

As for Nazim al Haqqani, I personally had a number of cases where he was involved, and he and his followers openly do magic. You go to them and ask them to harm someone or to benefit someone and they openly do it for their followers, it’s not something that they hide. So yes, I think that it’s surprising to some of the more moderate Sufis who maybe have an allegiance to a person like that without really knowing them. But I think anyone who is closely involved with these people will know. At the end of the day, you can recognize a magician very easily by looking at them. And you know when you see the kind of ta’weez these people give, when you see the kind of names of the Shaytan that they write, and then they are given out. I actually had one, and I probably still have a photograph of it from Cyprus from Nazim al Haqqani, which had the names of the Shaytan written on it.

Faraz: Names of the Shaytan?

Tim: They write a tameemah or a ta’weez that has the names of the Shaytan written inside of it, seeking help from the Shaytan in order to harm a person or in order to benefit a person. And this is something that doesn’t benefit them. They just increase each other in transgression and oppression.

Faraz: What makes a person consciously get magic done on someone else, because these days you even get explicit ads online that attract people to get what they want through black magic. Is this true? What advice would you give to such people?

Tim: I think it’s very unfortunately true. Allahu’l musta’an. It’s very unfortunate that it’s true and you have a very clear reason given in the Qur’an why magicians would do what they do. With regards to the magicians of Fir’oun, they asked: “Are we going to get a reward, a financial benefit if we are victorious?” “Yes, if you’re going to be from the people who are close to me” [26:41-42]. So money, power and status are the primary motivators for the magician. That’s what Allah tells us about the magicians of Fir’oun, and it’s true about every magician that has come since then – their motivation is money, power and status.

But as for the ordinary people, I often say this that when it comes down to who does magic, it’s not a person who’s far away from you, and that’s the sad reality. A person who’s far away from you just doesn’t care enough to have magic done on you. It’s always somebody relatively close, because it had to take that degree of jealousy, or that degree of hatred for a person to go to that extent, and I would say the overwhelming majority of cases come down to jealousy or revenge. Sometimes you get people whose problem is in their circumstances – they’ve gone through a messy divorce and they want to get their marriage back together. And sometimes the motivation is the same as the magician – wealth and status and success.

As for my advice to them: don’t ruin your akhirah and everything that you have with Allah by doing this. The one who purchases magic – either one who performed it or the one who goes to have it performed, they have nothing. Not even a single thing in the akhirah. And why would a person give up their entire future, their long term future and whatever is with Allah, for a couple of years of getting back at somebody? And I really believe that jealousy can be fixed by proper belief in Qadar. And I think the scholars of Islam mention that if a person has proper belief in the divine decree, they would not feel jealous of other people. Because you know that whatever came to you was never going to miss you and whatever missed you was never going to come to you so there’s no point in being jealous. That would be my advice to them.

Faraz: How can one know if a particular sheikh is authentic and who do you go and learn from?

Tim: This is a long topic but there are some simple pointers. The first is that you judge a person by their general characteristics, their general belief, what they call to, what they teach – outside their ruqyah. Are they a person who is known for calling to the Sunnah, and inviting to the Sunnah, and warning against innovation, warning again polytheism, warning against making a partner with Allah? That’s the first thing, that’s not the only thing.

If that person, in their general selves are not showing the characteristics of a good Muslim – in terms of the fact that they’re not calling to Allah, they’re not calling to the Sunnah – or they’re openly disobeying Allah – such as you go to a raqi who has shaved his beard or has his thobe below his ankles – you know, it’s a sin and it’s not more than a sin, but at the end of the day, you need to be going to a person whose inner and outer appearance is one of who is practicing Islam. That will save you from probably 70% of the problem, to have this concept in the beginning: That I’m only going to go to a person who’s practicing, I’m only going to go to a person who’s calling to the Sunnah and is known for that.

On the other side, it’s about what they actually do in the ruqyah session. The first thing is that they should be attaching your heart to Allah and not to them. Anyone who comes and attaches your heart to them, just walk out. Saying “I can help you, I can cure you, only me, don’t go to anyone else, don’t read ruqyah on yourself.” Any of these things, get rid of them. So the first is them attaching your heart to Allah – that the cure is from Allah and not from them. The second is in the ruqyah itself: The ruqyah should be recitation from the Qur’an, and the du’as from the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ‎ in a clear language that can be clearly understood. Anyone who is mumbling, anyone who is saying words you have never heard of before, these are people to avoid.

They should not be requesting anything from you. They should not be requesting you to bring any animals, to bring any clothing, to bring anything like or to do things like spit in a teacup. So you want somebody who is calling to the Sunnah, somebody who is practicing the Sunnah, somebody who, when you go there, they recite the Qur’an over you without anything that would be haram, including not touching women who are not mahram. They read the Qur’an over you, they read the authentic du’as of the Prophet ﷺ‎ that he made in ruqyah over you, and that is it. Nothing more than that; and they attach your heart to Allah – and that is the person who is authentic. Anything else and it’s better to avoid. If you have any doubt, it’s better for you to make your excuses, go away and ask somebody than it is to take that risk, because so many people who go, they end up with more Jinn and more problems with them because of the people they went to seek the cure from.

Faraz: There are also these people who do ruqyah according to the Sunnah but then they also have some practices that are based on experience

Tim: No doubt.

Faraz: There are things like, they ask you to listen to the Quran, close your eyes, listen to the Quran and you see some kind of a vision and all that.

Tim: Hmmm, this is where we get into a little bit of advanced topic… now experience has a role to play in ruqyah.At the end of the day, ruqyah is something of a cross between Islamic knowledge and medicine at the same time. It has a certain degree of experience, but we have to draw a line of what’s acceptable and what isn’t and that is only going to come up on people who learn how to do ruqyah themselves.

