Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF
“A Saudi man is believed to have been gripped by jinn (ghosts) during a picnic with his friends in a valley which is reputed to be haunted. But he was later treated in an exorcist-style session by the Gulf Kingdom’s religious police. The unnamed man and seven friends from the western town of Makkah were vacationing in the nearby Taif city when they decided to descend into Wadi Al-Amak (the deep abyss) despite warnings by local people. After a short evening trip in the valley, the colour of the man’s began to change and his behavior became aggressive before he lost balance and fell down. When his friends tried to talk to him, he shouted and pushed them away while his eyes were fixed at an area deep in the valley. “Friends then overpowered him and washed his face with cold water…it was clear the man was haunted by a jinn,” Sabq Arabic language daily said. “They then decided to carry him back to town…they were told that the valley is haunted and that there were two similar cases in the past.” The paper said the man was taken to the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the most influential Islamic law-enforcement authority in the conservative Moslem Gulf nation. “The Commission brought experts in such cases and subjected the man to a session of Koran recitation and incense burning until the jinn was forced to get out of the man through his hand………”

This guy’s friends first waterboarded him (splashed water on his face, my eye). Then they handed him to the religious police (Commission for the Promotion of Vice) who may cure him or they may decide to send him to trial for consorting with jinns (genies) outside legal marriage. An extramarital affair with a jinn (genie) could get a man a beheading sentence in Saudi Arabia. In end it seems like they smoked the jinn out of the man through the stink of cheap incense, or maybe the man came down from his “high” as a result.
I like that part about the jinn “getting out of the man through his hand”. Could it mean the man gave the religious police exorcists the proverbial middle finger, flipped them the birdie, “made a gesture” as polite Brits would say, and they misunderstood? Or, better yet, maybe the Jinn (Genie) gave them its own middle finger.
(I am beginning that a lot goes on in Taif, Saudi Arabia, a lot more than meets the eye).
Cheers
mhg



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