Such ideas were anathema to Christianity, which believed in a God who created the world through an act of will. The Byzantine ruler Justinian, a devoutly Christian emperor, decided that the existence of the Academy was an insult to his religion and to his imperial power. In Athens, he ordered, “no one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.” The Academy’s seven last professors, the “successors of Plato,” sought refuge in Persia. Athens’s schools fell into decay.
It was a dramatic conclusion to the reign of Greek philosophy in the Mediterranean world, where philosophers had sometimes been treated as prophets or even gods. Plato had attracted a religious cult that claimed to have access to unwritten doctrines of the philosopher; it had its own initiation ceremony. The mysterious mathematician Pythagoras, Socrates’s teacher, had ended up regarded as a miracle worker, able to see the future and be in two places at once. These cults had a strong ethical dimension: Pythagoras’s followers in particular (the Pythagoreans) were encouraged to examine their consciences nightly and to overcome gluttony, sloth, sensuality, and anger. But the cults were also designed to fit alongside old pagan forms of worship, and in Europe, Christianity was sweeping them aside. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” one Christian polemicist wrote. More sympathetic thinkers, such as St. Augustine of Hippo, adapted Plato’s ideas to fit with the doctrines of Christianity. Aristotle, however, was neglected until the Middle Ages, and Pythagoras is generally remembered in the West today only for his theorem regarding triangles.
In the Middle East, Greek philosophy was able to escape Justinian’s edict, because that region was far from Byzantium, was partly ruled by the rival Persian Empire, and in less than a hundred years came under the rule of Islam. The Harranians still revered Pythagoras as a prophet as late as the eleventh century. Far from being hostile to Greek philosophy, many early Muslims were keen to see their own civilization as the true heir to ancient Greece. The great Arab philosopher al-Kindi argued that the Arabs and Greeks were kin: Qahtan, the father of the Arabs, was brother to the ancestor of the Greeks, Yunan. A later scholar, al-Farabi, saw the Muslims as having accepted Greek philosophical ideas that the Christians had preferred to ignore or suppress. An early Islamic caliph claimed to have encountered Aristotle in a dream and to have then debated philosophy with him. Their discussion convinced the caliph to authorize the translation of Greek works into Arabic.
Among heterodox Muslims, regard for the Greeks was even higher. A mysterious group of Muslims who called themselves the “Brethren of Purity” and lived in southern Iraq in the tenth century had a great reverence for Pythagoras, too (the conservative scholar Ibn Taymiyyah denounced their writings as “a few insipid crumbs of Pythagoras’s philosophy”). Just like his followers the Pythagoreans, they felt that the universe was constructed around mathematics: “the nature of created things accords with the nature of number,” as they put it. The Druze are very keen on the Great philosophers, too, especially some of them and not necessarily the ones that are best known in the West. “The Druze faith,” according to Druze historian Najla Abu Izzeddin in a 1984 book, “reaches beyond the traditionally recognized monotheisms to earlier expressions of man’s search for communion with the One. Hence its reverence for Hermes, the bearer of a divine message, for Pythagoras . . . for the divine Plato and for Plotinus.” Three things in this sentence intrigued me when I read it in my room at Harvard as I prepared for my trip to Lebanon. Who was Hermes? Why was Plato “divine”? And why were Pythagoras and Plotinus so important? All eventually would become clear—or clearer, at any rate.
The Yazidi religious leaders, when I met them at Lalish, had told me that the Druze resembled them—“they even have the same kind of mustaches,” one of them added. One Druze professor told me during my time in Lebanon that the Druze’s relationship with Islam was like that of Mormons with Christianity. They have their own revelation and philosophy that mainstream Muslims would consider unorthodox. They are led politically, for the most part, by a single family: the Jumblatts, who have achieved the remarkable balancing act of remaining feudal landowners, based at a castle in Lebanon’s southern mountains, while also running a modern radical socialist political party. The Jumblatts rely to a large extent on the tribal loyalty of the Druze, but their party is in theory open to all religions. During Lebanon’s civil war, their political skills enabled them to outmuscle their longtime rivals for the Druze leadership, the Arslan family, which possesses an older lineage but less money and power. I was hoping to meet both Prince Talal Arslan and Walid Jumblatt, as well as the senior Druze clergyman.
In the center of Beirut, a small knot of people were protesting. I saw their slogans on lampposts and placards near the city’s renovated center: “No to sectarianism,” “No to bribery,” “No to stupidity.” They were asking for the right to civil marriage so that Lebanese from different sects could marry more easily. They had little chance of success. Lebanon is a liberal society in many ways; its bars and nightclubs are crowded every night with Muslims and Christians alike. But a deep strain of conservatism runs beneath the surface, and intermarriage is viewed with disfavor by the influential and conservative Christian and Muslim religious hierarchies.
Soldiers were stationed at key points around the city center. A dispute between political factions in the Lebanese Parliament had been ongoing for several months, preventing the formation of a government, and the troops were on the streets to prevent trouble. The Druze parties could play kingmakers in these disputes, but never kings: Walid Jumblatt could call on the loyalty of at least six members in the 128-member Parliament, and the Arslans on two.
