Monday, June 21, 2010

Scary childhood tales & characters - Part II

Dear readers,

As I promised this is the second part of scary childhood tales & characters. Check out the first part in case you haven't read it yet. Enjoy :)

Mghayab


There’s a famous myth in Oman that claims the existence of some creatures called “Maghayba”. It’s basically a person who’s been taken by witches/wizards. When a witch or a wizard puts their eyes on someone –it could be anyone- they’d take them and leave the body of the person “so everyone thinks that he’s dead”, but actually the person would become a mindless slave in a pitiable mental and physical shape.

Irony is that many people still believe in it, and more, they believe that most of their loved ones and relatives who passed away are still alive, and that witches turned them into Mghayba (plural of Mghayab)



Ahel bismllah

The elderly people used to[ and some still do] refer to Jinn by Ahel bismllah in an attempt to avoid mentioning them – and thus to avoid their harm.

El neg6a el 7amra “The red dot”

“Go to bed now otherwise the red dot would come to you” that’s what we used to very often hear when we were kids. I still don’t have a clear picture of what the red dot is all about, all I know is that I sometimes tended to believe that the red illuminating dot on the AC’s switch is what they were talking about, in an attempt to make the whole thing rather funny and less creepy.

That's it for today
Till next time :)

2 comments:

Amarant said...

Very interesting.

the "mghayeb" concept is creepy because couple of my friends swear they have seen them.

Here is an interesting fact about them:
The jinn cut their heels so that they need to be running all the time, and can't stand still.

Salima Al Masrouri said...

Now that's interesting! Ye5awf :S