C- Childhood Miracles and Youth:

 

Since 1920, when he was 11 years of age, Saleem began to have strong tendencies towards spiritual matters, miracles, and the supernatural. He exhibited certain powers that he did not know their source initially. He was able to predict events and inform his friends about them. For example, he would tell a friend that his mother will come to see him on such a date and the prediction would come true. He would recite his lesson to the teacher without reading it. He was fully aware that the predictions he made were accurate, however, he did not know the source, or purpose behind such powers.

In 1924, Saleem wanted very much to enroll back in school. However, his mother’s financial situation did not allow him to do so. This led him to start borrowing books from libraries and spending entire nights reading them with eagerness.

At fourteen, he began to increase his association with the youths of Bethlehem, where he was living with some members of his family. He would narrate to them the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, preaching his return, and the necessity of preparing and purifying themselves to receive him. He used to perform miracles before them, and rebuke many of the Christian clerics for their hypocrisy, deviation from Christ’s teachings, and for commercializing his religion. He exposed their shameful conduct, and their atrocious hidden acts, warning the youths not to be deceived by their words. His campaign against the clerics reached its peak in Bethlehem in 1927. The clerics raised a hue and cry, inciting the men in power against him. They began to threaten him in the churches of Bethlehem, and to intimidate everyone associating with him, warning people, and counseling parents not to let their children communicate with him, on the pretext that he embodies a demonic power. But Dahesh’s miracles increased among the children, and his influence among the people became even greater, despite his youthful age.

 

Among the scores of miracles recounted by eyewitnesses of his prodigious acts during his childhood and youth are the following:

 

1-First Miracle—Speaking in the cradle

The child was still in the cradle when he was inflicted with an incurable illness. His father, who worked in a print shop at the American University of Beirut, became very worried, so he contacted Dr. John Smith, an American doctor that he had knew when Wadee’ah, his third daughter, became sick. Doctor Smith came to see the child and found him to be unconscious, so he used medicines in order to regain his consciousness, but to no avail. As his parents became desperate and as the Doctor was about to leave, the child suddenly rose after being cured in a miraculous way and conversed with doctor Smith in fluent English mentioning to him the name of the medicine that he should have used in treating him. The child was three years of age and didn’t even speak Arabic well, let alone fluent English. The doctor was amazed more than the child’s parents and asked him: “How did you know the disease and the medicine?” The child answered: “I am the cure to every disease.” The doctor became even more amazed and told his acquaintances of what he saw and heard, however, he did not know anything about the truth of who this child is.

 

2-He spoke Hindi

Some elderly people who lived before World War I in the Musaitbeh neighborhood of Beirut—and Mr. Antoine Barood was one of them— told me [i.e., Dr. Brax] that while they were standing and chatting in the neighborhood, a strange man passed by and asked them a question in a foreign language they did not understand. People crowded around the stranger attempting to communicate with him to no avail. All of a sudden, a child around five years of age passed through the crowd and approached the man wearing the unusual attire and speaking a different language and began talking to him in his same language with fluency. Signs of happiness appeared on the face of the stranger, thanked the child, and passed on his way. The crowd is amazed and asked the child how he was able to communicate with the stranger and in what language? He answered them: “He is an Indian who lost his way, so I gave him directions.” They were puzzled and said to him: “How were you able to give him directions and you are still a young child that doesn’t know the roads and you can’t even speak Arabic with fluency.” He answered them saying: “I am the Way, and I am the Guide.” The puzzled crowd asked each other about the name of the child and they were told it is Saleem El-Ashi (Dahesh).

 

3-Miraculous Fishing

Mr. Antoine Barood told Dr. Brax that on one morning, long after World War I had ended, he went fishing at the beach in Beirut. He spent ours throwing his fishhook and fishing net without catching anything. As he was about to return home in disappointment, a boy around 11 years of age was hopping and playing on the sandy beach approached him and suggested that he throws his net in a particular location, however, Mr. Barood refused because he had thrown the net and fishhook in that same location several times without scoring a catch. After the boy had insisted, Mr. Barood threw his fishhook and then his net in that location and scored a big catch. He repeated the process several times and in every time his net came out full. He was astonished! The boy was his neighbor in the Musaitbeh neighborhood, however, he seldom saw him. He remembered that it is the same boy that spoke Hindi several years earlier and since that moment, he followed the news about him with interest.

