In late January 2020, the Iranian cleric Abbas Tabrizian publicly set fire to a copy of “Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine,” a foundational text for doctors around the world. It was a dramatic gesture to his hostility to modern medicine.

The following month, when Covid-19 began to ravage his home city of Qom, he had an immediate alternative remedy. “Before going to sleep, put a cotton ball soaked in violet oil into your anus,” he told his 200,000 Telegram followers. A year on, he made international headlines by declaring that coronavirus vaccines would “make people gay.” 

Tabrizian is often referred to as the “father of Islamic medicine” by his followers and is known for pushing unproven remedies to believers, with no regard for scientific consensus. Thousands of shops in Iran sell herbal treatments. This has increased since the imposition of U.S. sanctions in 2012, and the country’s internet is full of start-ups advertising “Islamic” oils and potions for every kind of ailment, backed by religious influencers like Tabrizian.

Mehdi Sabili, an “Islamic medicine specialist” with over 60,000 followers on Instagram, runs one such company. In April, he urged Iranians to sip hot camel urine to ward off the virus. Another even more popular figure, with 185,000 followers, is Dr. Hossein Ravazadeh, a conspiracy theorist and promoter of Islamic medicine who considers much of modern medicine to be a “colonial conspiracy” dreamed up by Zionists and the British. His remedy for the virus is simpler than Sabili’s: drop bitter watermelon oil into your ears, morning and night, and “all obnoxious creatures'' will be unable to enter the body, including Covid-19.