Sufi Healing

Early Sufism and its institutions

Carl Ernst's encyclopedia entry on tasawwuf places the emergence of early Sufism in the late eighth century in north-eastern Iran and Iraq. It names al-Hasan al-Basri (died 728), Rabia of Basra (died 801), Dhu al-Nun (died 859) and Junayd of Baghdad (died 910) among early figures. The entry describes organised Sufi 'ways' (tariqas) as developing from the eleventh century around charismatic masters who claimed lineage to Muhammad, with lodges spreading under dynastic patronage across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Spain and south-eastern Europe.

This source is used here for origins and terminology only. It does not establish when healing became associated with particular Sufi figures or orders, and the sources reviewed for this article do not supply a dated history of Sufi healing as a distinct practice.

Healing at saints' shrines

Present-day ethnographic studies describe healing at Sufi shrines in South Asia. A study at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan, based on interviews with 70 devotees, notes that earlier research on shrines in Muslim countries portrays followers seeking healing and using Sufi saints as intermediaries. Another study combined surveys, clinical assessments and ethnography across a Sufi shrine, a Delhi neighbourhood and a psychiatric facility to examine a shrine-based concept of affliction in urban north India, in which distress is treated as shared within a household or kin group.

These are contemporary accounts. They describe what devotees and researchers report, and they do not date shrine healing or show that present practice is continuous with any earlier period.

Orders in North America and the West

The Inayatiyya, a Sufi organisation in the lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan, gives his dates as 5 July 1882 in Baroda to 5 February 1927 in Delhi. Its biography says he trained for four years, until 1908, under a pir of the Indian Chishtiyya order, travelled to the West around 1910, and during his stay in England from 1914 to 1920 established the Sufi Order as an organised body. This is the organisation's own account. Its Seven Activities page lists a Healing Activity offering education and training in spiritual healing teachings that it attributes to him, but the pages reviewed give no date for when that activity began.

A separate study followed a North American branch of the Shadhiliyya Sufi tradition through fieldwork between 2016 and 2020. It reports that the branch's healing rituals combine Islamic devotional acts, including dhikr and Qur'anic recitation, with complementary approaches such as acupuncture.

Sufism, tasawwuf and the word Sufi

Ernst glosses the Arabic tasawwuf as 'becoming a Sufi', meaning the realisation of ethical and spiritual ideals. He lists several competing derivations of the word: from suf (wool, the ascetic garment), safa (purity), safwa (the chosen ones) or suffa (the bench, linked to poor Muslims in the Prophet's time). He credits tenth-century theorists such as Sulami with formalising the ideas into a coherent spiritual discipline. The etymology remains contested, and the term describes a broad religious current and not a therapy.

Dhikr, sama and related terms

In Ernst's account, dhikr is the recitation of God's ninety-nine names from the Qur'an to draw closer to the divine, and sama is 'listening' to music and poetry as part of spiritual practice. A researcher at the University of Edinburgh glosses dhikr as recitation in his article on Sufism and healing. A 2026 scoping review of 53 studies lists dhikr, salah (ritual prayer), Qur'anic recitation and muraqabah among the practices used in Islamic mindfulness interventions; it does not treat these as only Sufi.

A case study of an Indonesian Islamic-Sufi rehabilitation centre applies three Sufi stages of purifying the soul, takhalli, tahalli and tajalli, which the authors compare with the process of therapy there. These are explanatory concepts from the tradition and are not measured outcomes.

How the label Sufi healing is used

The sources reviewed give no single standard definition of Sufi healing. The label is attached to different things: an order's Healing Activity, a programme of Sufi psychology based on the teachings of the Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi Shahmaghsoudi school, the meditation Tamarkoz, makam music, a residential rehabilitation centre, and healing rituals at shrines. These are separate practices with separate settings, and similar wording does not show that they are equivalent.

