Born Again

May and I decided to take a drive the other night up to 'Aley (the apostrophe indicates that the word starts with the letter 'ain - which, itself, must start with 'ain, and so on, ad infinitum - not the letter A) and have a snack while looking down on Beirut from the hills. The drive took us through the southern suburbs of Beirut. We drove down the dividing line between Shiyah and Ein ar-Romaneh, Shia' and Christian respectively, which was on the front line during the civil war. Vast numbers of buildings were so badly damaged that bulldozing them was the only option. In their place stand row upon row of new apartment blocks as far as the eye can see.

The road up (and down) the mountain alternates between brand-new highway and under-construction-with-foot-deep-potholes-but-open-for-traffic-anyway. Which is to say, between perfectly fine and hair-raising, particularly going down in the dark.

Once past that we threaded our way through 'Aley itself, packed with the only tourists actually in Lebanon this summer, visitors from the Gulf. At one point that I realized that I recalled the road we were on, and, casting back in my ever-more-feeble memory, I realized the recollection came from a moment in 1982 when, reporting for Pacifica, I stood on an Israeli tank and watched airstrikes on the very neighborhoods I'm now staying in.

At the top we pulled into a parking area to take in the view, which turned out to be entirely fog-shrouded. In about 45 minutes we'd gone from hot and wet to cold and wet.

While we stood contemplating the fog, a voice called out from behind. I turned and saw a police officer and wondered whether May was going to be in trouble for some violation of parking regulations. In Beirut, there are none - or none that one need bother about, at any rate. But here, in well-organized 'Aley one could conceivably encounter one.

But, as soon as May turned, she and the policeman recognized one another, and here began an interesting and completely unexpected story. And one which connected back to my days in the Druze village of Ba'aqline (another 'ain).

Prerequisite to the story: Druzism 101

As I think I've mentioned previously, the Druze (not their own name for themselves, but never mind that for the moment) are technically an offshoot of Ismaili (i.e., Shia', in the sense that Anglicans are an 'offshoot' of the Catholic Church) Islam. Among the sects of Lebanon they are generally grouped along with other Muslims or entirely by themselves. Among the scholars and sheikhs of mainstream (Sunni) Islam there has been for many, many years disagreement about whether they are Muslims or kuffar, with the weight of opinion generally coming down on kuffar.

One of the reasons for this is that the Druze, virtually alone among Muslims, believe in reincarnation. With some important differences, their views on reincarnation resemble - and clearly stem from - Hinduism. Indeed, their belief system as a whole is an amalgam of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and even ancient Greek philosophy. From this much information alone, it's easy to see why Sunni Islam might have trouble with their heterodox beliefs.

So much for the very (very!) brief recap of Druzism! For more, I can suggest the reincarnation studies of Dr. Ian Stevenson and the books on the Druze by Dr. Sami Makarem. Wikipedia also has a pretty good article on the Druze.

Moving right along, there's also some brief backstory to this meeting in 'Aley. When I lived in Ba'aqline, I became quite fascinated with the reincarnation beliefs of the Druze, and set out to document what stories I could. And what stories they were! As the Druze like to say, reincarnational beliefs happen in all cultures - usually to children. But in most cultures they are denied or explained away as childhood fantasies. Among the Druze, they are taken very seriously and frequently followed up on.

For example, I interviewed participants in a case where a small boy, just beginning to talk, insisted on physically pulling his parents to the house of another family, where he announced that he was the (recently deceased) son of the family. As the Druze often do in similar cases, he was challenged to prove his statement. At which point he broke away and ran into the room of the deceased son, and tried to push a dresser away from the wall. When the adults helped him pulled it forward, he dove behind it, thrust his hand into a hole no one else had noticed in years, and pulled out a handful of trinkets and childhood toys.

From that moment on, he was recognized and accepted by both families as a legitimate member of the family. This, also, is very common among the Druze.

A second story, which I documented in an extensive series of taped interviews, was even more astonishing. In this case, it involved a young woman who had begun to have reincarnational memories at the age of 3 or 4. Because she was about 20 when I met her, and because her English was quite good, I was able to get a very detailed account of her experience. Her case started out quite similarly. As the memories began to appear, she started incorporating them into her play. She 'invented' an entire invisible family, complete with parents, siblings, cousins, and so forth. At some point her parents took notice and began to note what was going on. Sometime later, she began expressing a desire to leave the house for an unknown destination. When restrained, she would begin to cry and insist that she needed to go 'home'. Finally, her parents decided to let her go and follow her. Apparently without hesitation she walked completely across the village - which is located on a mountain; walking across it requires navigating a complex series of byways and alleys - and arrived in front of a house, which she declared to be 'home'. She then pounded on the door, and - with her parents watching in amazement - when the door was answered by a woman in her thirties, cried out 'don't you recognize me? I'm your mother!' Again, the entry into the house and, again, the tour of the recently deceased mother's bedroom. More importantly, she sat for hours with her 'children', effortlessly recounting events that had happened in her life as their mother.

This story has a coda, a twist, which for me was quite revelatory. As she became somewhat older, the memories of her past life, rather than receding as they generally seem to do, became ever stronger and more detailed. Her former children now fully accepted her position as their mother and treated her as such. At the same time, she was still a child, in a new body, in a new life. Eventually, the invasion of her past life into the present became unbearable. As I recall her telling me (this is from memory, not from my tapes): 'It became impossible to separate my two lives. I would have committed suicide at times, but I was too afraid of what would then happen to me. Would I then have three lives simultaneously? I felt trapped, with nowhere to turn, no solution. I came very close to going mad. Then, slowly, the memories tapered off and became weaker. Now I still have them, but I no longer feel invaded by them, they have their place and I have mine.'

In thinking about reincarnation, such a situation had never occured to me. From this story I concluded that, if reincarnation is real, there is a very good reason why we don't remember our past lives.

Other than occasionally recounting these events to friends and family, I hadn't really thought about them for years. Until the other evening, when we ran into Fuad the Police Officer. It turned out May and he had met before and May turned to me and said, 'he's a very interesting man, he remembers his past life.' Fuad was kind enough to recount it to me, and here it is. You will notice the themes common to many Druze reincarnation stories:

Fuad and May. He requested we photo him
from the rear, as he was in uniform and
should have gotten permission for the pic.

As a young boy of 3 or 4 Fuad began to experience reincarnatonal memories. Eventually, he led his parents to another house in the village, where he announced that he was the father who had recently died. He was able to prove this by walking unerringly through the house to his former bedroom, where he removed a lamp from a window niche and extracted some money and other things he had deposited there in his previous life. He was also able to remember and recount episodes from his former life. His children, at this point nearly adult, accepted him from this point on as their dead father, and dealt with him exactly as if he had not died. At the same time, in his current life he remained a child in the house he had been born into. This is not at all uncommon in Druze villages, though a little thought shows how complicated this extra 'dimension' of affiliation can easily become. For example, Fuad told us that the hardest time in his life occured a few years ago, when two of his 'children' - many years his senior! - died of separate causes. He told us, 'this was the hardest period of my life, I didn't want to live any more. My children were dead!' And yet, in his 'new' life, Fuad is married and has 'new' children! When asked he pulled out his phone and, beaming proudly, showed us photos of his children...in his current life!