Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/241

 here and there are tribes which reject it altogether, as is the case with the B. Messara, the Ida of South Morocco, etc. Pilgrimages (ziara) are made to saints' tombs, commemorative banquets are held there (wa'da or ta'an), and acts of worship, often taking a revolting form, are paid to living saints, who are known as murabits or marabouts, a word which literally means "those who serve in frontier forts (ribat)," where the soldiers were accustomed to devote themselves to practices of piety. These saints are also known as sidi (lords), or mulaye (teachers), and in the Berber language of the Twaregs as aneslem, or "Islamic." Very often they are insane persons, and are allowed to indulge every passion and to disregard the ordinary laws of morality. Even those living at the present day are credited with miraculous powers, not only with gifts of healing, but with exemption from the limitations of space and from the laws of gravity (cf. Trumelet: Les saints de l'islam, Paris, 1881); in many cases the same saint has two or more tombs, and is believed to be buried in each, for it is argued that, as he was able to be in two or more places at once during life, so his body can be in several tombs after death. All this, of course, is no normal development of Islam, to which it is plainly repugnant. How thin a veneer of Muslim usages covers over a mass of primitive animism may be seen from Dr. Westermarck's essay on "Belief in spirits in Morocco," the firstfruits of the newly established Academy at Abo in Finland (Humaniora.