Order-based healing programmes

The Inayatiyya describes its Healing Activity as emphasising attunement, prayer, breath and concentration. A 2026 course page lists four themes for its Foundations of Healing programme: the body as a sacred instrument, breath and divine power, the healing heart, and a closing retreat, taught by nine instructors from February to May. These are the organisation's own descriptions of its teaching, and they cannot be read as a protocol that others follow.

Neither page reviewed says how the programmes relate to medical care. A reader can ask an organiser what a session involves, what is expected of participants, and how participation relates to any treatment they are receiving.

Remembrance, text and the body

In the North American Shadhiliyya study, practitioners are described as experiencing healing through sensory engagement and imaginative practices, with the body acting as a gauge, a regulator and a channel for spiritual energy. Those are the study's categories, taken from practitioners' accounts, and they are not measured physiological processes.

A 2024 textual analysis of the book Miftah al-Sudur by Pangersa Abah Anom, using a descriptive qualitative method, reports that purification practices, remembrance and spiritual heart-to-heart transmission are presented as routes to inner healing. Its authors say that the work is limited to textual analysis and lacks empirical field data.

Residential and shrine settings

The Indonesian centre Pesantren Tetirah Dhikr in Yogyakarta provides care for people with mental illness and drug addiction. A case study based on interviews with the head of the centre (the Kyai), his assistants and 16 patients (santri) reported that participants regarded dhikr as the essential therapeutic component. The study describes the experience of treatment there and did not measure clinical outcomes.

At the Makhdoom Sakhi Syedi Mossani shrine in Sindh, a qualitative study using 10 interviews, four focus groups and observation found that visitors frequently combined biomedical and spiritual approaches. In western India, a state-sponsored psychiatric clinic affiliated with a Sufi shrine offers free psychotropic treatment, mostly to pilgrims, and has been praised for blending medicine and prayer, although the author observed a strongly medicalised style of consultation.

Reasons people give for visiting shrines

Qualitative studies report a mix of motives. In Sindh, visits were shaped by low educational attainment, economic hardship, cultural belief and distrust or inaccessibility of formal medical care. At the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, devotees sought rituals for social troubles as well as physical and emotional problems. In Kashmir, 12 adults with haemophilia described shrine visits as a source of hope, comfort, inner peace and resilience, while recognising the importance of biomedical treatment.

These are participants' own reasons and experiences, gathered from small, non-random samples in specific places. They are not tests of whether visiting a shrine changes a condition, and they cannot be applied to other shrines.

Claims made in the literature and by organisations

The Edinburgh article links dhikr and knowing oneself with the psychological concepts of mindfulness and self-efficacy. The 2024 textual study proposes that sacred remembrance and heart-to-heart transmission support emotional regulation and neurological change, and the authors note that this rests on text and not on field data. The Sufi psychology programme describes its aim as addressing physical and spiritual aspects of a patient so that identity is not limited to a diagnostic status.

The Inayatiyya describes its Healing Activity as teaching spiritual healing. None of these statements is a clinical claim for a named condition, and each should be read as a description from the author or organisation making it.

Uses that have been studied

Researchers have tested Sufi-related interventions for anxiety before medical procedures, anxiety and sleep in people on haemodialysis, and stress in university students. The next section sets out what each study found and the limits on applying it to other uses.

Sufi music with makams

A 2021 systematic review searched ten databases to March 2020 and found 21 trials of Sufi music therapy with makams, a Turkish modal system. A meta-analysis of 18 randomised trials with 1,454 participants found that, compared with usual care or no music, anxiety was lower in the short term in patients undergoing operations or treatments such as chemotherapy or haemodialysis (standardised mean difference -1.15, 95% confidence interval -1.64 to -0.65). The authors rated the evidence very low quality, with significant heterogeneity.

A 2025 pilot trial randomised 60 adults with mild to moderate depression and anxiety in two Turkish community centres in England to a four-week programme or a control. Recruitment and retention were high, but mean scores did not differ between groups at the end of the intervention. Only after adjustment for baseline scores was anxiety lower, and mental and spiritual well-being higher, in the music group. This was a feasibility study, and the music studied is receptive listening, not a healing session or dhikr.

