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Abstract

Abstract

In modern Tajikistan, practitioners of traditional healing, often called tabibs and folbins, are increasingly facing government-led persecution under the guise of fighting "superstition" and "illegal religious activity." Since the early 2000s, President Emomali Rahmon's secular-authoritarian government has actively criminalized these centuries-old practices, labeling them as fraudulent, deviant, or fanatical. This paper contends that the suppression of traditional healers in Tajikistan resembles a modern witch hunt, serving as a form of scapegoating driven by deeper fears about state control, social order, and cultural identity in a post-Soviet country going through ideological consolidation.

To analyze this phenomenon, the case of Tajikistan is compared to the Salem witch trials of 1692, a pivotal moment in the history of religious persecution in colonial New England. Although separated by centuries and rooted in different theological and political contexts, both cases show how dominant authorities create narratives of "deviance" to marginalize cultural "others" and strengthen their power during social instability. While the Salem panic was rooted in a theocratic environment characterized by religious extremism and gendered suspicion, the Tajik campaign against traditional healers is based on a secular discourse shaped by Islamic reformism and the recent endorsement by the state of a "pure Hanafi traditional cultural Islam" as the foundation of national identity.

In both contexts, alternative epistemologies, especially those used by marginalized groups who have lost trust in institutional systems, including biomedicine, are viewed with suspicion and targeted during times of cultural anxiety. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, such as media reports and ethnographic studies from 2005 to 2025, this study examines how legal and extralegal methods used by the Tajik government have been employed to suppress faith-based healing practices. It situates this repression within larger theoretical frameworks related to medical pluralism, religious marginalization, and the historical sociology of witch hunts.

Methodologically, this paper engages with historiographical analyses of the Salem trials, especially theories of scapegoating, moral panic, and cultural crisis, to interpret the Tajik government’s rhetoric and punitive measures against traditional healers as strategic tools of cultural engineering. This comparative framework provides not only a metaphorical lens but also a typological model through which contemporary moral panics and repressive regimes can be better understood. Ultimately, the Tajik case shows how states create moral crises to discipline nonconformity, police cultural boundaries, and reaffirm dominant ideologies.