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Debating Islam through the Spirits
In this chapter,1 the theme of illness is continued, but the perspective
shifts from sufferers to the practice of healers who work with spirits.
Within the cosmologies of healers, experiential reasoning is given objec-
tive form. The government’s efforts to monitor and control religious
expression have stifled public debate and the free circulation of interpre-
tations independent of its own discourses, but Muslims in Uzbekistan
are still able to develop their own understandings of Islam and contest
the practice of others. We have seen that imams criticise much of the
practice of Central Asian Muslims as un-Islamic innovation, but their
criticism is muted by the government’s celebration of an authentic Cen-
tral Asian cultural and spiritual heritage. Those who do not speak from
the security of the quasi-state regulatory structure that imom khatib enjoy
are even more vulnerable to charges of extremism if they proselytise too
vociferously.
In this environment, criticism of the practice of healing and prophesy
with the help of spirits is ‘safe’. The postindependence government has
not incorporated these practices within its idea of cultural authenticity.
Healing with spirits falls outside the categories of Islam, religion, culture,
and politics produced in state discourse and therefore is less likely to
attract the attention of state officials and organs. It has become a site
where debates about what it means to be a Muslim can take place in
relative freedom.
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Healing with Spirits in Uzbekistan
The healers I encountered in Uzbekistan evoke spirits to diagnose and
treat illness in others and for purposes of prophesy. Spirits do not take
physical possession of the bodies of the healers, but healers remain
autonomous and fully conscious. They might be described as inhab-
iting an expanded or altered consciousness that enables them to see and
converse with spirits while displaying no change in outward demeanour
(Stephen & Suryani 2000). At the same time, interaction with spirit
beings is not confined to discrete occasions of healing or prophecy but is
continuous within the lives of healers. Some claim that when they were
children they were able to see strange beings invisible to others. They
encounter and converse with spirits in dreams and waking visions, and
many discovered the existence of their spirits through an illness expe-
rience. This illness was caused by the spirits and recurs if the person
does not practice healing. In some cases, the spirits are fulfilling a greater
mission through the healer, calling the people of Uzbekistan back to
Islam after decades of Soviet-imposed atheism. Healers might be said
to embody the spirits in the sense that through their relation with the
spirits they establish and maintain an ongoing moral state (Lambek 1993,
316–20).
A brief account of healing with spirits during the Soviet period pro-
vides a historical context for current practice. Gleb Snezarev provides one
of the most detailed descriptions. Basing his account on fieldwork he con-
ducted in the 1950s, he describes what he calls remnants of shamanism
and its demonology in Khorezm province in northeastern Uzbekistan
(Snezarev 2003). He describes varieties of supernatural beings, including
jin and pari, among others. Jin, in his account, are malevolent beings
that cause harm to people who encounter them. They are found in such
places as abandoned villages, houses, and mosques; in cemeteries; in
the manure of horses and donkeys; and in ash. Pari both harm peo-
ple and have a benevolent attitude; they are classified as Muslims and
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unbelievers. Men and women who were called by pari to serve as shamans
were referred to as parikhon or folbin in Khorezm and as bakhshi among
Kyrgyz and Kazaks. This call sometimes came in the form of a dream in
which the chosen person was offered one of the objects used by shamans
such as a tambourine or whip, and those who were called risked illness or
madness if they refused. In addition, upon accepting the call, the shaman
had to visit a saint’s tomb to receive the saint’s blessing – again, often
through a dream. Snezarev provides a detailed account of the various
healing rituals shamans used to expel the problem-causing jin with the
aid of the pari spirit helpers, including the placing of chicken blood on
various parts of the patient’s body as food for the pari.
Like Snezarev, Vladimir Basilov draws a distinction between what
he describes as shamanic practices and Islam in pre-Soviet and Soviet
Central Asia. Shamans were healers who expelled illness-causing jin and
divined the future with the aid of spirit helpers. He characterises the
history of shamanism in Central Asia from the late nineteenth cen-
tury onward as one in which it became Islamised. Shamanic cosmology
was enriched by Islamic imagery, and shamans repositioned themselves
within an Islamic frame. For example, they demanded that their clients
carry out the same ritual ablutions before their healing ceremonies that
they would before performing Muslim prayers; they used the Qur’an
and Muslim prayer rugs in their divination and healing rituals; and they
claimed that their healing spirits were prominent figures from Islamic
history or cosmology, such as the angel Gabriel. Basilov also describes
the hostile attitude of many Muslims towards shamans for contravening
the doctrines of Islam and the opposition of some shamans to Islam.
These shamans criticised the wearing of protective amulets that con-
tained verses of the Qur’an written on pieces of paper, claimed that their
spirits forbade them from becoming a mullah, or stated that they could
not say the name of God when making offerings to the spirits. For the
most part, however, Basilov describes a situation of peaceful coexistence
and assimilation. Muslim figures such as mullahs adopted elements of
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the shamanic tradition and used spirit helpers. He describes Sufism,
with its traditions of ecstatic trance states and its scorn for the normative
strictures of ordinary Islamic practice, as particularly open to incorpo-
rating elements of shamanic practice. Sufi spiritual leaders, Basilov states,
accepted shamans among their followers and allowed them to combine
shamanic divination with Sufi practices such as the zikr (the chanted
repetition of the name of God). Shamans, for their part, presented them-
selves as exemplary Muslims, and some considered it essential to obtain
initiation from such Sufi masters (Basilov 1992).
Snezarev and Basilov attempt to differentiate between what they
implicitly assume to be Islam proper and pre-Islamic shamanic prac-
tices that have been assimilated within it. There are two reasons why I do
not agree with this approach. Firstly, this implies the objective existence
of a ‘pure’ Islam, of which these practices do not form a part. This dis-
misses the subjective experience of the healers who construct themselves
as Muslims precisely through their interaction with spirits. Moreover, to
assert that certain practices are pre-Islamic survivals is to make a theo-
logical claim (Launay 1992, 5). Rather than focusing attention upon the
process through which Muslims themselves construct moral selves and
debate and negotiate the nature of Islam, the analyst implicitly prejudges
local debates with his or her own notions about how the boundaries
of Islam should be drawn. A more productive approach is to look at
how individuals come to their own understandings. This means taking
seriously the diverse perspectives of Muslims in their own terms.
