Dushanbe:
In an apartment block in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, a woman wearing a turban gingerly opens her apartment door slightly, letting in the scent of incense.
“I’m not going to take on any new customers. They might be setting me up,” she said, closing and locking the door again. “I’m at risk of getting a big fine. I don’t want people out on my landing,” he said through the door.
Tajikistan, a mountainous and impoverished Muslim-majority country in Central Asia, recently launched a crackdown on fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, mediums and “witches.”
Occult practitioners keep a low profile to avoid arrest and public humiliation due to a government-led campaign against them.
Tajik police are stepping up investigations into what they call “parasites engaged in some of the most abhorrent activities imaginable: divination and witchcraft.”
Other countries in Central Asia are also cracking down on widespread practices rooted in pre-Islamic traditions.
thousands arrested
The fight against occult practices is part of a wide range of strict regulations imposed on the authoritarian state as it seeks to suppress both Islamic extremism and ancestral beliefs.
President Emomali Rakhmon, who has ruled the country since 1992, said last year that “illegal religious teachings lead to fraud, fortune-telling and witchcraft. Tajikistan! Prophets are categorical against going to fortune-tellers and magicians. Forbidden.”
Rakmon also announced last year that it had arrested 1,500 people “involved in witchcraft and divination” and “more than 5,000 mullahs” who promised healing through prayer.
Repeat offenses are currently punishable by two years in prison and a fine of 12,800 euros ($13,300), equivalent to six years of the average Tajik salary.
Witches and fortune tellers have adapted to avoid police raids.
“People don’t come to my house anymore. I go to them,” Adalat, a 56-year-old fortune teller, said during a session on the outskirts of Dushanbe.
She waved a string of pearls over some instructions scrawled on a piece of paper, asked the client a few questions, and then muttered a few words.
She said she is especially good at reconciling fighting couples and seeing their futures.
“Since I was a child, I have had nightmares, which made me want to help people. But I only show my talent to those close to me,” she said.
Consultation fees range from a few euros to gold jewelry, depending on the client’s request, but Adalat said she “cannot make a living” from fortune-telling alone and relies on remittances from her son, who works in Russia.
“Social inequality”
“I turned to fortune tellers and healers mainly because of health problems,” said one of her clients, Gulbachor. “It’s cheaper than traditional medicines, which are very expensive,” the 42-year-old housewife told AFP.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and civil war in the early 1990s, Tajikistan has fallen into poverty.
Mehligiul Abrezova, a sociology professor at the American University of Central Asia, said that “the fascination with magic and fortune-telling may be associated with social inequality and lack of access to public services.”
“In countries with limited health and welfare systems, people may seek alternative treatment and sources of support,” she told AFP.
He said repression alone was not enough to counter these “traditions and beliefs that were deeply rooted in Central Asia even before the introduction of Islam.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)