There are few forces in the human experience as ancient, as emotionally powerful, and as persistently misunderstood as the belief in black magic. In villages across Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and the wider Muslim world, the word jadoo carries a weight that no rational argument can easily lift. Families stop speaking to one another because a neighbour is suspected of casting a spell. Marriages collapse under accusations of love magic. Mothers spend their life savings visiting one aamil after another, each one pocketing their money while diagnosing fresh afflictions. And at the centre of it all, exploiting grief, desperation, and ignorance, stands the figure of the jahli peer, the counterfeit spiritual guide who has turned other people's suffering into a thriving industry.
This article does not dismiss the Islamic acknowledgement of sihr as a reality. The Quran speaks of it. The Ahadith address it. Authentic scholarship has engaged with it seriously for fourteen centuries. What this article does challenge, with evidence from both Islamic sources and modern science, is the culture of fear, fraud, and superstition that has grown up around these beliefs, and the devastating human cost it extracts every single year.
What Islam Actually Says About Sihr
The starting point for any honest discussion must be the Quran itself. Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 102 is the most direct Quranic reference to magic, recounting the story of what was taught through the two angels Harut and Marut in Babylon. The verse is unambiguous on two points: first, that magic as a practice exists and was taught among people; and second, that it was a cause of serious harm, including the separation of a husband from his wife. Crucially, the verse also states that these same angels would warn those they taught that this was a trial, a thing of disbelief, and that those who acquired it would have no share in the hereafter. The Quran thus acknowledges sihr not to endorse it, but to condemn it in the clearest possible terms.
"Sulaiman did not disbelieve, but the devils disbelieved, teaching people magic."
— Surah Al-Baqarah 2:102
Sahih al-Bukhari (Hadith 2766) records the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ warning his companions to avoid the seven great destructive sins, and among them he explicitly named sihr, magic. This places the practice of black magic in the company of shirk, murder, and consuming the wealth of orphans, situating it among the gravest of prohibited acts. The scholar position held across major schools of Islamic jurisprudence is that practicing sihr constitutes an act of kufr, a rejection of Allah's sovereignty, because it necessarily involves seeking assistance from forces and entities other than Him.
The famous Mu'awwidhatayn, the last two surahs of the Quran — Surah Al-Falaq and Surah An-Nas — are themselves a guide to the Islamic response to such fears. Al-Falaq specifically asks refuge from "those who blow on knots," a reference to those who practice sorcery. The prescribed response in Islam is not to seek out another practitioner or a jadoo ka tor specialist, but to seek refuge directly with Allah, to recite Ayat al-Kursi, and to strengthen one's connection with the Quran and authentic dhikr. Sahih al-Bukhari (5735) records that the Prophet ﷺ instructed recitation of the Mu'awwidhatayn as protection. This is the actual jadoo ka tor that Islam prescribes: not a blackened egg passed over one's body by a stranger in a candlelit room, but consistent, sincere engagement with Allah's own words.
A History Written in Fear: The Origins of Belief in Magic
The belief in supernatural harm is not unique to any culture or religion. Anthropologists have documented it in virtually every human society across recorded history. Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets contain incantations against witchcraft. Egyptian papyri are filled with magical formulas. Ancient Greek texts describe binding spells and curses buried at crossroads. What this global prevalence tells us is not that magic is real, but that the human mind, when confronted with suffering it cannot explain, has a deep and persistent tendency to seek hidden causes. When a child falls mysteriously ill, when a business collapses without apparent reason, when a marriage sours without warning, the anguished mind reaches for a narrative. And the narrative of an enemy who has done this to you is psychologically more bearable than the chaos of a random universe.
In South Asian Muslim communities, the cultural history of sihr beliefs is intertwined with centuries of pre-Islamic folk traditions, Sufi shrine culture, Persian mystical literature, and Hindu ritual practices. The resulting folk Islam that developed across the subcontinent often grafted indigenous animist beliefs onto Islamic vocabulary, producing a hybrid tradition in which jinns are petitioned through rituals that have no Quranic basis, and in which the distinction between a genuine Islamic scholar and a self-proclaimed amil-baba became dangerously blurred. As Dawn newspaper has documented, this blurring has been ruthlessly exploited by those who cloak fraudulent practice in the language of spirituality.