Secondly, classifying the practice of healing as shamanism sets it apart
as a field of knowledge and practice with its own specialist practition-
ers, separate from ‘lay’ experiences of spirit beings. However, everyday
encounters with spirits in dreams or during visits to the tombs of saints
draw on the same cosmologies and histories as those of specialist healers,
and both are enactments of moral reasoning through which individuals
develop an understanding of what it means to be a Muslim. What distin-
guishes specialist healers is their more explicit reflection on encounters
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with spirits. The cosmologies healers develop present in objective form
and thus make more readily accessible to conscious reflection and manip-
ulation, the processes of moral reasoning that are largely implicit within
experience. Like practices anthropologists have described using the labels
of witchcraft, sorcery, or spirit possession, healing practices are creative
interventions within ongoing, immediate concerns through an appeal to
power that transcends the present. An important characteristic of this
‘magical’ practice is its ambiguity. Healing with spirits, witchcraft, and
sorcery can be morally evaluated in both negative and positive terms,
often both at the same time. This renders them creative media for debat-
ing and contesting what is true Islam and who is a good Muslim.
If we want to explore the creative dynamic of healing practices, we
need to take the subjective experience of these practices seriously in
their own terms. As the healers locate themselves firmly within Islam,
we need to be open to exploring how debates about what it means
to be a good Muslim are carried on through interaction with spirits.
Even from Basilov’s own account, it is clear that identifying different
types of shamanic or Muslim healing practices as distinct categories
is problematic. In the present-day context, the labels used to describe
healers and their spirits are not objective descriptors. They are morally
loaded labels through which the practice of healing with spirits and the
healers themselves are characterised as truly Muslim or excluded from
genuine Islam. It is common for healers to be referred to by others using
a term they personally disavow.
Taking Spirits Seriously
Much of the anthropological literature on spirit possession and sorcery
has aimed to reveal the rational motivations underlying the seemingly
exotic. There is a sometimes implicit, sometimes openly stated assump-
tion that spirits and magic do not exist as empirical realities, so that
the task of the social scientist is to uncover what is indeed real, namely,
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their observable social effects. Emphasis is placed upon the motivations
and strategies of actors involved and the structural position of spir-
its and magic within a social system. This was most clearly evident in
the British structural functionalist tradition of anthropology, in which
witchcraft accusations were commonly interpreted as expressing the ten-
sions generated by a society’s social structure (Middleton 1963; Nadel
1952). Similarly instrumentalist assumptions underlie more recent anal-
yses in which spirit possession is understood as a means for socially
marginalised groups within society – often women – to exercise a degree
of agency or to establish a social network that offers them the support,
autonomy, and authority they lack in wider society (Doumato 2000;
Lewis 1998). Alternatively, the practice of healers who work with spirits
or magic has been analysed in terms of personal charisma and the strate-
gies healers employ to convince clients of the efficacy of their treatments
and in terms of their competition with other healers (Bellér-Hann 2001;
Lindquist 2001a).
These analyses have provided important insights into the dynamics
of healing and into the societies within which they are located. Healers
as well as those who employ sorcery, or accuse others of doing so, are
often motivated by such strategic and instrumental concerns. Moreover,
in societies where women have limited autonomy outside the enclosed
space of the home, networks formed through possession cults, groups
formed for visiting shrines, or regular ritual gatherings women hold to
invoke divine or spirit intercession can give those involved a means of
expression they otherwise would not enjoy. However, by excluding the
subjective reality of spirits and magic, creativity of moral reasoning is also
excluded. It is true that a moral dimension is often part of instrumentalist
or functionalist analyses. Lewis has made a distinction between central
and peripheral possession cults, where the former represent and enforce
the dominant morality and are the province of more powerful sections
of society, whereas peripheral cults are amoral. Structural functionalist
analysis typically makes a similar claim that witchcraft allegations act to
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enforce social norms. But morality here is seen as static rules and norms
that leave little space for creativity and diversity.
The issue of morality takes centre stage in the more recent litera-
ture, which studies witchcraft and sorcery in relation to conditions of
modernity. This literature suggests that far from being forms of primi-
tive, premodern thinking that should be displaced by the advancement
of scientific knowledge, sorcery and occult practices are in fact pro-
duced within the local experiences of global capitalism and the politics
of the modern nation-state. In these terms, occult practices and spirit
possession are understood as moral commentaries of the dispossessed
within colonial and postcolonial societies, as resistance to their situation
of inequality and exploitation (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Moore &
Sanders 2001; Ong 1988; Taussig 1977), as well as a critique of the politi-
cal power and corruption of politicians (Meyer 1998). Insightful though
these analyses are, they, too, gloss over the possibility of the reality of
magic. Occult practices and spirit possession are not studied on their
own terms but are regarded as really being about something else. They
are taken to be meta-narratives arising out of a more tangible (and more
apparently rational) economic or political reality. Dynamism is located
in changing political economies that are objectified and reflected upon
within sorcery discourses.
