He would recite healing prayers over anyone suffering from a sore, a wound, or an ailment. He would place his index finger on the ground, then lift it and say: “In the name of Allah. With the soil of our land and the saliva of some of us, our sick person is healed (1), by our Lord’s permission.” This is recorded in the two Sahīh collections (2).

This disproves the wording found in the hadith about the seventy thousand who enter Paradise without being called to account, which describes them as those who neither recite healing prayers nor ask others to recite them (3). The words in the hadith (4), “do not recite healing prayers,” are a mistake on the narrator’s part. I heard Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah say this. He said (5): “The actual wording of the hadith is: ‘They are those who do not ask others to recite healing prayers over them’” (6).

I say: They entered Paradise without being called to account because of the perfection of their monotheism. This is why the hadith states that they do not seek healing recitations—that is, ask people to recite over them. For this reason,