As Pakistan moves to ban black magic, astrologers see a bad omen

Lahore, Pakistan — The curtain glows under ceiling lights, and a soft cream-colored screen guards the privacy of clients who slip inside. On a glass panel by the door, bold white letters offer quiet assurance: Shahbaz, Astrologer & Palmist.

Shahbaz Anjum has worked in Shop 2-A inside the Pearl Continental Hotel in Lahore, Pakistan, for 24 years. He does not advertise. Yet rich and poor, believer and skeptic, come to him for luck, direction, a glimpse behind the veil.

“I help people,” Anjum said. “That’s all. I don’t claim to heal, and I certainly don’t do black magic.”

He felt compelled to make that distinction as the Pakistani government moves to crack down on occult practices that lawmakers call a threat to the country’s social fabric.

A bill approved by the country’s Senate in March would impose prison terms of up to seven years and thousands of dollars in fines on people who provide a vaguely defined set of supernatural services.

Spiritual practitioners worry that a range of esoteric practices will be targeted in this deeply religious and culturally conservative country. They point to the inherent difficulty and danger in policing belief, and say that the legislation risks conflating spirituality and superstition with con artistry and criminality.

Supporters say the legislation is needed to combat fraud. The bill speaks in moralistic terms about protecting families from “sorcery” and “ignorant malpractices” carried out in the name of spiritual healing.

The bill, which now moves to the lower house of parliament, would require spiritual practitioners to register with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which would decide which activities are outlawed.

Aiysha Mirza, a Lahore-based spiritual healer who blends tarot cards, birth charts and hypnotherapy in her practice, said that the ministry “cannot understand what I do.”

“The government needs to broaden its perspective,” she said. “What we really need is a new Religion and Metaphysical Authority.”

Mirza fears that the legislation would fall hardest on those who are visible and aim to be law-abiding — not those operating in secret or inflicting indisputable mental, physical or financial harm.

“Real black magic,” she said, “is something entirely different. Those people never show their faces.”

Pakistan is no stranger to spiritual contradiction. A nuclear-armed state with a highly wired population, it is also a place where political leaders consult holy men before taking office and where television anchors read horoscopes on prime-time news shows.

Everyday believers — many of them highly educated — seek solace in a mix of religion, ritual and metaphysics, even as orthodox Islamic scholars have long declared astrology, palmistry and fortunetelling incompatible with faith.

Shabana Ali, a tarot reader who has a steady following among professionals in Islamabad, the capital, said she had no intention of registering with the government.

“I’m not interested in being judged by clerics who think in binaries — haram and halal, real and fake,” she said.

In legislating belief, Ali said, “you’re not just regulating fraud. You’re deciding what kind of spirituality is allowed.”

The bill’s backers say spiritual fraud is so rampant that something must be done.

“There are advertisements in newspapers, there’s wall chalking in many cities — people promoting Bengali magic, fake pirs, people offering love spells,” said Faisal Saleem, chair of the Senate’s Interior Committee, referring to fake holy men.

“It has to stop,” he added.

Others, like Syed Ali Zanjani, whose family runs a spiritual center in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, believe that the legislation’s intent may be right — but that care must be taken in putting it into practice.

Zanjani receives clients at a large house opposite a stretch of military residences and a golf course. An assistant greets visitors in the main hall and offers tea as they wait.

His family has been in the spiritual trade since 1945, holding public prediction sessions and advising a cross-section of society, including politicians, generals and businessmen.

“This field has been abused by frauds,” Zanjani said. “If someone wants to clean that up, it’s a good thing.”

But he is wary of how the law might be applied. “You have to define whether astrology is science or a spiritual subject,” he said. “You can’t punish what you can’t explain.”

There have been attempts to regulate the occult across the region.

In India, several states have passed anti-superstition laws, often after gruesome cases involving exorcism or sacrifice. In Saudi Arabia, the religious police have pursued people accused of sorcery, in some cases leading to their execution. But rights groups warn that laws targeting spiritual practices — often vague by design — can be weaponised.

At the Pearl Continental in Lahore, where Anjum works with a magnifying glass and a birth chart opened on a laptop, he describes his work not as mysticism, but as “mere calculations.”

Zanjani, however, believes such skills cannot be distilled into equations. “Our work,” he said, “falls under spirituality, rooted in a long tradition of Islamic mysticism.”

Between those two — the astrologer who believes in reason, and the spiritualist who believes in tradition — lies a country that must now decide how far it wants to go in policing the unseen.