In order to fully appreciate the creativity of magic and how this creativ-
ity enables processes of moral reasoning, we need to open ourselves to its
reality for those involved (Boddy 1988; Kapferer 2003; Lambek 1988). This
is the approach adopted by a number of recent studies of spirit possession
and sorcery in Muslim societies. By taking spirit agents seriously, rather
than attempting to ‘decode’ spirit possession as an allegory or reflec-
tion of processes external to it, Jennifer Nourse has been able to explore
possession as an arena in which the Lauje in Indonesia come to differ-
ing understandings of what it means to be Muslim. Whereas reformist
Muslims, mainly immigrants to the area but also some local Lauje, criti-
cise belief in spirits as a pagan practice that denies the fundamental unity
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of God, Lauje who take part in possession rituals emphasise the collective
nature of spirits as refractions of a single essence created by God, and
therefore consistent with monotheistic Islam. An additional voice is that
of elite Lauje followers of a Sufi tradition who establish their authority
and identity as true Muslims through their mastery of knowledge of the
spirits as separate, individual entities with their own natures and powers
(Nourse 1996). It is only by accepting the subjective experience of all
parties in their own terms, Nourse argues, that we can free analysis from
the limiting perspective of individual strategies and competition over
authority and power.
Nourse’s ethnography touches on an important aspect of magic that
creates particular space for creativity, namely its ambiguity. The spirits
are located within the experience of the Lauje Sufi elite in a fundamen-
tally different manner than the way in which they inhabit the mediums
themselves. Although their utterances during possession rituals through
the bodies of the mediums emphasise their collective nature, the Sufi
elite take these occasions as opportunities for displaying and expanding
their own esoteric knowledge by discerning genuine from fake spirits,
reinterpreting their utterances for the audience, and attempting to dis-
cern and individuate the spirits’ origins and identities. All participants
are involved within the same possession episode, but experience is not
uniform and they develop contrasting Muslim identities through their
interaction with spirits.
This quality of ambiguity has been pointed out in accounts of sor-
cery and spirit possession in a wide range of ethnographic contexts. The
power of sorcery is often viewed as amoral, so that it can be used both
to inflict harm and protect. Healers and those who provide protection
against sorcery attacks are frequently held in suspicion as being poten-
tial sorcerers themselves. This is true even when the power involved is
attributed ultimately to God or is located within the text of the Qur’an
(Barth 1993, 257–60; Bowen 1993b; Lambek 1993, 121–33). Similarly, pos-
session complexes among previously non-Muslim groups incorporated
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within a Muslim dominated polity have been shown both to negotiate
an accommodation with Islam and even reflect the hegemony of Islamic
ideals, while at the same time being a forum for expressing resistance to
Islam and to validate alternative non-Muslim identities and moralities
(Masquelier 2001; McIntosh 2004).
The ambiguity of magic is the ambiguity inherent in the indetermi-
nate nature of experience itself. Magic brings this into sharp relief. Bruce
Kapferer makes the point that sorcery is located in the lived-in world. It
does not present an abstract model through which contingent events can
be understood, merely offering explanations for misfortune or express-
ing interpersonal conflict. Rather, sorcery brings to bear on crises and
suffering in the lived-in world cosmologies that articulate the ontolog-
ical state of humans in the world and the forces motivating individual
action. It aims to effect material interventions in ongoing life-concerns
(Kapferer 1997). Healing cosmologies and histories manifest the reason-
ing inherent in experience. Moreover, Kapferer argues that a person’s
subjective experience of sorcery arises from a consciousness grounded
both in the body and the world. Consciousness is not only reflective
thought, but arises from an embodied existence in a lifeworld as well
as a person’s relations and interaction with others, much of which is
not explicitly reflected upon (Kapferer 1997, 222). For Kapferer, sorcery
is a manifestation of consciousness. In Chapter 6 I argue that moral
reasoning is innate to experience, whereby indeterminate, contingent
experience is apprehended within an unfolding moral narrative. This
takes on objective form in the cosmologies healers invoke. The dynamic
process of moral reasoning is laid bare in the creative work of healers as
they develop Muslim selves through their interaction with spirits.
Healing Cosmologies
As I show in Chapter 6, individuals draw on a variety of domains of
knowledge in apprehending their experience of illness and encounters
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with spirits. Healers in Uzbekistan similarly invoke within their healing
practice an eclectic mixture of Islamic cosmology and practice, Sufi
ideas about chains of the transmission of knowledge, ideas from what
might be termed ‘New Age’ healing such as bioenergy, as well as imagery
from the biomedical tradition. This mixture of imagery and practice
is not unique to healing in Uzbekistan but has been observed among
healers in a variety of settings from Kazakhstan and Russia to Bali (Barth
1993; Bellér-Hann 2001; Lindquist 2001b). Kapferer has described sorcery
practices as ‘metacosmologies’ in the sense that they break apart elements
of different cosmological frames and recombine them in novel ways, so
that they are major sites for invention (Kapferer 2003). The creative
dynamic of healing with spirits offers a means for healers to construct
themselves as Muslims in the face of critics who claim that they stand
outside true Islam.
The ethnography on healing with spirits I present here was recorded
in and around the village of Pakhtabad. Gulnorahon is a fifty-year-
old woman who lives and works in a town in Andijan province located
approximately ten miles from Pakhtabad. I have chosen to relate her story
because it is particularly rich in creative imagery and includes features
common to most of the healers I encountered, although imagery and
practice vary from healer to healer. Gulnorahon described her ancestors
on both her mother’s and father’s side as ‘white bones’, descendents of the
Prophet or of Muslim saints, and recalled performing the morning namoz
(Muslim prayers) with her grandmother in her childhood. She graduated
from a higher educational institute and works as a schoolteacher. At the
age of twenty-five, she became ill and had a series of heart attacks, which
persisted for ten years and resulted in the partial paralysis of her face
(a condition people often associate with the influence of jin). In 1989,
when she was thirty-five, after recovering from a heart attack in a clinic
in the city of Andijan, the doctor who treated her suggested that she turn
to a ‘spiritually pure person’ who could cure her by reading the Qur’an
over her and that she turn to ‘our own musulmonchilik’ (Muslimness).
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figure 17. One of Gulnorahon’s apprentices treating a fallen heart in Pakhtabad
Gulnorahon recovered after a healer in Kyrgyzstan cleansed her of the
hostile spirits possessing her.
