The babel rose from the cemetery gate.
A man grunted as if punched again and again in the gut. Someone else was moaning in a low, weepy singsong. Another burped spasmodically. Underneath it all was the soft, raspy muttering of prayers, like leaves tumbling in an autumn breeze.
The prayers came from the shamans. They were curing patients.
“The majority of these people? Ordinary doctors cannot help them,” said Shakhlo Teshabaeva, a friendly woman rubbing a glassful of ashes over a man who was sitting under a plane tree. The man suffered chronic headaches, Teshabaeva said. “Once people come to us, few ever go back to hospitals again.”
Teshabaeva had strong, pale, beautiful hands.
The “used” ashes containing evil spirits are on the left.
Paul Salopek
She sat her walk-in clients on a sidewalk bench. She filled a glass with ashes raked from local clay ovens called tandoors. (The ovens, common all over Central Asia, burn mulberry branches and cotton shrubs.) She covered the mouth of the glass with a plastic bag and rubbed its base across her customer’s trunk and limbs. Every minute or two she removed a pinch of the “polluted” ashes from the glass and deposited it into a waste bag. She belched often doing this.
“I’m breathing out all the bad things,” she explained. “I’m putting healthy things in.”
Teshabaeva said she could feel her patients’ pain enter and leave her body. She and her colleagues channeled the many chronic and incurable sufferings of Kokand. Under a nearby plane tree another folk healer, a bearded old man, was gently tapping a patient with a mulberry stick: head, shoulders, arms, legs, and back again, as if playing the human body like an instrument. Somewhere behind the high cemetery wall some other unseen, more vigorous procedure was going on. That’s where loud grunting came from.
In the tenth century Uzbekistan gave the world Abu Sinna, otherwise known as Avicenna, one of the fathers of modern medicine. A genius of the Middle Ages, Avicenna wrote the Canon of Medicine, an exhaustive physician’s handbook that listed more than 750 drugs and was still being taught in Europe until the 17th century. Today most Uzbeks use antibiotics and chemotherapy but also tabibs, or faith healers, like Teshabaeva. Tabibs combine ancient practices such as herbalism with Islamic mysticism. One of the prayers they chant comes from the hadiths: “The One who sent down the disease sent down the remedy.”
The “used” ashes containing evil spirits are on the left.
Paul Salopek
She sat her walk-in clients on a sidewalk bench. She filled a glass with ashes raked from local clay ovens called tandoors. (The ovens, common all over Central Asia, burn mulberry branches and cotton shrubs.) She covered the mouth of the glass with a plastic bag and rubbed its base across her customer’s trunk and limbs. Every minute or two she removed a pinch of the “polluted” ashes from the glass and deposited it into a waste bag. She belched often doing this.
“I’m breathing out all the bad things,” she explained. “I’m putting healthy things in.”
Teshabaeva said she could feel her patients’ pain enter and leave her body. She and her colleagues channeled the many chronic and incurable sufferings of Kokand. Under a nearby plane tree another folk healer, a bearded old man, was gently tapping a patient with a mulberry stick: head, shoulders, arms, legs, and back again, as if playing the human body like an instrument. Somewhere behind the high cemetery wall some other unseen, more vigorous procedure was going on. That’s where loud grunting came from.
In the tenth century Uzbekistan gave the world Abu Sinna, otherwise known as Avicenna, one of the fathers of modern medicine. A genius of the Middle Ages, Avicenna wrote the Canon of Medicine, an exhaustive physician’s handbook that listed more than 750 drugs and was still being taught in Europe until the 17th century. Today most Uzbeks use antibiotics and chemotherapy but also tabibs, or faith healers, like Teshabaeva. Tabibs combine ancient practices such as herbalism with Islamic mysticism. One of the prayers they chant comes from the hadiths: “The One who sent down the disease sent down the remedy.”
Video by Paul Salopek
Teshabaeva said she learned her curative skills from her mother-in-law. Out of politeness I submitted to her treatment. We’ve all got something wrong with us. I had a stubborn cough. It was one thing.
She rubbed her glass of ashes over my chest, back, and shoulders. She prayed. She burped out evil spirits—jinn. She asked if my lower back also hurt—a question for a man from far away, carrying a worn rucksack. Yes, I lied. A crowd had begun to gather. I didn’t want to embarrass her.
“How’d it work?” Aziz Khalmuradov, my guide, asked with a crooked smile as we walked away. We had covered more than 1,200 miles on foot together across Uzbekistan. We were brothers. I was walking through the world.
I didn’t feel noticeably better. Probably, I felt a little worse. I thought, wistfully, about Teshabaeva’s hands. About how antidotes to pain also can hurt.
“It worked,” I told Khalmuradov. And we walked on toward Andijon.