 

4- Miraculous Healing

In 1920, at the Musaitby district, in Beirut, where Dahesh was living with his mother, the Christians were celebrating the holiday of the prophet Elijah. A child, riding his bicycle, was crisscrossing the street back and forth amidst the people; suddenly he had an accident: he fell to the ground, was injured, and his bicycle was completely twisted. The child started crying loudly.

People gathered around him in order to help him, but his crying grew louder and louder. The eleven-year-old Dahesh forced his way through the swarming crowds up to the injured child, and laying his hand upon him, said:

Get up and go home in peace. Your injuries have been healed by God’s permission.
And his injuries were healed immediately.

Then, the prodigious child laid his other hand upon the bicycle, and at once the distortions and cracks disappeared.
This miracle was not the first that Dahesh had performed in his childhood; however, it was the first of his miracles performed in public. And for a long time, the inhabitants of that district kept recounting it; they were baffled and perplexed by the miraculous power of the child. Among the many witnesses to this miracle, are some members of the Baroud and el-Ashquar families.

 

5- The Re-creation of a Book from Ashes

The child, Dahesh, mastered reading on his own, and became passionately fond of knowledge. The economic condition of his family did not allow him to buy books, so he used to borrow them for pay from bookstores and stay late into the night reading them.

In 1925, the fifteen year old Dahesh was the guest of his maternal aunt in Jerusalem. One night, he stayed up late reading one of the Holy Books. It did not take his illiterate aunt long to put out the kerosene lamp in a rush, prodding him to go to bed, to preserve his health and the lighting fuel as well.

The youth obeyed her wish. However, a part of the night had not yet been over, when the aunt woke up, and saw gleam lighting up the corner of the room. There, the youth was sitting reading. She got up angrily to put out the lamp and hide it away, and she awakened her husband so that they may together discipline the disobedient youth.

They suddenly stood riveted to the ground, baffled and terrorized, for the lamp was not lit, but a strange shining beam of light was radiating out of the prodigious child’s eyes!
They did not understand what was happening and reaped nothing but fear. In the morning, they contacted a few clergymen, and explained to them what had occurred. The clergymen ascertained to them that the youth must be afflicted by “demonic madness”, and that the book itself embodied an evil spirit.

The woman and her husband came back home during the absence of the youth; they immediately fetched the book and set it to fi re in one of the house’s corners.
However, no sooner had the youth returned than he requested the book from them. They denied any knowledge of it. He angrily went straight to where the ashes were, and striking upon them with his hand, the ashes became the same book they were before.

This miracle of creation had been witnessed by the adolescent’s neighbors’, the Murad family, who happened to be visiting his aunt at the time of the spiritual manifestation. Its news spread out in the vicinity, sowing fear of the prodigious youth in the souls of ignorant people.

 

This miracle was the first to draw the attention of the clerics in Palestine to the wondrous youth and aroused their hostile feelings against him.

 

6 - Dr. Dahesh’s Walking on Water

The following year (1926), Dahesh moved to Bethlehem. One day, the banks of Prophet Solomon’s lakes, situated close to the city that had seen the birth of Jesus, were overcrowded with visitors and strollers among whom were many Assyrians. The prodigious youth was also there. And it was that someone mentioned Christ’s walking on the water, to which the wondrous youth said:

What would you say about me, if I walked back and forth on the waters of the lake?”

They felt the matter too magnificent to believe, and very unlikely to happen.

Nevertheless, he immediately began walking gradually on the surface of the water, as if he were walking on the ground, until he had crossed the entire lake, and then turned back to the starting point.

Many baffled witnesses examined his shoes, and found them unwetted, so their astonishment grew even greater. And one of the witnesses, Mr. Kourieh Melky Abdullah, asked him:

- “How did that happen?” Dahesh answered: “I walk upon waters, as I walk upon solid ground”.

On November 6, 1964, the aforementioned witness gave an interview to the Beirut magazine, “Al-Liwaa,” testifying to what he saw, and mentioning the names of a number of other witnesses, who had seen the miracle with him.