During the healing process, Gulnorahon had a dream in which a
woman gave her seven objects connected with healing, including prayer
beads (tasbeh) and a knife. When she subsequently related the dream, the
healer summoned the spirit, asked her name, and identified her as Lojim
Poshsha Hojaona, one of Gulnorahon’s ancestors who had performed
the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca seven times and become a healer (tabib)
herself. The healer identified Gulnorahon as a healer and became her
master (ustoz). Gulnorahon learnt healing practice with her and was also
shown how to heal by an oqsoqol (old man) who appeared to her in
dreams. In fact, Gulnorahon said that in her childhood, she had dreams
where she saw spirit beings but she did not know what they were at the
time. In 1990, her master gave her the duo (blessing and permission) to
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‘work in Islam, purity (poklik), to perform the prayers five times a day,
to work in a halol (ritually pure) manner, not for monetary gain in this
world but for God’. She gave her the prayer beads, knife, and other tools
of healing, and also the spirit of her ancestor Lojim Poshsha Hojaona as
a spirit helper.
In 1991, after working as a healer for a short period, Gulnorahon
completed a three-month course at an ‘extrasense’ centre in Tashkent that
her master from Kyrgyzstan had also attended. At the centre, she studied,
as she put it, how to perform the Muslim prayers, religious knowledge
(ilm) from a domla (person learned in Islam), anatomy and physiology
from a doctor, and how to heal spiritually. She received a diploma. The
centre was founded by a retired university professor who had been on the
hajj and who had herself graduated from the parent centre in Moscow
with which the Tashkent centre had been affiliated during the Soviet
period. After independence, it was registered with the state authorities
and in fact became a private firm belonging to the founder.2 When I
asked Gulnorahon why she felt the need to attend the course, she replied
that she needed to obtain official documentation (hujjat): ‘If you gather
people they will ask you if you have any documents. I am a teacher as
well, and because there are all sorts of worldviews, this diploma gives me
lots of strength’. She added that her documents gave her the right to check
up on people who practice her form of healing in Andijan. She claimed
that there were a lot of charlatans pretending to heal people for money,
whereas she had read the Qur’an and had a duo (blessing) from a master.
In fact, Gulnorahon was the only healer I encountered who had attended
any sort of institutionalised training or had paper qualifications. Most
had obtained a duo from another healer or through a dream encounter
with an ancestor, Muslim saint, or some other spirit being.
In the course of her healing, Gulnorahon relies on her spirit helpers,
which she refers to as azizlar (saints) or otakhonlar (sing. otakhon: ances-
tor). The fact that she and other healers refer to their helping spirits
in this way rather than as pari is significant, and I will return to this
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issue in the next section. She has a principal otakhon named Hurshid
Mahsum who was also given to her (qo’y bergan) by her master in Kyr-
gyzstan. This otakhon has a ‘deputy’ named Karim Polonoglu Nusrotilloh
Qori, and they call on other azizlar as necessary. Gulnorahon uses her
azizlar to diagnose patients’ illnesses and to inform her as to what heal-
ing actions she needs to perform, such as reading a specific passage from
the Qur’an. ‘I will read and they will stand behind me. Together we
will heal, and . . . they will tell me how to massage, to give heat, to pass
biopower.’ With a Russian patient, Gulnorahon recounted how her prin-
ciple otakhon called ‘the head of the popes’ from her (the Russian’s) own
nationality (millat). Her head spirit has told her that he has spirits from
every national group.
Gulnorahon’s healing contains a mixture of elements pertaining to
Islam, knowledge of biomedicine and anatomy, and what might be called
‘New Age’ philosophy.
People get lots of illnesses from getting frights, stress. Blood doesn’t circulate properly and a person can go mad, blood doesn’t go to the brain. Hardened blood goes to the organs. Medicine can’t detect this. We raise the heart with water and with hands (passing heat and bioenergy through the hands). Then we use lead (she drops a small amount of molten lead into a bowl of cold water and makes a diagnosis of the state of the patient’s inner organs from the shape the lead takes), and after we’ve raised the heart two or three times the blood vessels will loosen, the circulation will improve.
In fact, Gulnorahon and the healers she trained were the only healers
working with spirits I encountered who referred explicitly to ‘bioenergy’.
I surmise that this is because she and her master had attended the training
institute in Tashkent, and Gulnorahon had incorporated this knowledge
within her healing practice. In describing how she worked with her spirit
helpers, she explained:
I’ll do two rakaat of the namoz (cycles of prayer) to give them strength to do the job. For example, I’ll place three oqsoqol, otakhonlar on the first person
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to come. If there’s a problem with the internal organs, a doctor otakhon will come, give injections and heal. I’ll ask them to give light from the third planet to the place which is cold. They will clean the client. This is not seen, you have to believe. I will cut the jin out with my knife and the black things will fall off the person. The otakhonlar will sweep them up, and a person from the second planet will come and take them away.
In addition to healing with spirit helpers, Gulnorahon prepares herbal
medicines and also dips paper on which verses of the Qur’an are written
in tea, which the patient drinks.
