At weddings, or over tea, the talk was always about leaving. In the cab ride across town to meet the spirit medium, Sharifi considered his options: remaining jobless in Afghanistan or trying his luck abroad. Only his best friend, Maqsood Sayed, knew and agreed to join him. Sharifi was ashamed that it had come to this, resorting to magic over reason, and so kept his visit to Shah a secret. These beliefs left their marks on Afghan culture and still resonate today. Before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, Afghanistan was home to many other belief systems: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, as well as pagan traditions. These men – and the occasional woman – are living manifestations of Afghanistan’s complicated relationship with Islam. Spirit mediums inhabit the interstices between the old and the new: in one neighbourhood in old Kabul, a row of falbin fortune-tellers sit receiving visitors just outside a modern medical clinic, to serve those who want to cover all bases. Shah is a fortune-teller – a falbin, a taweez naweez mulla, a djinn hunter – who belongs to a long tradition of men who practise magic said to predate Islam. Sharifi had been without work for nearly a year when he decided to go and see a man named Arab Shah. Sharifi found a clerical job on an American military base, but that, too, ended when the camp shut down in 2014 as troops packed up to go home. But by 2013, for the first time since the American invasion, the shop was struggling to make rent. Back then, it did not seem vainglorious to think that a shopkeeper’s assistant could aspire to such wealth. He had once thought that he might be able to save up for a nice car, perhaps a BMW. In the years that followed, levels of violence – suicide bombings, assassinations, ambushes – continued to soar.Īs embassies, NGOs and private contracting companies retreated behind concertina wire and blast walls, Sharifi’s customers began to disappear. That year, 1,523 civilians were killed, an increase of more than 50% over the previous year. However, the mood had begun to turn from 2007 onwards, when insurgent attacks rose in response to the dramatic escalation of foreign troops. For many young English-speaking Afghans like Sharifi, the early years of the occupation had expanded their sense of what was possible.
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