POPULAR CUSTOMS WITH A COMMON ORIGIN? 275 Journal of Semitic Studies XLIX/2 Autumn 2004 © The University of Manchester 2004. All rights reserved ARABIAN GULF ÎIYYA BIYYA, JEWISH BABYLONIAN FARFISA, CHRISTIAN SICILIAN SEPOLCRI: POPULAR CUSTOMS WITH A COMMON ORIGIN? CLIVE HOLES UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Abstract The old Gulf popular custom of Ìiyya biyya, in which children grew pot plants during the last ten days of the Islamic pilgrimage month of Dhu ’l-Îijja, and then threw them into the sea, a stream, or a well (the important thing is that it had to be into water) on the night be- fore the Feast of the Immolation, is explained locally as the children’s mimicking of this Islamic ritual sacrifice. However, the close struc- tural similarities which this popular custom bears to others in Chris- tian Sicily (sepolcri), Jewish Babylonia (tashlik/farfisa), and the ancient Adonis cult of the eastern Mediterannean, suggest a common, pagan origin which at some point in the past was taken over and reinter- preted in different ways by the organized religions. Recently, in the Gulf, Ìiyya biyya has been ‘reinvented’ as part of a shared Gulf ‘na- tional heritage’ in which its ‘Islamic’ nature is emphasized. In the course of doing fieldwork on the Arabic dialects of Bahrain in the mid-1970s, I came across a number of intriguing local customs — intriguing because, although explained locally as part of the popular Islamic practice of the area, there were certain elements in them that, on investigation, suggested the possibility of a more an- cient origin. One of these customs — known to the Bahraini {Arab 1 as garga{un and to the BaÌarna 2 as gregsun and similar to Hallowe’en trick-or-treating — is performed by children at the halfway point in the fasting month of Ramadan. It occurs widely in the Gulf and has been described in an article by Jack Smart 3 . Another, which I de- 1  That is, those indigenous Bahrainis who trace their tribal origins back to Najd. They are all Sunnis. 2  That is, those indigenous Bahrainis who claim they formed the ‘original’ vil- lage population in Bahrain before the arrival of the ‘Arab. The BaÌarna are all Shi{a. 3  See Smart 1996. Smart has collected descriptions of this custom from the available literature for Baghdad, Basra, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman. A further reference to the custom not noted by Smart can be found in