Tag: sorcery

Salaf calls for Anti-Sorcery Act

Local religious NGO Jamiyyathul Salaf has asked the authorities to enact legislation to make sorcery or black magic illegal in Maldives.

During a religious program broadcasted live on local radio SunFM last night, Salaf President Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohamed said the Anti-Sorcery Act is required to “protect the people from evils of sorcery”, and prosecute suspected sorcerers.

He requested President Mohamed Nasheed submit an Anti-Sorcery bill to make the practice illegal, while calling on the parliamentarians to pass the bill.

Minivan News could not reach him at the time of press.

According to Salaf’s website, Mohamed urged the authorities to stipulate the death penalty in the law for convicted sorcerers.

Sheikh Mohamed’s remarks came following the brutal stabbing of 76 year-old Ali Hassan, on Kudahuvadhoo in Dhaalu atoll, which has been blamed on sorcery.

Mohamed was quoted in local newspaper Haveeru as claiming that many Maldivians have become victims of sorcery, and it has “ruined families”.

“Sorcery has become a social plague in the Maldives,” Mohamed contended, “which needs to be cured”.

Sorcery was a grave sin in Islam for which Islamic Sharia stipulates death penalty, he explained.

Saudi Arabia continues to use the death penalty for sorcery, while the last person to be judicially executed in the Maldives, Hakim Didi, was executed by firing squad in 1953 after being found guilty of conspiracy to murder using black magic.

Didi’s daughter, Dhondidi, was also sentenced in 1993 for performing sorcery on behalf of the former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s brother-in-law Ilyas Ibrahim, in his bid to win the 1993 presidential election.

Sorcery, known locally as Sihuru or Fanditha, is said to widely practiced on many islands in the Maldives, while related reports have surfaced in the media time to time.

Islanders from Kudahuvadhoo has been quoted in the media alleging that the murder victim was a sorcerer.

The victim had previously been accused of using sorcery on a 37 year-old woman, who was reported missing at 2:00am on December 4, 2011 and whose body was found floating in Kudahuvadhoo lagoon later that morning.

However, Hassan’s family denies the claims that he was a sorcerer, and alleged he had received death threats from another family on the island.

The incident has however sparked “fear of sorcery” among the island’s 3000 inhabitants, and some islanders “do not even come out of the house after dark”, according to the source.

In 2009, parents on the island of Maamendhoo in Laamu atoll accused an islander of practicing sorcery on school girls to induce fainting spells and hysteria, which led to a police investigation.

Meanwhile last year the Islamic Foundation of the Maldives (IFM) conducted a certificate level course on incantations, teaching the participants “spiritual healing” and how to cure diseases using “incantation”.

President of the Islamic Foundation, Ibrahim Fauzee, told Minivan News at the time that the main reason why the organisation decided to conduct the courses on spiritual healing was that many people in the islands had become victims of black magic performed by their enemies.

“Sometimes people have lost their lives [to black magic], and sometimes people perform the black arts to ruin the life or family of others. Many do not know how to cure this,’’ Fauzee claimed.

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Sorcerer suspected of using magic on school girls

Parents on the island of Maamendhoo in Laamu atoll have accused an islander of practicing sorcery on school girls to induce fainting spells and hysteria.

Speaking to Minivan News, the parents said girls in grades nine and 10 began experiencing problems after a game of bashi earlier this year.

“Our children haven’t been able to study ever since,” said a father of two girls in the island school. “They suffer aches all over their body and they faint and have to be carried home.”

He added that some parents have transferred their children to the school in nearby Maavah, while the lives of his own daughters had been “destroyed”.

Five or six girls were believed to have been affected, he said, and often had to be carried by ambulance to the health centre after fainting in class.

In May, he continued, the parents decided that a man from Thaa atoll Thimarafushi, married to a woman living in Maamendhoo, was responsible for the trouble.

The man was taken into custody and investigated after the parents lodged complaints with police. A police media spokesperson confirmed that police had investigated a sorcery case in Maamendhoo.

The father said police have since informed the parents that the case has been sent to the prosecutor general’s office.

Apart from fainting spells, he said, his daughters went into trances, became hysterical and “talked gibberish”.

The mother of a 16-year-old girl said she had to take her daughter home from school almost every day after she started fainting.

“Parents are afraid to send their children to school now,” she said.

Both parents said all the girls had been tested at the regional hospital in Gan as well as hospitals in Male’, but the doctors said there was nothing wrong with them.

“I don’t believe it can be anything other than fanditha,” said the father.

He said the parents discovered who was responsible after the alleged fanditha man (sorcerer) offered to cure the girls.

“He came to our house and said I can cure them, it’s no problem,” he said, adding the man concocted a drink with zamzam water and a variety of flowers.

When he confronted the fanditha man after growing suspicious of his proffered cures, he said, the man admitted to practicing sorcery on the girls.

“He said to me there’s nothing I can do to stop him and that he’ll do whatever he likes,” he said.

The parents also accused the island authorities of failing to help them cure their children.

Maamendhoo councilor Abubakuru Hussein said the authorities had done everything they could to provide assistance, including taking the girls to hospital and covering the travel expenses of an investigations team from the education ministry.

The team, consisting of a counselor and a religious scholar, determined that the girls were “faking it” to avoid studying, noting that all the girls involved were poor students.

“I don’t believe he knows the kind of fanditha to do this to so many girls,” Abubakuru said.

The councilor speculated that a likelier explanation for the fainting was the smell of chemicals emanating from a fibre factory near the school.

“One parent is working tirelessly to force the [fanditha] man out,” he said. “I have been telling him we don’t have the authority to search people for talismans.”

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