Something Wicked

Tétouan · Taroudant · Agadir · Rabat · 2015–2025 · Recent

This episode describes beatings, burns, torture, the deaths of mentally ill and vulnerable people, and medical neglect.

A woman is held down on the floor of a room while a man recites over her and beats her with a stick. Everyone present believes they are saving her. When she stops moving, some of them believe it has worked.

Ruqya — healing by recitation — is ordinary and legal. What this episode is about is the version that ends in a body. In May 2015, at Douar Ben Salah near Tétouan, a mother of eight was beaten to death across repeated sessions by a fkih and four assistants; all five were arrested. In February 2015, at Anza near Agadir, a twenty-two-year-old newlywed died with the fkih sitting on her chest. In March 2016, near Taliouine, a young woman was burned with earthenware heated white-hot and died of the infection in an Agadir hospital. In October 2019 at Aourir, a thirty-two-year-old mother died of blows delivered by her husband and her uncle. In January 2022 at Inezgane, a man beat his wife to death and took her silence for a cure.

The shape of these stories is always the same, and it is the reason there are so few names in them. The death is reported, the arrest is reported, and then the story stops; verdicts almost never follow it into print. The one case that does run to a judgment is a different shape entirely — a Rabat court in March 2025 convicting a raqi who had messaged a woman with breast cancer telling her to abandon radiotherapy for his treatment. She did. The sentence was four months, suspended.