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Show Bedouin's Whole Life Ruled by Superstition Despite his courage in battle, the Bedouin loves life and fears death. This is due to his conceptions of afterlife, after-life, which are unclear and differ from the general Mohammedan ideas; In fact, the average Bedouin is only nominally nom-inally a Mohammedan ; he retains very little of that faith over and beyond his belief in one God. In the conception of the Bedouin, the soul of the dying leaves the body through the nostrils and flies away into paradise or hell, according to the lifetime life-time conduct of the deceased. Both paradise and hell are situated below the earth, and the soul leads a life there much similar to that of his brothers in this world, the main difference differ-ence being merely that, according to his merits, it will be one of wealth or poverty. The principal advantage of paradise over hell is that the abode of the good is plentiful in water, the most important necessity to the desert dweller. A great part in Bedouin imagination is played by superstition. The desert is inhabited by thousands of ghosts, "Jinns"' and "nffrits," and the tribesman tribes-man lives in constant fear of them. The soul of a man asleep is temporarily tempo-rarily away from his body, and it is therefore with particular care that a Bedouin awakes a companion for fear that his soul may fail to return to the body and be replaced by some ill-disposed spirit. Dr. Edward J. Bing in I Current History Magazine. |