The cosmology and practice of most healers I observed share a set of
central features, many of which are also described in the ethnographic
accounts of healing in Uzbekistan during the Soviet period that I referred
to earlier in this chapter. These include the initiatory illnesses by which
the sufferer is identified as a healer, self-identification as coming from a
line of healers so that healing is seen as a natural quality of the person
transmitted by blood, obtaining the blessing and sometimes training
from established healers, and often being visited in dreams by ancestors
or Muslim saints who might also pass on certain objects used in healing,
such as a Qur’an or prayer beads. Despite the wide variation in indi-
vidual practice and cosmology, these shared features unite the diversity
of individual practice into a tradition of healing shared by practitioners
and clients. Tradition in this sense is not a bounded and fixed body of
knowledge and practice, mechanically reproduced from generation to
generation, perhaps incorporating elements from other such traditions
and shedding some of its own with the passage of time. This sort of con-
ception would encourage an ‘archaeology’ of healing, which attempts to
identify a pure essence continuing through time and to identify which
elements of contemporary practice are part of the core and which derive
from other traditions. Healing cosmologies and practices clearly have
histories, and tracing these can be a worthwhile endeavour. However,
limiting analysis to tracing the genealogies of discrete cultural artefacts
overlooks how healing practices arise from the concerns of the present
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and articulate moral reasoning in relation to it. Healing practices con-
stitute a tradition in the sense that they are a model for experience and
practice, similar to the models for illness discussed in Chapter 6. It is
not a mechanically followed script, but it is re-created within experience
and made meaningful within moral narratives. It renders the practice of
healers mutually intelligible to other healers, their clients, and critics.
What was in fact most striking and consistent in the healing practice I
observed is the insistence by healers that their spirits and healing power
come from God. Gulnorahon stressed that she was working in the service
of God (ilohning yolida). The blessing she received from her master was
presented in these terms, exhorting her to work in a religiously pure
manner and not for monetary gain. She presents herself as a devout
Muslim, performing the prescribed five daily prayers and adding two
extra prayer times as well. Her spirits, she declares, ask her to call those
who come to her for healing to lead Muslim lives, to perform the prayers
and the ritual ablutions so that they can live in a state of purity.
My azizlar told me to put a prayer rug in front of them and I told them to go and pray after they were healed. In this way lots of people have returned to Islam. When they prayed, the illness went. This is a spiritual (ruhiy) thing. By reading (the Qur’an), purifying, the illness goes and people begin to perform the namoz (prayers). This is one way of entering Islam and strengthening it. I tell people to read the namoz, to learn ilm (religious knowledge), to walk with the tahorat (in a state of ritual purity), and to pray. This is a light to the people.
Gulnorahon is not only asserting that her practice is fully in conformity
with Islam, but also that she is contributing to God’s work by bringing
people back to Islam. Through their relations with spirits, healers are
addressing the question of what it means to be a Muslim, which became
a vital concern for many Muslims with the end of Soviet rule. They
are addressing critics who claim that their practice is un-Islamic and
developing Muslim selfhood.
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What’s in a Name?
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the number of people in Pakhtabad
who have obtained an education in the sacred texts of Islam has increased.
They may have studied in one of the country’s madrasas or taken lessons
from those who have. Since independence, a number of books written by
Islamic scholars have become available that provide information on the
correct form of prayer and how to apply Islamic morality in the conduct
of daily life, and cassette or compact disc recordings of the sermons of
prominent preachers are readily available as well. The influence of this
textually based interpretation of Islam has spread, as more people attend
Friday prayers at the main mosque, and religiously educated preachers are
invited to deliver sermons at household life-cycle celebrations. Prominent
targets for criticism by these Muslims are healing or prophesy with the
aid of spirits. The existence of jin and other spirit beings such as angels
is not usually denied by these critics. Rather, they condemn the claim
that healing can be obtained from a source other than God, as well as the
attempt to discern a person’s fate, which is for God alone to know.
The views of a young imom khatib in Pakhtabad village are indicative
of the sort of criticism levelled against healers. This imam was in his
early twenties at the time of my field research in 2004. He had recently
graduated from the state-registered madrasa in the city of Andijan, where
he had studied for four years after leaving school, and had been appointed
to the officially registered Friday mosque in a neighbouring village by the
provincial branch of the Muslim Board. The imam makes a distinction
between a bakhshi or folbin and a tabib. The first two he condemns as
harom, forbidden according to the guidance of the shar̄ı!a because they invoke the help of jin to heal, whereas healing only comes from God. A
tabib, on the other hand, treats illness with plants. These are provided
by God and act as an intermediary for divine healing, which makes their
use permissible. The imam recognises the reality of jin as one of the three
beings obliged to pray to God, the other two being humans and angels.
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He also acknowledges the ability of jin to cause illness and attributes
to them the condition of facial paralysis mentioned in Chapter 6. He
stated that they are attracted to dirt, such as saliva and sexual fluids, but
that people who maintained a religiously pure state and behaved in a
correct manner had nothing to fear from them. To be cured of illness
caused by jin, he stated, the sufferer needs to go to a religiously learned
man (domla) who can recite verses from the Qur’an and knows the
language of the jin so that he can tell them to leave the sufferer alone. The
ambiguity of spirits is apparent here. On the one hand, the imam denies
the claim that healing can come from any source except God, but on the
other hand, he also acknowledges the power of jin to cause illness. He
therefore condemns healers for working with jin, but at the same time,
he recognises their effectiveness in relieving disorders caused by them.
What seems to determine whether a practice is religiously permissible or
not for the imam is whether the healer cooperates with the jin (which is
inadmissible), orders them to depart by reciting verses from the Qur’an,
or avoids them altogether by using plants.
However, as is evident from the account given above of Gulnorahon’s
healing practice, the distinction the imam makes between different heal-
ing practices is not so clear cut. Gulnorahon and other healers who work
with spirits typically incorporate the recitation of Qur’anic verses as well
as herbal remedies in their treatments. I came across only one individual
in Pakhtabad who described himself as a tabib and was generally referred
to as such by others in the village. He was an elderly man in his eighties.
In his healing practice, he combines a number of the techniques that
are clearly separated by the imam, and his case illustrates how porous
boundaries are, making it problematic to talk about healing traditions
as distinct and bounded. The tabib identified himself as descended from
a long line of healers, some of who worked with spirits in God’s way
and others who treated sufferers using herbs (giyoh). He told me that
healing was in his blood lineage (zot). He only uses medicines produced
from herbs and animal products, although his grandfather had been
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helped by two spirits whom the tabib described as five-year-old boys.