The Jahli Peer: Anatomy of a Fraud
Understanding how fake spiritual healers operate is essential to dismantling their power. The methodology of the jahli peer, the aamil, the self-styled kaamil, follows a remarkably consistent pattern across cultures and centuries, so consistent that psychologists and investigators have been able to map it with precision.
The entry point is almost always someone else's pain. As The Express Tribune reported in an investigation, desperate couples seeking male children, families with ill members, young people suffering from mental health crises, and individuals experiencing marital difficulties are the primary targets. The fake healer presents himself, and they are overwhelmingly male, with religious credentials, a distinctive appearance of piety, and often a network of planted followers who testify loudly to miraculous cures. The combination of social proof and religious authority creates a powerful psychological trap.
Once the relationship is established, the fraud deepens through a cycle of manufactured dependency. The healer will claim partial success, then attribute any continued suffering to new factors: the need for more expensive rituals, more materials, a longer treatment. One documented case from Lahore saw a man lose gold worth six million rupees through what appeared to be a combination of hypnosis and staged ritual theatre. The victim was a functioning adult with a normal life, not someone particularly naive or uneducated. This is crucial: the fraud works not because its victims are stupid, but because the psychological techniques employed are genuinely sophisticated.
Researchers estimating the scale of the problem in Pakistan have noted that in rural areas alone, the number of active fake faith healers runs into the thousands, and the communities they serve often have no alternative access to mental health support, social services, or affordable medical care. The jahli peer fills a vacuum created by the state's failure to provide welfare, and he fills it profitably.
The secrecy that these healers demand of their clients is one of their most destructive tools. By instructing a wife not to tell her husband, or a son not to tell his father, that they are visiting him, the fraudster creates conditions for family rupture that mirrors exactly what he claims to be healing. In some documented cases, this enforced secrecy has enabled outright abuse, with vulnerable people, including children, being exploited under the cover of spiritual treatment. The threat of peer fakiri, of spiritual harm being inflicted on those who speak out, has been used to silence victims across the region.
The Psychology Behind the Belief
For all the moral condemnation that superstition attracts, the honest truth is that belief in hidden causes is not a character flaw. It is a feature of the human mind, one that served survival purposes across our evolutionary history. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology identifies illusions of causality as a central mechanism: when people experience two events close together in time, the brain automatically generates a causal narrative linking them, even when none exists. This is not error; it is the same cognitive machinery that taught our ancestors to associate the smell of smoke with fire.
Psychologists studying the mechanisms of superstition have identified several reinforcing factors that explain why these beliefs persist even among otherwise rational people. The illusion of control, named by psychologist Ellen Langer, describes the human tendency to overestimate our ability to influence outcomes through rituals and symbolic actions. When someone visits a healer and their situation subsequently improves, even by coincidence, the ritual receives the credit. When it does not improve, a new explanation is generated: the magic was too powerful, the treatment incomplete, another enemy has struck. The belief system is structured to be immune to disconfirmation.
B.F. Skinner's classic experiment with pigeons demonstrated that animals, when rewarded randomly, develop ritualistic behaviours as if those behaviours caused the reward. This accidental reinforcement is precisely what happens when a person visits a healer, pays money, performs a ritual, and then recovers from an illness that would have resolved anyway. The recovery is remembered. The ritual is credited. And a belief is born that will resist challenge for the rest of that person's life.
Poverty, Illiteracy, and the Economy of Fear
It would be morally convenient, but intellectually dishonest, to attribute belief in jadoo entirely to individual irrationality. The structural conditions that make people vulnerable to these beliefs are themselves products of inequality and institutional failure. As Dawn's reporting on Sindh's shrine culture has noted, the businesses of fake faith healers survive because of rampant illiteracy and superstition, conditions that the state has had decades to address and has largely failed to.
When a family has no access to a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, or a social worker, the local aamil becomes the default institution for every crisis. When public schools fail to teach basic critical thinking, and when religious education is reduced to rote memorisation without any emphasis on the rational and ethical dimensions of the faith, the population is left functionally defenceless against sophisticated manipulation. When television channels broadcast hour after hour of programming that presents supernatural cures as legitimate medical options, the culture of credulity is actively reinforced by commercial media.
