When sickness prevails in a village, votive offerings are brought to the Mukâm, and I have often seen a little earthenware lamp brought down by some poor wife or mother, whose husband or child was sick, to be burnt before the shrine.
A vow to the saint is paid by a sacrifice called Kôd, or “requital,” a sheep being killed close to the Mukâm, and eaten at a feast in honour of the beneficent Sheikh.
At the festival of Bairam, processions are often made to these shrines; and at the more famous Mukâms—such as Neby Mûsa, near the Dead Sea, or Neby Rubîn, south of Jaffa—hundreds of pilgrims gather round the little building. In 1874 I saw one of these ceremonies at the village of Dhâherîyeh. The chief men of the place assembled in the morning, clad in their best dresses, with spotless turbans and new cloaks, each with his pipe (a luxury forbidden during Ramadân) in his mouth. They marched, chanting, through the village in a compact body, with the Sheikh in front, and they visited two little domed buildings in succession. They did not enter the chamber, though one man looked in through the window, but in conclusion, eight elders, closely packed in a circle, with their arms on one another’s shoulders, swayed slowly backwards and forwards, in a weird and solemn dance resembling an incantation. It was thus, perhaps, that David danced before the ark.
The worship of local personal divinities by the peasantry reminds one strongly of the ancient cultus of the Canaanite tribes, which seems never to have been stamped out during the period recorded in the Bible; and the veneration of sacred trees and sacred hill-tops, which seems thus handed down, is also specially denounced in the Mishna. The Mukâm worship thus forms one more striking point of resemblance between the modern Fellahîn and the original inhabitants of Palestine.
A very curious circumstance with regard to the Mukâms comes to light on careful examination. It is striking to find that the saint or prophet has often a name unmistakably Christian; Bulus (Paul), Budrus (Peter), Metta (Matthew), are instances. In almost all the great Crusading towns, El Khŭdr will be found to have a chapel, now venerated by the Moslems; and El Khŭdr is St. George, as can easily be shown, as, for example, at Darum, where he is also called by the latter name. The plain fact of the matter is, that the peasantry have adopted Christian sacred sites, and have received Christian saints into their Pantheon. This can be proved by innumerable instances, of which the following are among the most striking:
In 1631 A.D., a little chapel was erected by the monks near a cave at the foot of Carmel, and called by them “the School of the Prophets.” In 1635 A.D., a Moslem Derwîsh took possession of the building, and the Mohammedans still hold it. This place is regarded as sacred by the Moslem peasantry, though the shrine is well known to be of Christian origin.
In 1187 A.D., a chapel of St. John stood near the caves of certain hermits, which were opposite Castel Pelegrino, now ’Athlît. A glance at the Survey shows caves still existing east of that fortress, and near them is a little Mukâm of the Prophet Ahia, which is the native name of John the Baptist. Here, then, the Moslems have again adopted a Christian shrine.
In 1432 A.D., Bertrandon de la Brocquiére was shown a mountain between Gaza and Hebron, called the “Penance Mountain of St. John.” A hill called “the place of separation of Ahia” is still shown by the peasantry in that direction.
Nor is it Christian tradition alone which is thus absorbed. Jacob Shelleby, the Samaritan, complained to me that the Moslems had robbed the Samaritans of the “Mosque of the Pillar,” which the latter now believe to have been the scene of Joshua’s “pillar by the oak,” near Shechem, just as they robbed the Christians of the little chapel at the Hizn Y’akûb, also close to Nâblus.
It might, perhaps, be argued that the reason of this adoption of Christian sites by Moslems is to be sought in a common origin of Christian and native tradition, and that the adoption proves the sites to be authentic. It is easier to advance this theory than to disprove it; yet the tomb of Samuel is now fixed by a tradition, which was not generally accepted until after the twelfth century, and the venerated tomb of Moses, which is connected with the site of an old monastery, is now shown west of Jordan, in plain contradiction to Scripture. Surely these, at least, are not genuine sites; but above all, the tradition still preserved by the Bedawîn which connects the “high mountain” of Our Lord’s Temptation with a hill 500 feet below the level of the Mediterranean (see page 205) cannot be regarded as anything but a monkish legend.