These spirits are connected with a mulberry tree in his garden, which he
claimed is 150 years old. The tabib referred to his grandfather as a qori, a
person who recited the Qur’an, but he also recollected how he employed
‘black magic’ (he used the Russian term chernaya magiya) to ‘bind’ peo-
ple and cause affliction. He stated that the two child spirits who had
helped his grandfather were still present in the mulberry tree and gave
him knowledge. He cannot control them, however, because he has not
undertaken the forty-day period of isolation and fasting (chilla), as his
grandfather had done, although he was contemplating putting his own
grandson through this so that he could take on the spirits and follow
him in his healing practice. The tabib distinguished between different
methods of knowledge (ilm), including technical knowledge used in the
state hospitals, knowledge of plants and herbs, and Islamic knowledge
his grandfather had used. He attends communal prayers and performs
the early-morning and evening prayers daily, but, unlike Gulnorahon
and many other healers I encountered, he claimed that his own healing
had nothing to do with Islam.
For this elderly tabib, different types of knowledge (including the
ability to read the Qur’an) could be used to heal, inflict suffering, or see
into the future and are completely separate from his own practice as a
devout Muslim. By contrast, the young imam newly graduated from the
madrasa judges healing practices through the prism of what he considers
to be genuine Islam, as, in fact, do Gulnorahon and many other healers,
although the imam would condemn their practice as un-Islamic. This
seems to be a generational difference. The tabib began his healing practice
in the 1970s, when questions about the correct conduct for Muslims and
the influence of textually based interpretations of Islam were not as
prevalent as they have become since the end of Soviet rule. He does not
construct himself as a good Muslim through his healing practice and
his relation to spirits, as other healers do, and he sees them as distinct
spheres. However, many in Pakhtabad, like the imam, interpret healing
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with spirits though the lens of what they perceive to be proper Islamic
practice. They ignore the assertions of healers that their spirits are not
jin but azizlar or otakhonlar sent from God.
Another person critical of healers who work with spirits is Qori-aka,
the forty-four-year-old man mentioned in Chapter 6 who is from a family
known in Pakhtabad for religious learning and whose great grandfather
had been the imam in the Friday mosque in the village. Qori-aka believes
that reading the Qur’an can bring healing to those who genuinely believe
and follow its precepts, and he condemns those who work with jin
as contrary to Islam. However, like the imam, his attitude to spirits
is ambivalent. He stated that the shar̄ı!a cautions against attempts to subordinate jin and that healing could not be achieved in this way. At
the same time, he acknowledges that in the past great men of religious
learning had gained knowledge through spirits. Qori-aka was sceptical
about the claims of healers that their spirits were azizlar or otakhonlar
sent from God, because he did not believe that these healers had any
real Islamic learning in contrast to the great figures of the past. He
accused them of merely fooling people in order to make money, a charge
commonly levelled against healers.
The young imam and Qori-aka are among those in Pakhtabad with
the closest engagement with the sacred texts of Islam. If their attitudes to
healing with spirits are ambiguous, those of other villagers are even more
so. Some in the village recognise healers who work with otakhonlar as in
conformity with Islam and condemn those who deal with jin, whereas
others consider otakhonlar to be merely the spirits of the departed who
have no power to intervene in the affairs of the living and accuse healers
who invoke them of trying to fool people in order to make money. What
remains consistent are the ideas that working with jin is not something
a good Muslim should do and that those who work with jin are called
bakhshi or folbin.
The ambiguity associated with the nature and power of spirits makes
the identification of which spirits are illegitimate jin and which are
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otakhonlar sent from God, who is a bakhshi who works with jin and
who is a qori who merely acts as a medium for channelling the power
of God, far from straightforward. Bakhshi, folbin, qori, jin, or otakhon
are therefore not categories of healer or spirit that can be applied in an
objective manner with reference to the observable characteristics of a
particular healing practice or the nature of a particular spirit. They are
morally loaded labels that define the practice of a particular individual as
legitimate or illegitimate, in conformity or in contravention of genuine
Islam. In this respect, they work in a similar manner as the labels ‘tradi-
tional Islam’ and ‘Wahhabism’ that the government uses to characterise
religious practice as good or bad.
The ambiguity of naming is particularly evident in the practice of
healers themselves. The terms people generally used to refer to healers like
Gulnorahon are bakhshi or folbin. However, healers themselves denied
being bakhshi, stating that bakhshi and folbin worked with jin, ‘bound’
people, cast spells to block people’s success, and worked for the sake of
money. In contrast, most of the healers I encountered emphasised that
they did not work with jin, which were evil, but with otakhonlar and
azizlar sent from God. They stressed that they never demanded money
from their clients, but accepted whatever it was in their hearts to offer.
While they professed the purity of their own spirits and practice, they
would often characterise other healers as morally suspect.
Moral Reasoning Objectified
Gulnorahon has developed an understanding of herself as a Muslim
in large part through her encounter with spirits. Her understanding of
healing cosmologies is not a static tradition she has simply inherited but
is a creative production of experiential reasoning. Healing with spirits
is a fruitful context for exploring the creativity in experience because
it is objectified and made visible within the cosmologies invoked by
healers.
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The experience of Zuhrahon, a healer in Pakhtabad who worked with
otakhon, is particularly revealing because her healing practice began in
the late Soviet period and thus spans the period of changing attitudes to
Islam in the village. Zuhrahon was forty-one years old at the time of my
field research and was married to a teacher in one of the schools in the
village. Her grandmother had also been a healer. She first became aware
of her spirits at the age of six when she developed a problem with one of
her eyes. After a course of unsuccessful treatment in a clinic in the city
of Andijan, her parents took her to a woman she described as a bakhshi
who informed her that the problem was caused by two spirits, one of
her father who was still living at that time, and the other of his deceased
younger brother. This meant, according to the bakhshi, that Zuhrahon
would have the ability to heal with these spirits, and in fact her illness
would recur if she did not practice as a healer. As she was still a young
child, however, the bakhshi called on the spirits to leave her alone until
she was older.
