Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/266

 The rapaʾi performance may be classed among the ratébs; it bears a religious character in the estimation of the Achehnese public, and can therefore become the subject of a vow. Thus we find people undertaking to give rapaʾi performances in their enclosures, should they escape some threatening danger, or should one of their relations recover from his illness, etc. Such performances are also sometimes given on the occasion of a family feast, whether in accordance with a vow or not, and persons of wealth and rank occasionally organize them without any special reason.

The great saint of the mystics, Aḥmad Rifāʾī (ob. 1182), a younger contemporary of the equally celebrated Abdulqādir Jīlānī (ob. 1166), who was held in high honour in Acheh as well as in other parts of the Mohammedan world, was the founder of a wide-spread order (the Rifāʾiyyah), which afterwards split up into a number of subdivisions. If we read the story of his life we find an abundant record of his piety and wisdom, and also of the miracles (karāmāt) which he worked through God's grace, but nothing which bridges over the gulf which separates him from the all but juggling performances which bear his name.

Yet the connection may be traced. Not only in the Rifāʾite but also in other mystic orders cases are quoted from their own tradition where members of the fraternity who have attained a high degree of perfection in mysticism, have through divine grace suffered no hurt from acts which in ordinary circumstances result in sickness or in death; the eating of fragments of glass, biting off the heads of snakes, wounding themselves with knives, throwing themselves beneath the feet of horses, all these and other like acts have proved harmless to the successors of the founders of these orders, and they too have been given the power to endow their true disciples with temporary invulnerability. The stories current about such matters in the mystic tradition must certainly be set down to some extent to pious fiction, but there are also instances where the condition of high-strung transport into which the dervishes work themselves by wakeful nights, by fasting and exhausting exercises, do actually result in temporary or local insensibility to pain.