Poverty intensifies all of these vulnerabilities. The woman who has spent her entire savings on a fraudulent cure is not a fool; she is desperate. And desperation does not submit to reason. It submits to whoever promises relief. The jahli peer understands this perfectly, which is why he almost always targets those who are already suffering, because suffering makes people temporarily willing to believe anything that offers an exit.
How Fake Healers Destroy Communities and Families
The damage caused by fraudulent spiritual healers extends far beyond the financial loss to individual victims, devastating as that is. One of the most insidious harms is the way accusations of jadoo function as social weapons. When someone attributes their misfortune to a neighbour's envy or a relative's malice, it transforms ordinary human difficulty into interpersonal warfare. Families fracture along lines of accusation and counter-accusation. Communities divide between those who believe a person is responsible for harm and those who do not. The jahli peer, who often has an interest in prolonging conflict because it generates more clients, will sometimes actively stoke these suspicions.
The introduction of a family member to a fake healer's practice can draw that person progressively further from their family and community. Healers demand secrecy, require repeated visits, and often cultivate something close to a cult dynamic in which the follower becomes emotionally and financially dependent on the practitioner. Pakistani law enforcement has documented numerous cases of extortion under sections of the Pakistan Penal Code, and the pattern is consistent: initial trust, escalating demands, and eventual coercion backed by threats of spiritual harm.
Perhaps most disturbing is the use of jadoo allegations to target vulnerable women. In Pakistan and across the region, accusations of black magic have been used as justification for domestic violence, honour-based abuse, and even murder. A wife who is accused of using magic on her husband's family occupies a position of terrifying vulnerability, stripped of social protection by the very accusation against her.
The Role of Media and Social Platforms in Spreading Fear
Pakistani, Indian, and other South Asian television networks have, for decades, broadcast content that normalises the existence of jadoo as a routine domestic threat and presents various amulets, rituals, and specialist practitioners as the appropriate response. Reality shows featuring apparent jinn possession, drama serials in which black magic drives every plot twist, and late-night advertisement slots filled with aamil babus promising cures for everything from job loss to infertility have collectively created a media environment saturated with superstition presented as fact.
The arrival of social media and messaging platforms has accelerated this dynamic dramatically. WhatsApp groups circulate videos of supposed demonic possession alongside instructions for protective rituals. YouTube channels monetise content about jadoo symptoms with millions of views. Facebook pages for self-proclaimed spiritual healers collect hundreds of thousands of followers. In this environment, the reach of a single fraudster has expanded from a village to a continent, and the financial model has scaled accordingly.
What is tragically absent from this media landscape is any substantial counter-programming: content from genuine Islamic scholars that clearly explains what sihr actually means in the Quran, what the legitimate Islamic response to fear is, and how to identify and avoid fraudulent practitioners. The market has filled the gap that authentic religious education left open, and it has filled it with exactly the wrong content.
What Authentic Islamic Teaching Actually Offers
It is important to distinguish clearly between what Islam actually teaches and what the culture of jadoo has made of those teachings. The Quran and Sunnah offer a coherent, dignified, and psychologically sophisticated framework for dealing with fear, suffering, and uncertainty. It does not involve becoming dependent on a human intermediary who claims supernatural powers. It does not involve secret rituals that must be hidden from family members. It does not involve handing over money in exchange for spiritual protection.
"And if Allah should touch you with adversity, there is no remover of it except Him."
— Surah Al-An'am 6:17
The concept of tawakkul, reliance upon Allah, is central to Islamic spirituality precisely because it addresses the human need for a sense of control and protection without surrendering that need to a fraudulent human intermediary. The prescribed actions in the face of fear, illness, or misfortune are prayer, supplication, seeking legitimate medical or professional help, recitation of protective Quranic verses, and trusting in the plan of Allah. This is not naive or passive; it is a sophisticated psychological orientation that situates a person's wellbeing within a relationship with the divine rather than within the manipulative hands of a self-appointed spiritual broker.