In adulthood, Zuhrahon suffered from a number of recurring illnesses.
In 1983, after the birth of her first child, she lost sight in both her eyes, and
again hospital treatment was ineffective. Her original healer had died, so
Zuhrahon went to another bakhshi who lived near her parents’ home.
This bakhshi placed chicken blood on her and told her that if her problem
was not a medical one but was from eskicha (the old ways), the blood
would disappear and she would be healed. After this treatment worked,
the bakhshi placed Zuhrahon into a chilla, a period of complete isolation
for three days during which she read the Qur’an, and a further seven days
during which she was able to move around the house but not venture
outside. The bakhshi then gave her the duo (blessing and permission)
to start working as a healer. However, Zuhrahon was still only twenty-
one years old and had only one child, a relatively junior member of her
husband’s parents’ household, and she felt uncomfortable practicing as a
healer in front of her mother-in-law. She actually began healing after the
death of her father in 1986. She again fell ill, but this time she was unable
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to walk. She was taken to a male healer in a neighbouring district whom
she insisted was not a bakhshi but a religiously learned man (domla)
who healed by reciting the Qur’an. This person wrote passages from the
Qur’an onto paper and instructed her to dip these in water and drink the
water for forty-one days. He also put her on a diet of bread, raisins, and
nuts for forty days. He told Zuhrahon not to practice as a bakhshi, not to
‘bind threads’ (ip baylama), and not to do any other kind of ‘bad work’.
However, when her problem returned seven days after she ended her diet,
he agreed that she could practice as a healer. He helped to open her up
to her spirits by reading verses from the Qur’an. Although he offered to
enable Zuhrahon herself to see her spirits, she was too frightened to go
so far and is content only to hear and talk to them, although she knows
that they are men with white beards who carry prayer beads (tasbeh),
because she has seen them in dreams.
Despite placing herself firmly within an Islamic frame, Zuhrahon
avoids the use of the Qur’an, and her experience of using it in the past
has reinforced a belief that it is dangerous for her. She considers reciting
the Qur’an a male activity and greatly respects the male reciters (qori)
who can do so without fear. The only women who read the Qur’an, she
claimed, are poshshakhon, or descendents of the Prophet. A number of
otincha in Pakhtabad supported this gendered distinction and expressed
the view that women were incapable of qiroat, the formal chanting recita-
tion, but could only read the text with normal intonation. At women’s
religious gatherings, there is less recitation of the Qur’an in Arabic than
at men’s gatherings. Zuhrahon has been told by a qori that if she reads
the Qur’an for healing, she will become insane. On one occasion, she
was persuaded to recite Qur’anic verses in order to invoke good fortune
for her brother-in-law. They had just been to the home of another healer
who also works with spirits but whom Zuhrahon said both harmed and
helped people. She said that this healer’s spirits did not get along with
her own (to’g’ri kelmaydi). When she read from the Qur’an later at home,
she was able to see the spirits of this healer and became very frightened.
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On consulting a prominent male healer in the village, she was advised
not to recite in the future.
The development of Zuhrahon’s understanding of Islam is discernable
in her encounters with spirits and her healing practice. She was healed
in childhood and identified as a healer by a bakhshi and obtained the
permission and blessing to practice healing from another. At the same
time, she has been told not to cast spells upon people in the way of
a bakhshi by men she considers to be of greater spiritual strength and
learning than herself and is aware of the negative association between the
bakhshi and jin. Like the tabib described earlier in this section, Zuhrahon
began her relationship with spirits and healing in the Soviet period before
the textually based interpretations of Islam that condemn working with
jin became so widespread in Pakhtabad. Her experience of receiving
healing and permission to heal herself from a bakhshi leave her ambivalent
about them, so that she acknowledges that they can do good as well as
‘bind threads’ to harm people. She insists that she is not herself a bakhshi
but works with otakhon who are ‘clean’ (pok) and only do good works. By
asserting that her own spirits do not get on with those of other healers she
considers to engage in suspect practice, she is asserting her own religious
purity and coming to terms with the warnings of the male healers she has
encountered in the past, as well as the increasingly widespread knowledge
that working with jin is incompatible with leading a good Muslim life.
Her understanding of herself as a good Muslim is objectified in her
encounters with the spirits of healers she considers suspect. She recalled
an occasion when she had visited one such healer for treatment who had
promised to send her people to heal Zuhrahon at home. When Zuhrahon
went to sleep, she saw two well-dressed old men with white beards come
into the room:
They were not my people, they had horns. They stood beside me and turned their tasbeh (prayer beads). The old man behind me touched me and I felt a strong electric current. I was scared. They gave me an injection. Then in
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the morning I had no pain. My brother went to the woman and asked what happened, and she said she had sent her people, but they had horns. They were probably shaitonlar (devils). I don’t know if they were devlar (demons) or jinlar. . . . My people don’t like her people. I don’t know but they really cured me.
Although healers universally distance themselves from jin, they do
not all claim that their own spirits are otakhon. Fatimahon, a sixty-
three-year old healer in a village near Pakhtabad, described herself as
both an otincha and a parikhon (a person who heals with the aid of
spirits). She recounted being visited by the spirits of Imom Hassan and
Imom Hussain, the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, after being
chronically ill for eighteen years with an illness ‘given by God’. These
spirits presented her with a Qur’an and continued to visit her for twenty
years, during which time they taught her to read the whole of it. As a
result, she became an otincha, reciting the Qur’an at women’s gatherings
and giving Qur’an lessons to girls. At the age of fifty-seven she was
struck down with another illness given by God, during which she was
taken to the seventh level of heaven by angels and shown all the aziz
avliyolar (saints). When Fatimahon related this to another otincha, she
was told that she was to become a healer, and since then she has healed
people with the aid of the two grandsons of the Prophet. Fatimahon,
too, distanced herself from association with bakhshi, saying that they
use the blood of sheep and chickens and that she and others like her
only work with ilm, religious knowledge. She also belittled the otakhon
of other healers, saying that they would disappear in time because they
had no ilm:
Well, you have different millat (nationality), we have our Uzbek millat, and Tajiks have their millat, Russians are different. Our azizlar have different millatlar as well. Because I was given ilm, mine come from God. Ours won’t disappear. They are the grandsons of the Prophet. Those of the bakhshi- lar and the otakhonlar, they are also God’s creations, but they are tempo- rary. . . . Those people they show on the TV, they may be around for 20 or
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25 years and then they will disappear, they haven’t got strength. The domlalar (religious teachers) are ours; their ones don’t know the Qur’an, they don’t have ilm like us.’
