Police rescued dozens of students at an Islamic seminary in Karachi, saying that some of them were drug addicts kept in chains. While the case has gained global notoriety, this form of “rehabilitation” is not unheard of in the region.
The Associated Press reported that parents of some 60 youths paid the seminary to “treat their children through a regime of Islamic instruction and worship, or simply to take them off their hands.”
Chaining as a form of rehabilitation goes on in other religious institutions in the region, most notably shrines. At a shrine outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan, families would leave relatives who were mentally ill or addicted to drugs.
A standard treatment at the shrine was to chain a patient for 40 days, either in a small cell or to a tree in the courtyard, and administer a strict diet of bread and black pepper.
Mia Sahib, one of the shrine-keepers, explained that his patients are possessed by demons known as djinns. For some, he offers a taweez – a Quranic verse written on a slip of paper. Others require 40 days of confinement.
“A mental patient doesn’t know himself,” said Mia Sahib. “In 40 days, he is going to know himself fast. He will know he has some djinn inside. Once he knows he has a djinn inside, he will clean himself. And once he cleans himself, he will know Allah.”
Mia Sahib claimed to have some success with this method, but he admitted he could do little for patients addicted to opium. At the time, he confining in chains a drug addict named Waseem from Pakistan. Waseem explained that a relative had tricked him into making the journey that resulted in his imprisonment.
At the seminary in Karachi, men were not allowed to use the bathrooms at night.
There were similar conditions at the shrine in Afghanistan. Each of the patients lived alone in a tiny cell with no door. Each had only a couple feet at most of slack in the chain that linked his ankle to the nearby wall. Some would use uncollected trash in their sell to fling their own waste out the doorway.
Afghanistan has made some strides in modernising its mental health system, including upgrades to psychiatric wards and the replacement of chains with medication. But mental health doctors still expressed frustration that people sometimes still preferred to send their relatives to shrines like the one outside Jalalabad.
The mental health community in Afghanistan is hoping education campaigns will eventually put the shrines out of work. Meanwhile, the Karachi case is focusing renewed attention on madrassa reform, with critics arguing the seminaries need more oversight to prevent cases of physical and sexual abuse.
