In villages near the city of Kulob in Tajikistan, a hysterical epidemic is unfolding among local residents. According to radio Ozodlik, women who consider themselves victims of genies and sorcerers are increasingly turning to the local hospital.
At the end of last year alone, five young women who had recently got married turned to doctors in Kulyab with various symptoms. According to popular beliefs in Tajikistan, women in the period before and after marriage, as well as during pregnancy, are of particular interest for the action of otherworldly forces. Traditionally, brides and young wives are prohibited from leaving their home after sunset, and it is also undesirable to stay alone inside the house. The women who entered psychiatry violated these prohibitions and immediately "felt the presence of genies."
Doctors attribute the epidemic to panic attacks, which have an outlet in the form of visions and psychoses, which are superimposed on mythological ideas about magical and semi-magical creatures - genies, peri, ayars, witches.
Saleswoman isyryka, herbs for driving out genies
Photo: rasfokus.ru
The girls subjected to their intrigues say that they see nightmares at night, feel the presence of invisible guests during the day, experience someone's touch and notice other phenomena.
Some of them are afraid of being "captured" by the spirits, because, according to local beliefs, otherworldly forces often choose servants and even spouses among young women and turn their lives in the appropriate direction.
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40-year-old Maidagul Rakhmonova told the Ozodlik correspondent that for 40 days after marriage, the bride should not only sit at home after sunset, “when the jinn sabbath begins,” but also must follow a special diet, and also not pour water after swimming on road. Some of the sick are helped by the prayers of local mullahs, the rituals of healers or pilgrimages to holy places, and some only by medical examination and psychiatry.
It is not always safe to go to exorcists. In 2013, a 19-year-old Tajik resident suffering from a mental illness died after Mullah Abdulvohid Kodirov, who lives in the Pyanj region, bordering Afghanistan, tried to “expel the jinn” from him. First, the mullah beat the unfortunate man with seven wooden rods, and then made several cuts on his body and under his tongue with a knife. The young man died from beatings, shock and blood loss, and the exorcist of the genies was arrested and put on trial.
“Although Tajiks have long become Muslims, there are many remnants of paganism, Zoroastrianism, shamanism, and various rituals and beliefs that are rejected by orthodox Islam in the region,” says Central Asian expert Askar Kurmangaliev. traditions that have organically got on with Islam since the time of the Islamization of the region, carried out by the dervishes-Sufis inclined to mysticism and populism. On the one hand, the absence of a clear spiritual vertical is fraught with various mental consequences for people, various kinds of "hysteria", and on the other hand, such popular Islam is incompatible with Wahhabism, which threatens this region more powerful than all kinds of shaitans, fortune-tellers and women prone to hysteria."
