"What Is Your Evidence?": A Salafi Therapy in Contemporary Egypt

"What is your evidence?" Repeated time and again, the question reverberated in the television studio, dominating the entire show. In March 2010, the popular talk show Egypt Today aired two episodes dedicated to the topic of "The Truth of Spirit Possession," joining the growing number of televised mediations of the unseen that have circulated in the region since the advent of satellite channels in the 2000s.¹ The host and the three invited guests—a Quranic healer, a graduate of al-Azhar (the centuries-old Islamic university, now nationalized), and a psychiatrist—debated if the invisible spirits mentioned in the Quran and known in Arabic as jinn can enter the human body and take possession of it. They also discussed the legitimacy and efficacy of therapies aimed at treating such possessions, most notably the Salafi-oriented revivalist form of exorcism called Quranic healing that has become since the 1980s increasingly popular and visible in Egypt and beyond.²

It was certainly an impassioned debate, with the participants' raised voices struggling to drown one another out and interrupting each other. They split into two camps: on one side, the healer affirmed that possession is possible and can be treated, albeit exclusively through Quranic healing (al-'ilaj bi-l-qur'an). On the other side, the other two participants and the host rejected the possibility of possession and criticized all related therapies, dismissing Quranic healers' simultaneous claims to healing orthodoxy, therapeutic efficacy, and the practice's resemblance to biomedicine. And yet the two sides did share something: both used an evidential language to make their argument and condemn the other's, invoking the term evidence (dalil, plural adilla) and various types of religious and scientific evidence. Without a doubt, the question "What is your evidence?" could have been the tagline for the two episodes.

These shows and their focus on evidence illustrate how Quranic healing has been discussed in the public sphere in the past decades. But "evidence" is not only a discursive weapon. It is also a central element of this Salafi influenced therapy, underlying authoritative claims of expertise and efficacy. Healers resort to it in the numerous books they have published and in interactions with patients. Furthermore, it shapes what they see as an orthodox treatment and how they devise new therapies. In other words, evidence is the foundation on which Quranic healing practices and discourses are built.

Taking this notion of evidence as the focus of this article, I tackle it as a social and historical object, analyzing healers' assumptions about what evidence is, how it works, and to what effects. To put it differently, I examine the semantics and pragmatics of Quranic healing's evidentiary regime. To analyze this ethnographic context, I take inspiration from historical epistemology, the approach in the history of science concerned with the origins, conditions of possibility, and constitution of epistemic categories like objectivity, evidence, and truth.³

Throughout this article, I argue that evidence has a double footing in Quranic healing. On one hand, Quranic healers invoke it when grounding their practices in the revealed texts of the Quran and hadith (the corpus describing the acts and deeds of the Prophet), indexing a specifically Salafi way of engaging with these texts. On the other hand, evidence refers to a nontextual source of therapeutic knowledge: the practical experience of healing (tagriba). Condensing forms of reasoning and practice like empiricism and experimentation, tagriba makes Quranic healing, in the eye of its practitioners, akin to modern scientific practice, particularly biomedical clinical trials.

By juxtaposing Quranic healers' positions with critiques directed at them, and using the critiques as a foil that allows a better grasp of the healers' positions, I reconstruct how these two meanings of evidence are related in Quranic healing. As I show, textual and practical evidence are hierarchically articulated, with the first taking precedence over the second yet leaving space for it, allowing for their coexistence.

Through this dual employment, the notion of evidence connects, if hierarchically, religious and scientific domains, with Quranic healing at their meeting point. It is what I call a hinge notion—an idea...