Authentic Islamic scholarship has consistently emphasised ruqyah shariyyah, Quran-based healing recitation, as the legitimate form of spiritual treatment. As documented in the Ahadith, the Prophet ﷺ himself and his companions practised and approved of recitation over ill persons. What is not permitted, and what genuine scholars have repeatedly clarified, is the use of rituals, materials, written spells, or conjuring of jinns in ways that have no Quranic basis and that effectively constitute invoking other than Allah. The distinction matters enormously in practice, and blurring it is precisely how fraudsters operate.
Practical Solutions: What Can Actually Be Done
The scale of the problem demands responses from multiple directions simultaneously. No single intervention, whether legislative, educational, or religious, will be sufficient on its own. What is needed is a coordinated approach that respects genuine religious tradition while refusing to allow it to be weaponised against the vulnerable.
Governments across South Asia have existing legal frameworks, such as Pakistan Penal Code sections 420 and 508, that can be applied to cases of fraud committed under the guise of spiritual practice. Cases of prosecution exist and demonstrate what is possible when law enforcement takes the matter seriously. What is missing is consistent political will, because networks of fake peers often have political connections and client bases that make them difficult targets for elected governments. Strengthening consumer protection laws, creating specific offences for fraudulent spiritual practice, and providing law enforcement with better tools and training would all help.
Religious scholars and institutions bear a particular responsibility here, because the fraud is conducted in the name of Islam. Major scholarly bodies including reputable fatwa councils have issued clear rulings on the illegitimacy of visiting practitioners who use forbidden methods, but these rulings have not reached enough of the population in accessible language. Scholars speaking in local languages, using media platforms that ordinary people actually use, and engaging directly with the folk beliefs of their communities rather than speaking only in formal theological registers, would make a measurable difference.
Psychologists and mental health professionals can contribute by developing culturally sensitive frameworks that acknowledge the spiritual beliefs of their patients without reinforcing the harmful elements of those beliefs. Many people who visit fake healers are experiencing genuine anxiety, depression, or grief, conditions that respond well to appropriate psychological support. Framing that support within an Islamic context, normalising therapy through the lens of the Prophetic emphasis on healing the mind as well as the body, would make it more accessible to populations that currently reject it as alien or irrelevant.
Civil society organisations, women's groups, journalists, and educators all have roles to play in what must ultimately be a cultural shift: a shift from a culture in which the fear of jadoo is a perpetual low hum in the background of daily life, to one in which people are equipped with both Islamic grounding and basic critical thinking to face life's difficulties with dignity and intelligence. This is not a war against religion. It is a recovery of authentic religion from those who have hijacked it for profit.
Conclusion: Truth Is the Only Tor
The question that opens this investigation was why millions of people continue to believe in black magic despite the absence of verifiable evidence. The answer, we now see, is not a single thing but a convergence of many: cognitive architecture that generates pattern and cause, structural conditions of poverty and neglect, cultural traditions that blend pre-Islamic practice with Islamic vocabulary, media environments that profit from fear, and the absence of genuine Islamic education that might otherwise inoculate communities against these vulnerabilities.
The Quran does not ask Muslims to be naive about the existence of evil, spiritual harm, or the malicious intentions of others. It asks them to anchor their response to all of these realities in their relationship with Allah, not in the rituals of a stranger who charges by the session. The hadith tradition consistently directs the Muslim towards Quranic recitation, legitimate supplication, and the pursuit of appropriate worldly means, including medicine, law, and education, as the Islamic response to difficulty. Any practice that substitutes a human intermediary for this direct relationship with the divine is, in the framework of Islamic theology itself, a form of corruption.
The jadoo ka tor that millions are paying for in cash, in gold, in years of their lives, and in the destruction of their family relationships, is a lie being sold to them in the language of their own faith. The real tor is knowledge: knowledge of what the Quran actually says, knowledge of how the human mind works, knowledge of the rights that law provides, and knowledge of the practical steps that can be taken when life becomes unbearable. That knowledge is freely available. The challenge of our time is making sure it reaches the people who need it before the next jahli peer does.
That hadith was not spoken into a vacuum. It was spoken to a community that already knew the temptation of seeking hidden knowledge from hidden sources, and the Prophet ﷺ drew a clear line. Fourteen centuries later, with sophisticated fraudsters broadcasting their services on YouTube and WhatsApp, that line is as urgently necessary as it ever was. It is time for families, communities, scholars, and governments to honour it together.