Dhikr, meditation and Islamic mindfulness

A single-centre randomised trial in an Islamic hospital in Surabaya, Indonesia, enrolled 54 people on haemodialysis; 53 completed baseline and post-intervention assessments. Using the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the authors reported lower anxiety and better sleep quality with a combination of dhikr and salawat (prayers of blessing on Muhammad) than in the comparison group, with p values below 0.001. The abstract gives few design details.

An 18-week quasi-experimental study of Tamarkoz, a Sufi meditation, in university students compared an intervention group with a wait-list group and a group using campus stress-management resources. It reported higher positive emotion and daily spiritual experience and lower perceived stress and heart rate in the intervention group. Allocation was not described as random, so the result is weaker evidence than a randomised trial.

A 2026 scoping review of 53 studies maps research on Islamic mindfulness interventions, in which dhikr, salah, Qur'anic recitation and muraqabah feature as central components. Its authors state that standardised, manualised approaches suitable for diverse Muslim populations remain absent.

Sufi psychology and what remains untested

A practice-based observational study of Sufi psychotherapy reported reductions in several measures of distress over time in patients from various backgrounds, but not in hope or resilience. Its authors state that the evidence base is extremely limited. The abstract describes change within patients over time and does not report a control group.

In searches of PubMed run for this record on 5 October 2026, the term Sufi combined with healing, shrine, mental health or psychotherapy returned 30 records, and dhikr in the title or abstract returned 27. Among those screened, no randomised trial was found of a Sufi order's healing programme, of healing at a shrine or of an in-person Sufi healing session. Other databases were not searched.

Sema is a separate practice

The whirling ceremony, the Mevlevi Sema, belongs to the Mevleviye, an order that UNESCO says was founded in 1273 in Konya. UNESCO describes the ceremony as whirling accompanied by a set musical repertoire, with dancers traditionally trained over 1,001 days in prayer, music, poetry and dance, and notes that many ceremonies are now performed for tourist audiences. It is treated as its own subject and is not covered by this article. UNESCO does not describe it as a healing practice.

Prophetic medicine and Greek-based medicine

The National Library of Medicine catalogue describes prophetic medicine (al-tibb al-nabawi) as an alternative genre of medical writing that flourished for centuries alongside Greek-based humoral medicine and became prominent in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. It says the authors were mostly clerics rather than physicians, and that the works combine diet, simple drugs, honey, bloodletting and cautery with prayers, invocations and designs for amulets. The catalogue does not link the genre to Sufi orders. The sources reviewed here do not cover Unani medicine, so no relationship to it is stated.

Regional scope of the sources

The studies reviewed come mainly from Pakistan, India, Indonesia, England, Turkey-linked communities and North America. They describe shrines, rehabilitation centres and organisations with different theology, language and practice, so findings from one setting cannot be carried over to another.

What the sources report about harms

The trial and observational abstracts reviewed do not report adverse events, and an absence of reporting does not show that none occurred. One ethnographic study of a Sufi shrine in western India describes it as a sanctuary for women who had left their homes, though not an entirely safe one. No source reviewed examines injury, coercion or harms from Sufi healing practices.

Care boundaries

The Kashmir authors state that shrine visits are not a substitute for medical treatment, and the Sindh authors call for health services that respect spiritual belief while improving access to formal care. A person with a diagnosed condition, severe distress or new or worsening symptoms needs assessment by an appropriate health professional, and spiritual practice should not delay or replace necessary care.

The sources reviewed list no formal contraindications for dhikr, meditation or shrine rituals, so none are stated here. People can ask any teacher or organiser what an activity involves, and they can pause or stop at any point.

Training and oversight

No statutory regulation, professional register or common training standard for Sufi healing as a whole was found. Teaching sits within individual orders and lineages, as in the roles of the Kyai in an Indonesian centre and of instructors in an Inayatiyya programme. The pages reviewed for the Inayatiyya give no qualification requirements for teachers, so training should be asked about directly.