SWEIDA, Syria — Nawaf Nasr, 78, holds a creased black-and-white photo showing what he believes is himself in a previous life.
The image, from the 1940s, shows a serious-looking young man wearing an Arab headdress and a suit jacket astride a white horse. The backdrop is a black stone house in Sweida province, the homeland of southern Syria's Druze religious minority.
Sweida, built around a volcanic mountain, has been inhabited for thousands of years and has served as a refuge of the often-persecuted Druze for centuries.
One of the pillars of the esoteric faith — also known as al-Muwahhidun, from the Arabic word for "union" regarding oneness with God — is reincarnation. The belief that the soul migrates to a different body or being is shared by multiple religions. (In Syria, Alawites — another religious minority that, like the Druze, began as a splinter group of Shia Islam — have their own belief in the transmigration of souls.)
The Druze hold that members of their faith who die suddenly — including those murdered or killed by accident — are immediately reincarnated as newborn babies.
A previous life remembered
Nasr says in his previous life, he was a university student, the son of a landowner, when he was thrown from a horse and died at the age of 25 in the 1940s.
Known by the honorific "sheikh" because of his standing as a devout elder, Nasr spent his life as a construction worker and never attended school. Despite that, he says he carried over knowledge from his previous life.
The shelves in his home in the city of Sweida contain books on history and civilization. He says when he was in the Syrian Army he was often asked by high school graduates to write letters in classical Arabic for them, the mark of a higher Arabic language education. (He says he inexplicably knows how to read and write at an advanced level despite never having gone to school.) Over tea, he quotes Plato's belief in the immortality of souls.
In the Druze religion, reincarnation is seen as a path to spiritual purification, an opportunity for souls whose lives have been cut short to achieve enlightenment, a state reached through knowledge and good deeds that opens the gates of paradise.
"We say that in order to achieve divine justice, the soul must go through multiple stages in order to correct mistakes and follow the right path," says Sheikh Yasser Abu Fakhr, a Druze spiritual leader in Sweida.
He notes that the Arabic word for reincarnation, taqammus, comes from a word for an outer garment — qamis for shirt.
"We do not believe the soul dissolves in old age but in new birth," he says.
Nasr says when he was 5, he recognized a woman he had never met before as one of his former neighbors from a village miles away that he had never been to — and identified her by name.
"She was drinking tea with my mother and I said, 'This is Um Ismaeen — what is she doing here?' "
He says he then told her his father's name in his previous life and eventually met his former brothers, who accepted the young child as their reincarnated sibling.
The merging of previous lives often makes for complicated family dynamics. Not all Druze believe in reincarnation, but many families embrace those they believe are their previous loved ones.
The creased old photo, he says, was from his daughter in his past life, who gave it to him 25 years ago in this life. He says she died four years ago — an elderly woman at the time.
"This was my horse," he says, of the white mare with tassels around its neck in the photo. "My daughter used to come riding with me."
There is no one else from what he believes was his previous family left to verify the information. But members of his own family vouch for what Nasr is saying, including his close relationship with the woman he believes was his former daughter.
Evidence of past lives?
Dr. Jim Tucker, former director of perceptual studies at the University of Virginia's school of medicine, has studied thousands of cases in different countries of children reporting memories of past lives.
"They are easiest to find in cultures with a belief in reincarnation but they are found all over," including in the United States, says Tucker, who has written books on the subject. In the U.S., researchers are aware of about 100 families per year reporting children with memories of what they say are past lives.
He says across cultures, children who believe they have lived before, begin speaking at an early age and mention very specific memories. In many cases, he says, after the ages of 6 or 7, the memories fade or — particularly in cultures that do not believe in reincarnation — the children stop talking about them.
The research involves comparing specific details given by children reporting past lives with the life of the person they believe they were, for which there is no explanation for them knowing.
Tucker says research does not prove that reincarnation exists. But he says, "If you look at the strongest cases, I think they do provide decent evidence that some children do have information about a life from the past."
People who believe they are reincarnated are widely accepted in their own tight-knit Druze communities. But the belief is part of the reason that the Druze have been branded by Islamic militants as infidels. ISIS and al-Qaida-related groups have killed Druze, along with believers from other faiths, because of their religious beliefs.
Unlocking traumatic memories
Like Nasr, Druze who believe they are reincarnated normally come to that awareness as small children.
In a fashionable villa in Sweida, a 60-year-old woman describes learning to speak before she was 1 year old. She says her earliest words included saying that she wanted to go home.
"I didn't say mommy or daddy. I just kept saying I wanted to go back to my family," she says. "Sometimes I would try to throw myself under cars, saying, 'You're not my family.' They didn't know what to do with me."
The woman, an academic, did not want her name or other identifying details used because she feared ridicule from those who do not share her beliefs and embarrassment to her family. Some of her personality traits, she says — rebelliousness and intense independence — come from her previous life.
She says her parents believed she was reincarnated but were living in another country and could not help her find the village she believes she came from. As a small child, she says, she used to describe the black stone house where she lived — volcanic rock widely used in Sweida but unseen in the country where she was born and raised.
Ten years ago, she says, she passed through a village in Sweida and recognized an abandoned house as the one where she believed she had previously lived. She says she was able to later verify the family names she remembered and the story of her death.
She says her past life was short and came to a violent end.
"I was 16 years old and a bride and I ran away from my wedding because I loved someone else," she says.
The young man she says she loved was a cousin who waited behind a stone wall near her home during the wedding celebrations. Making an excuse to leave the house, she says, they rode his horse to his mother's house for safety. There, she says, her elder brother found her and stabbed her to death because he believed she had dishonored the family.
"This was the tradition then — my father chose my husband and they did not allow love."
She says her aunt, whose name and face she still remembers, held her in her arms as she died.
In many regions of the Middle East, killings decades ago claiming to avenge a family's honor went unreported to the police. They sometimes still do.
Revisiting the past
The 60-year-old woman says she could not bring herself to see her brother from her past life after finding out 10 years ago where he lived. He died three years ago.
But she has wanted to see if she can find the house of her aunt, and on a recent day, she went with NPR to the small village, asking residents if they knew the home.
The house where she believes she grew up in her previous life is now mostly a tumble of stone blocks. One bears an ancient Greek inscription, from the practice of using parts of ancient temples as building materials. She walks through the rubble, and almost overcome, stops to steady herself. She describes running from the house in the white wedding dress she sewed herself to meet her beloved, waiting beyond the wall on a honey-colored horse.
Eventually in the ancient streets, she finds older villagers who know where the house was. An entourage of adults and children accompany her through the winding streets, past yards with honking geese and barking dogs.
"Here, it was here," she says in the courtyard of an abandoned house. She starts to cry.
She has not revealed why she is looking. But when she points to a spot where she says years ago there was a stone wall, a next-door neighbor confirms there was and asks if she has been reincarnated.
The man, Ghassan Halabi, says he would have been her cousin before she died. He tells her she looks like his father.
"It's very normal," says Halabi, when asked if he truly believes they were related in a previous life.
He says his own son, at the age of 11, described being a lawyer in a past life who was killed in Venezuela, where many Druze emigrated.
"Nothing is impossible," Halabi says.
Sangar Khaleel contributed reporting from Sweida, Syria.
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