Creator,
Bless my eyes that I may see with love,
Bless my lips that I may speak with love,
Bless my ears that I may listen with love,
Bless my heart that I may give and receive with love,
Bless my hands that all that I touch feels loved,
Bless my feet that my walk may be a prayer upon Mother Earth.”
This prayer is credited to the Mexican Grace Alvarez Sesma who is a ‘curandero’, a practitioner of a traditional Mexican indigenous form of healing. This healing prayer reminded me of this prayer of the Prophet:
O Allah, place within my heart light,
and upon my tongue light,
and upon my tongue light,
and within my ears light,
and within my eyes light,
and place behind me light,
and in front of me light,
and above me light,
and beneath me light.
and beneath me light.
O Allah, bestow upon me light!
An example of Sufi healing using music is Tümata [link checked on 8 November 2023]:
The dervishes of shaykh Oruç Güvenç play their healing music for instance in a children’s hospital in Budapest.
Mawlana Rumi says this about healing in his Diwan:
ای درد کهن گشته بخ بخ که شفا آمد
وی قفل فروبسته بگشا که کلید آمدFor the pain that is chronic, bravo, for healing has arrived!
Open the lock that is shut tight, for the key has arrived!
The door to the healing room of Amma was open to many patients in India. Amma practiced healing in the city of Hyderabad. Seated at a table in her healing room, Amma wrote amulets in Arabic, while Abba, her husband, himself a Sufi master, operated a small store catering to the waiting crowd.
Amma’s healing system is described in detail by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger in her In Amma’s Healing Room. Amma died of heart failure in August 2001 and was buried alongside Abba.
Amma asserted that her healing power is based solely on the Qur’an. Amma’s primary diagnostic procedure is based on the centrality of the Word: Abjad kā phāl kholnā, i.e. “Open the mystery of letters & numbers.” The Arabic letters of patient’s names are given numerical values that are then mathematically manipulated. This alone is insufficient as Amma brings to the numbers her spiritual understanding thereof [see Ibid. pp. 69-74].
Khwaja Hafez says:
دی گفت طبیب از سر حسرت چو مرا دید
هیهات که رنچ تو ز قانہن شفا رفتAfter seeing me last night the healer said to me: “I regret
That your suffering is not described in the Handbook of Healing.”
While we may not know how to heal a certain illness, the Prophet Muhammad [s.a.w.] stated that for every illness there is a cure. Khwaja Hafez, however, mentions an ‘illness’ without a cure:
از ین مرض به حقیقت شفا نخواهم یافت
که از تو درد دل ای جان نمی رسد به علاج
Khwaja Hafez Shirazi writes:
I shall never find a healing for this illness,
For, O dear one, there’s no pill for the pain of the heart.
Hakim Sahib, a Chishti Sufi, worked as a healer in Lahore. People came for medical treatment in his small workshop with pots of boiling herbs, while scholars came to talk to Hakim Sahib. Arthur F. Buehler describes meeting him in his Recognizing Sufism; pp. x-xi. Hakim Sahib gave Arthur several tasks to perform that held out a promise of finding some books in Lahore as such a task was corresponding to Arthur’s scholarly inclination.
After completing these errands, Arthur reported back to Hakim Sahib. Sometimes, when the search was unsuccessful, he would smile, reach down and hand him the book he had been looking for. This went on for about a year before Hakim Sahib sent Arthur out to Sufi centers in the Panjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
It was not until Arthur arrived back home in the US, that he realized how much he had learned as a direct result of Hakim Sahib’s errands. He experienced a sudden and intimate awareness about meeting Hakim Sahib. All he had ever seen him do was give freely to others. It became clear to Arthur that Hakim Sahib had given him a most precious gift: his example!