Overview
Süleyman Andary was born on 4 March 1954 in Falougha, a Druze village in the mountains about 24 kilometres east of Beirut. His father died when he was two, and after his mother remarried he was brought up by his paternal grandmother, Zahiyya, in a household that included two of his aunts.1
Abdallah Abu Hamdan spent his whole life in Gharife, a village in the Chouf district south-west of Beirut, about 30 kilometres from Falougha. A respected landowner with an olive orchard and an oil press, he was the village mukhtar (headman) for about fifteen years and became a Druze sheikh, reading his five sacred books at home. About three years before his death he was removed from office for falsifying a document to help a friend’s son, and he worried over payments on an oil press bought on credit. He died at home after a long illness, probably in 1942, aged about 65. One son had emigrated to America, and two of his children were blind and unable to speak.1
How the memories emerged
As a small child Süleyman had a vague sense of having lived before, with children, in a village called Gharife where he had an olive press. When he was five or six his family heard him muttering names in his sleep; told about it next morning, he recognized them as the names of children from that life. Then nothing more developed for several years.1
At about eleven he curtly refused to lend a religious book to his other grandmother, and when asked why, suddenly remembered that he had once kept religious books and never let them leave the house, as a devout Druze would. Encouraged by hearing of others who remembered past lives, he then deliberately tried to recall more, and recalled having been the mukhtar, and later the name Abdallah Abu Hamdan. Fearing teasing, he told only some other children, and adults heard nothing until he was about thirteen. His older brother Chowki, with whom he did not get on, said in 1969 that Süleyman had never told him.1
Visit to Gharife
When the family began to talk of taking him to Gharife, a relative met some people from the village in Saudi Arabia, who said Süleyman was describing Abdallah Abu Hamdan. Süleyman at first refused to go, but in the late summer of 1967, at thirteen, he went with his cousin Naef Andary and his family; a cousin by marriage, Faiz Halibi, who was working in Gharife, also witnessed the visit. Abdallah’s daughter-in-law Samiha took Süleyman aside and asked the names of Abdallah’s children. He repeated the three names he had given in Falougha, Najeeb, Ahmed and Kemel, and added four more, all in the correct order of birth.1
He set off from Kemel’s house on the main road straight across an orchard to Abdallah’s old house, following the line of a road that had since been replaced and had faded to a faint path. Asked by Faiz Halibi to name a place nearby, he named Jal imm Hassan, about two kilometres away and little known even locally. He named an old woman passing in the street, named the former nurse Badr when she came into a room, and said a sheikh, Said, came from Baakline and had changed a great deal, which was true: Said had grown a beard.1
Failures and errors
Much else did not go well. Süleyman was shy and frightened in Gharife and said little. He did not recognize Abdallah’s widow or two of the children, or anyone in old photographs, though he was moved to tears on seeing the disabled son Naseeb. Kemel denied that Süleyman had recognized him, and witnesses disagreed over whether he had recognized the building that housed the oil press. In 1968 he told Stevenson that a son called Salim was blind, but Salim was Abdallah’s brother and the blind son was Naseeb, and he said he had died in Badr’s arms, though she was not in the room at the time. A second-hand report that he spoke of a sealed box of money left for Ahmed could not be verified, and Süleyman denied saying it.1
Investigation
Ian Stevenson began studying the case in March 1968, eight months after the visit, and returned in 1969, 1970, 1972 and 1978. He interviewed thirteen people in Falougha, mostly relatives, and seven in Gharife, including Abdallah’s widow, son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, and listed 32 statements and recognitions. In 1968 Süleyman gave him the seven names, two more children (one partly wrong) and Abdallah’s wife’s name; Stevenson gave these no weight as evidence, since by then he had met the family, though he took them as a sign of unusual interest in strangers he had met only twice.1
Stevenson was more confident than usual that the families had not known each other. They lived in different parts of Lebanon, both denied any acquaintance, and none of the Abu Hamdans had ever been to Falougha. The only link he found was Faiz Halibi, a government surveyor in Gharife from October 1966 who knew Kemel slightly; but Faiz said he had never heard of Abdallah and had to make enquiries before he could confirm what Süleyman said, and the sleep-talking years earlier was independently attested. The few marriages between the two villages did not involve either family. Stevenson felt a confidence bordering on certainty that Süleyman could not have learned about Abdallah by normal means.1
Later contact
Süleyman went back to Gharife once more in the autumn of 1967, mainly socially; by his account the family then asked him to find money Ahmed had sent his father from America, and he denied that Abdallah had hidden any. Neither family kept up the relationship, though a distant relative of the Abu Hamdans visited him in Falougha for a few years. By 1978 Süleyman was working in Saudi Arabia, and Stevenson could not meet him that year.1