These three healers – Gulnorahon, Zuhrahon, and Fatimahon – all con-
struct themselves as good Muslims whose healing power and knowledge
come from God. They differentiate themselves from bakhshi and deny
that their spirits are jin. However, each has come to a particular under-
standing of Islam and their own Muslim self through their engagement
with spirits, and this is objectified in the cosmology and imagery they
invoke. Gulnorahon has incorporated into her healing elements from
‘New Age’ philosophy and biomedicine that she learnt at the training
institute in Tashkent and also invokes the authority of quasi-state offi-
cialdom in the form of her diploma from the institute of healing, which
physically resembles those awarded by universities. She has received reli-
gious knowledge (ilm) both from her formal education and from the
spirits themselves and sees herself as a missionary, calling people to
return to the true path of Islam after the years of Soviet repression.
She criticises other healers as charlatans, interested only in money and
with no official training or knowledge, and even claims the right on
the strength of her official documentation to inspect and regulate their
practice just as a state functionary would. Zuhrahon has more modest
aspirations, although she also distinguishes herself as religiously pure.
She places herself on a lower level in a spiritual hierarchy, with men of
religious learning and descendents of the Prophet at the top. Fatimahon
bases her claims to pure Islam on a mastery of religious knowledge. In
her case, this has come directly from the grandsons of the Prophet, and
she belittles the otakhon of healers like Gulnorahon and Zuhrahon as
lacking real knowledge. She views their spirits as newcomers with no real
knowledge who, unlike her own spirits, will not stand the test of time.
All three healers, as well as critics of their practice, such as the young
imam and Qori-aka, evoke common criteria for evaluation. They lay
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claim to a mastery of Islamic knowledge for themselves and accuse others
of ignorance, having pecuniary motives, and acting outside the bounds
of true Islam. Gulnorahon, Fatimahon, and many of the other healers I
encountered are responding to the criticism of their practice by imams
and others who adopt a scripturally based interpretation of Islam. Despite
the exhortations of imams during Friday sermons that good Muslims
should not resort to people who work with jin, these healers establish
themselves as good Muslims by claiming that their spirits are not in fact
jin but spirits sent by God and that their healing is founded on a mastery
of ilm, Islamic knowledge. Gulnorahon also draws on the legitimating
power of ‘official’ documentation with her diploma from an institution
she regards as having been registered with the state authorities, mirroring
the authority invested in imams of registered mosques as quasi-state
appointees who are charged with monitoring religious activities in their
areas. They criticise other healers in the same terms employed by these
imams, accusing them of consorting with jin, acting outside the bounds
of what is permissible in Islam, having no real religious knowledge, and
being motivated by a desire for material gain.
The increasing influence of textually based interpretations of Islam
in Pakhtabad since independence is being played out within healing
cosmologies. The existence of otakhon spirits themselves is an indication
of this. As Basilov’s account of the pre-Soviet situation makes clear,
healing with the aid of spirits historically has been attacked as un-Islamic.
With the growing influence of textually based interpretations of Islam
in recent years, people have become more conscious that working or
negotiating with jin is considered contrary to proper Islam. That almost
all the healers I encountered in Pakhtabad stressed that their spirits, as
azizlar and otakhon, were not the jin of bakhshi, is an expression of their
own and their clients’ changing ideas of Muslim selfhood. That this is a
fairly recent development is supported by the claims of both healers and
others in Pakhtabad and the surrounding area that otakhon only appeared
in the last ten years or so. Even their critics use the novelty of otakhon
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as a pretext for attacking healers, mocking them as a new way to try to
make money. As I noted above, ethnographers in the Soviet period wrote
of spirit beings called pari who could be both harmful and benevolent
to humans, whereas otakhon are unambiguously benevolent and sent
by God. In fact, the phenomenon is so new that most of the healers
who worked with otakhon do not have a specific name for themselves as
healing practitioners.
Some of the healers working with otakhon linked their recent arrival
with the revival of Islam in Uzbekistan. Gulnorahon stated that in the
Soviet period, there were bakhshi and qori who read the Koran, but she
had not heard of people working with otakhon. Her assertion that they
were sent to strengthen Islam after the decades of Soviet repression was
echoed by another healer in Pakhtabad who worked with otakhon and
who was also an otincha.
As the day of judgement draws near, lots of people will become ill from the effects of bad jin. I was told this by a parikhon. That time has come now. People who say they cure with the power of God, with azizlar, will give healing. Why do I say this? In the past, lots of people used to die, now they don’t, only a few in the past 10 or 15 years. This is because in the past people used to defecate or urinate in the fields. This is not allowed in Islam. And in the past they did this and there was lots of illness. All the fruit and vegetables were affected. Now because Islam is strong, and faith is strong, it’s helping. . . . otakhonlar are increasing and healing people.
Individual healers, their clients, and critics all have individual under-
standings of Islam and the nature of spirits. This diversity is produced
within the creativity of experiential reasoning, but the experience of
different actors remains mutually intelligible. I turn to the topic of intel-
ligibility in the next and final chapter.
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