The spooky story of a mystical man with supernatural powers is a well-liked bedtime story in Lebanon.
The Center East abounds in tales of spirits and their antics. At this time, Al Jazeera brings a few of these tales to life.
Legend has it that someday within the early twentieth century, a person walked right into a crowded Beirut barber store and requested for a haircut. The barber’s chair was occupied and the store was full of individuals ready for his or her flip.
“You’ll have to come back again later,” the barber stated, snipping as he spoke.
The person who got here for a haircut didn’t argue or make a fuss. He turned and walked out the door, however not earlier than he had left one thing behind. His head.
That is the legend of Dr Dahesh, a well-liked story grandparents in Lebanon inform their grandchildren. Dahesh means to astound or encourage marvel in Arabic. However the individual generally known as Dr Dahesh is just not a fable; he was an actual individual.
He was born in Jerusalem on June 1, 1909, as Salim Moussa Achi. He was a author and poet – and illusionist, apparently – and the founding father of a religious doctrine generally known as Daheshism.
Dr Dahesh was surrounded by mysticism. His disciples instructed tales of his 2500 “religious revelations” and miraculous acts, comparable to cleaning leprosy or “plucking a live bird from a painting”. He’s stated to have introduced individuals and birds again from the useless and summoned sweet from different dimensions. The place Jesus turned water to wine, Dahesh turned lottery tickets into winners.
His varied personalities might appear to look in other places concurrently. In his youth, he allegedly escaped an Iranian firing squad by sacrificing one among these personalities.
He additionally made enemies with a few of Lebanon’s founding fathers — together with the nation’s first prime minister and a president who imprisoned him and tried to strip him of his Lebanese nationality. Maybe his most spectacular alleged feat: being killed and buried in Azerbaijan earlier than immediately springing again to life.
Then there’s the story of a younger Palestinian girl named Hilda Murad Nassib. She claimed to see Dahesh carry out many spectacular miracles, together with one which concerned her late husband.
“[H]e requested me to throw [a] employees within the air and when it landed in his hand it had remodeled, in a split-second, into an image body holding the image of my late husband — an image that I had by no means seen earlier than,” Nassib allegedly testified. “Dr Dahesh, who lived in Beirut, by no means knew my husband, who lived in Jerusalem.”
Dahesh stated he might rematerialise her husband, who had been reincarnated on one other planet, however Nassib refused.
“Preserve the image then,” Dahesh stated.
