Word: fakirism
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...border of Afghanistan. Its fierce tribes have never submitted to British rule. There last week, as they have been doing for two years, grousing British Army officers and sweating troops scrambled over unfriendly mountains on the trail of an elusive, red-bearded, turbaned firebrand, Mirza Ali Khan, the Fakir...
...year-old Fakir, a strapping six-footer who takes his name from the Waziristan village of Ipi, once worked as a Peshawar porter and in Britain's Indian Civil Service. Then he became a religious fanatic, went to live in the Waziristan hills. Two years ago he gathered the tribesmen about him, began a revolt against Britain. Time & again scouting British airplanes have located the Fakir's hideouts and British troops have rushed to capture him. Each time he got away, has left behind a total of some 200 British officers and men killed, hundreds wounded...
Last week the British learned that the Fakir had made his headquarters in a hillside cave. Bombers roared ahead and the British troops closed in. The Fakir and his tribesmen took up positions behind boulder barricades and for two days beat back British attacks. One British captain, six soldiers were killed before the Fakir and his followers had fled again...
...that the Atlantic City meeting never occurred at all. It was, Mr. Hoffman later told a Federal Trade Commission examiner, "a fiction story, which is very commonly done in writing." But writing under his own name Mr. Hoffman later accused Mr. Atlas of being "The World's Greatest Fakir." Mr. Atlas, roared Mr. Hoffman in his Strength & Health, "does not have a 17-in. bicep as he claims. He does not have a 14½in. forearm. He does not have a 47-in. chest. He cannot pull six autos with his teeth. He cannot lift 250 Ib. above...
This "scientific" effect has been discarded by the Coney Island sideshow ballyhoo merchants. ... I don't know a single magician in the U. S., or even a carnival sideshow fakir who would dare to attempt this feat today, for every 16-year-old youngster probably knows how it is done. Actually what happens is that the fakir wears a harness, or corset-like arrangement. . . . Enclosed herewith are photostats from the most famous book of magic ever written-Modern Magic by Professor Hoffman, which was written in England in the early 1890's. . . . Note that...