22 July 2013

BEIRUT: Umm Hawlou’s kohl-lined eyes gaze into the shallow dish of water before her as she lets the Quran in her left hand fall open. “It shows me Surat al-Kahaf,” she says in a thick Baalbek accent, adjusting her white mandil with knotted fingers. “It tells me about a job ... about money, marriage, fortune, God’s face and the face of a small child.”

Next door, in the dingy office that also serves as a waiting room, clear plastic containers of incense sit on an otherwise empty desk, and two well-used bamboo rods lean against the wall in the corner.

Umm Hawlou promises to lift spells, bring luck and love, and cure disease using the “Moroccan method” of reciting specific verses from the Quran to treat a variety of problems, from possession to marital strife. She says she was granted this gift over 50 years ago, when she was just 14 years old, on Lailat al-Miraj, the holiday commemorating the Prophet Mohammad’s Night Journey.

“The angels of the Quran give me names and tell me about traditional medicine,” Umm Hawlou says. “It’s all from the light of God and his angels.”

Whether predicting political upheaval on television or advertising exorcisms in Al-Waseet, Lebanese fortune-tellers blend religion, mysticism and psychology into a soothing spiritual balm for a country plagued by uncertainty.

The most common methods involve coffee cups, tarot cards, numerology, geomancy, astrology, palm reading or psychic insight. Many, like Umm Hawlou, also incorporate elements of religion, calling on angels, saints or jinn to help diagnose problems, and prescribing certain passages from the holy books to banish illness or bad luck.

Nai, not her real name, says she went to a fortune-teller for the first time several years ago, and now makes it a biannual ritual.

“I was seeing somebody and I wanted a little more insight than I was getting in therapy, and also it’s faster than therapy,” Nai says. “I was curious.”

Nai says fortune-telling showed her a different side of herself by connecting her with her roots.

“The oracle is a deep part of Mediterranean culture,” she says. “Western culture tells me I need to go to therapy, but I go to the fortune-teller and I feel much closer to my culture. Women have a powerful intuition and a knowledge that have historically been overlooked or even dismissed by science and Western culture.”

Although there are some male fortune-tellers, most are women, and many say they were first exposed to it by other women in their families. One such woman, who goes by the stage name Criss Nostradamuze, first learned about tarot cards from her Spanish grandmother and later studied them in Paris. Today, back in Lebanon, she says she does readings “for fun,” and that “intuition plays a big part in fortune-telling.”

“For example,” she starts, “a woman comes to you and she’s devastated because her fiance left her – most of the people who seek out fortune-tellers are suffering from some kind of romantic delusion.”

“She wants to know whether they will get married, get back together or keep fighting,” she continues. “You can tell if they are going to get back together or not, so you tell her ‘it’s over, you won’t see him again, but someone even better is coming along and you’ll love him even more.’ You must always give them hope.”

While many people undoubtedly turn to psychics and fortune-tellers for insight into in their personal lives, others hope for a glimpse into the future of a country seemingly at the mercy of forces beyond its control. Celebrity psychics such as Michel Hayek, Mike Feghali and Helen Maalouf have become famous for predicting, among other things, assassinations, political crises, bombings and natural disasters. When a car bomb struck a parking lot in Beirut suburb of Bir al-Abed earlier this month, a video of Hayek predicting a similar-sounding attack on MTV just a few weeks before the incident went viral on social media.

Samir Tomb was among the first celebrity psychics to appear on the scene in the early 1990s with his own show on Future TV. He says he became disillusioned with the rise of what he characterized as a culture of charlatanry where anyone and everyone claimed some kind of psychic ability.

For his part, Tomb differentiates between prediction and what he calls “spiritual treatment” for curses and troublesome jinn or qareen, an invisible companion that appears in the Quran. Although Tomb describes himself as a Christian and a believer, as a spiritualist he keeps an open mind toward the unseen world that figures into all the major religions of the region, elements of which are believed to predate monotheism.

“Magic is mentioned by all the holy books,” he says. “Sometimes, if the bewitched person is being controlled by Muslim spirits or a Muslim jinn, I use some verses from the Quran to expel it in the name of a certain verse. If the jinn is Christian, I invoke the name of Christ. If the jinn is Jewish, I invoke the name of Moses.”

Despite, or perhaps because of this blurring of beliefs, most fortune-tellers are adamant in maintaining the distinction between tabsir, divination, and sahir, magic, which is strictly banned in both Christianity and Islam. In the past, authorities have even carried out arrests against fortune-tellers, a practice which has become rare in Lebanon but continues in other Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf.

When asked his response to the fact that many religious leaders are opposed to what he does, Tomb replies without hesitation: “Yeah, well I’m opposed to a lot of what they do.”

Maalouf, the well-known psychic who specializes in reading faces and coffee cups, says she is often consulted by politicians, famous artists and even members of the clergy. She sees no contradiction between her faith and what she describes as her “God-given talent.”

“They say [fortune telling] is against religion because the Bible and the Quran say it’s not for you to know what God has written for you, but I pray, I don’t hurt people or cast spells, I don’t do anything wrong,” she said.

“With all due respect, this is silly,” Nostradamuze scoffs, speaking of the campaign by some religious authorities against any and all forms of fortune telling. “What, we’re communing with Satan? We’re having fun.”

“Human beings, from the time they are born, they are searching: Where am I from? Where am I going? What comes after death?” she muses. “You know what our country has gone through and is going through – we can’t get out of it.

“This is hope. You tell someone ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘it will be fine’ or ‘right now, it’s not alright but it will be.’ We want someone to reassure us.”

Copyright The Daily Star 2013.