Faraz: But is the vision part correct? Some people depend on it as reliable information.

Tim: The problem with this is that it opens the door for the Jinn to manipulate a person in a way that would be very very detrimental. And so any Jinn is simply gonna just give you a vision of your husband or your mother in law or whatever it is and then it calls you to hate them- calls you to accuse them.

However, I’m not saying that a person can’t have a beneficial vision, or a beneficial dream, (while) doing ruqyah. It is possible.

If a person has a vision in ruqyah, they should take that as something as a potential. But they shouldn’t act upon it with certainty until they make sure that what they’ve seen is true.

And a person may see, particularly with cases of the evil eye, they may see the person who did the evil eye upon them.  But if they rush to judgment, then that might cause souring in a relationship without any right and it could just be the Shaytan manipulating a person.

Faraz: So there’s no sure way that you can differentiate between a beneficial one and…?

Tim: I think a raqi with experience can. I think there are two things. First of all, if it’s completely involuntary, there is no volunteering, no asking, then that is more believable than the one that is being done through prompting – “Ok what can you see? What can you see? What can you see?” If it is completely involuntary, like there is no prompting at all, that’s a beginning that it might be reliable. And then the raqi has to use his experience in the whole field of what’s going on, in terms of what the person’s been afflicted with, whether or not this is possible. 

And at the end of the day, even if you know who did it, what benefit is it going to be? 

Faraz: But does it really matter for example, I mean, do these visions have any helpful significance in your ruqya?

For the overwhelming number of people, they don’t. The exception might be if they have a vision about where the magic is. People do often have that and it gets clearer as time goes on. So it sort of comes to the end of the ruqya session and they may be able to have an idea as to where the magic might be. That might be of benefit. But knowing who did it, or seeing it, is unlikely to be of great benefit, and there are things that may help you along a little bit, they may give you a clue to something, they may. But then, they’re not going to change your ruqya. And I think that’s true of a lot of knowledge in ruqya. A lot of knowledge in ruqya is beneficial to a certain extent but it doesn’t really change the ruqya. People often talk about what kind of jinn is it? What sort of place does it come from? What sort of magic was done? We say, Okay, once you’ve calculated all of that, what is your conclusion going to be? Qula’oodhu bi RabbilFalaq and Qula’oodhu bi RabbinNas. Okay it’s a snake jinn, what are you going to do? Qula’oodhu bi RabbilFalaq and Qula’oodhu bi RabbinNas. Regardless of whether it’s this kind of jinn or that kind of jinn, this kind of magic or that kind of magic, you’re still going to read the same ayat of the Qur’an. So to a certain extent, you’ll say that maybe it isn’t of as much benefit as people think it might be.

Faraz: So, as conclusion to ruqyah, what would really benefit a person who is afflicted? What would really benefit him and how would he protect himself or cure himself from this?

Tim: There’s a lot to say and I would definitely recommend people to check out the website muhammadtim.com because there’s a lot more information on there. But I think the first thing and the most important thing – more important than anything you’re going to read from the Qur’an is that the person turns to Allah. That they repent for what they’ve done – because we’ve all got sins. That they do their best to change their life, to correct their life, turn to Allah ‘azz wa jall in every single way, and to seek a cure from Allah. Because Allah is Ash-Shafi, Allah is the Curer and nobody can cure except Allah ‘azz wa jall. So they need to turn to Allah and realize that their cure lies with Allah. And have knowledge of Allah because so many of them seek a cure from every single thing other than the One Who is able to give them the cure. And so the most important thing is their turning to Allah and their repentance and that is far more important than anything they read.

Then they should have a ruqyah program and start with the athkar that protect them – and they can find them on the website – simple things they can recite in the morning and the evening to protect them. Then for them to go on to a ruqyah program. And we normally say that a person needs to be doing about, at least a minimum – and this is an absolute minimum of 45 minutes a day of reading Al Fatiha, last 3 surahs of the Qur’an, Aamanar rasool, Ayat ul-Kursi, and so on and so forth. People need to read the basic ayat that are authentically mentioned in the Sunnah. And if then they read some other ayat and other Surahs, that’s very beneficial. Perhaps the most beneficial thing they can read if they can manage it is Surat al-Baqarah. Read Surat al-Baqarah every single day – once or even twice a day – and really dedicate themselves to it; in addition to all of the other things that they can do. And if they were to do that, I don’t think the Shaytan would remain very long with them.

But for a lot of people, they sort of have one foot in the cure and one foot out. They’re sort of reading a little bit but not enough, they’ve made some tawbah, but not enough, and so you find them with sort of one foot into the cure and one foot out. Whereas if they embraced the cure 100% and completely turned towards Allah, completely changed their lifestyle – start with their recitation of the Qur’an, read Surah al-Baqarah once or even twice a day and completely throw themselves into it, then I don’t think the Shaytan would remain with them very long, bi ithnillah.

Faraz: What is your vision for the Humble Foundation? What do you want it to achieve?

Tim: I personally set up the Humble Foundation for two or three reasons. The first is because we were receiving some donations and things for ruqyah and we wanted to do something beneficial. There are really some amazing projects that could be done with very little financial resources they don’t need hundreds and thousands of pounds. And I’ve been a bit disillusioned with charities lately. I’ve seen huge and huge amounts being raised and really wasted. So what we want to do is we want to establish a charity that is going to be, in shaa Allah, a leading Islamic charity, but something that speaks to the original values of charity in Islam. It’s not about raising millions and millions. It’s about getting the most we can out of the resources we have. We have projects relating to the Qur’an, we have projects relating to new Muslims, we have projects relating to Muslim women, small projects that we can build upon it and in shaa Allah making it into something of huge benefit to Muslims all over the world bi idhnillahita’aala.

Jazaakumullahu khairan

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