I was due to meet the British ambassador at a café, from where she and I would go together to see Jumblatt. I wandered toward our rendezvous through a beautifully restored section of the city. Located on the frontier of the civil war, it was once wrecked by shrapnel and gunfire, but Rafiq Hariri, Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s, invested huge sums in its restoration before he was assassinated near it by a car bomb in 2005—probably at the instigation of the Syrian government. The incident was all too reminiscent of the civil war and made some Lebanese expect that a new internal struggle would begin.
I passed a recently built mosque that towered over a neighboring church, and I saw that the church was in return now raising its tower to match the minaret. I was trying to decide whether this was a depressing sign of religious competition or a refreshing reminder of religious freedom when my attention was diverted by a discovery. Tucked away in a side street and relatively neglected beside these two newer and bigger buildings was a mosque built by a Druze governor of the city many centuries ago. When I looked in at the mosque from the outside, I noticed what looked like a pentagram woven into the patterning of its external ironwork.
The pentagram was a particularly significant symbol for the Pythagoreans, and one they could use to identify themselves to other members. It interested them because it is made of ten triangles—ten being a number that to them signified perfection, and the triangle being an emblem of Pythagoras’s famous theorem. Pythagoreans believed that numbers, and the geometrical projections of numbers, were the building blocks of the universe. So when there was a pattern in geometry or mathematics, they read into it moral and practical messages. For them, Pythagoras’s theory did not just prove that a triangle’s hypotenuse must measure five if its other two sides measure three and four. In the Pythagorean language of numbers, two was the number for a woman, and three was the number assigned to a man, and so five was the number for marriage. Four represented justice because it could be equally divided twice over. So the three-, four-, and five-inch sides of the triangle spelled out a message written into the mathematical fabric of the universe: “Man must behave justly in marriage.” Pythagorean husbands were renowned for their faithfulness to their wives.
What did it mean, I wondered, that this Pythagorean symbol was here? Was it a coincidence? I put this question a
side for the time being, because I was late for my meeting. I hurried past expensive clothing shops and restaurants, elegant arches and shuttered windows, and reached the ambassador in time to catch my lift to Walid Jumblatt’s house.
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The Druze number around a million people, of whom half or more are in Syria and the remainder split between Israel (120,000) and Lebanon (250,000). In each country they have had to choose sides. In Israel the Druze serve in the army and distance themselves from the Palestinians. In Syria they have mostly supported Bashar al-Assad’s government during the bloody aftermath of the 2011 uprisings. When Lebanon’s civil war began in 1975, Jumblatt’s Druze militia battled alongside a coalition made up largely of Muslims and leftists against the country’s Western-backed and Christian-dominated government. The war became more complex as time went on. Both sides fragmented: Christian groups often fought each other and sometimes allied with majority-Muslim countries such as Iraq and Syria. The Druze fell out with other Muslim groups and especially the militias belonging to what became Lebanon’s largest single religious group, the Shi’a Muslims. In the long to-and-fro of the conflict, the old heart of the city was devastated.
Now it is once more a fashionable district, and Jumblatt’s street was quiet and prosperous-looking, his villa large and comfortable. A complement of guards stood around the entrance. We took an elevator to an upper floor, and as we emerged, a huge dog came bounding over to us. Jumblatt followed close behind. A mass of wild white hair protruded from the sides of his otherwise bald head. He wore a thick mustache and a shrewd expression. Before he succeeded his father, Kamal, as lord of a feudal estate, leader of a socialist party, and civil war guerrilla leader, he had been a history teacher. “He gives me a book every time we come,” the ambassador had whispered to me in the elevator. “And I keep worrying, each time I see him, that he’s going to test me on the book he gave me last time.”
When we entered his study, I saw what she meant. Books and newspaper clippings were spilled across his multiple desks; on the wall hung eighteenth-century Ottoman portraits and an ornamental musket. He had discovered an antiques shop in Istanbul that he particularly liked, he told us. Surely this man, I thought, would share my enthusiasm for tracing his own people’s origins and uncovering their links to classical Greece. But when I asked him about the Druze faith, he gave me an unexpected reply. “I know nothing about the Druze,” the preeminent leader of the Druze declared with a violent wave of the arm. From his piles of books he selected a couple by Tariq Ali and gave them to me as gifts. He invited me to visit him at his palace in the mountains. And then he said goodbye. Either the most powerful Druze man in Lebanon, an intellectual in his own right, had been excluded from the teachings of his own religion, or else he knew better than to pass them on to an outsider. I had every intention of taking up his invitation to spend time among Druze communities, but first I would have to find someone more willing to talk to me.
Luckily, a Druze man named Rabieh, who knew the ambassador and was keen to help us understand his community, had agreed to help. The only trouble was, he told us, that he did not know very much about it himself. He was not alone. Druze laypeople live essentially as they choose, provided they help defend and maintain the community and marry within it. But they are not allowed to know what their religion teaches. This is why they are known as juhhal (literally, “the ignorant ones”). Despite his power and wealth, Jumblatt was once one of the juhhal. Only the initiates—who are also known as sheikhs or uqqal, and who dedicate themselves to lives of contemplation and poverty—know the religion’s teachings in full. That was why, Rabieh explained, he had arranged for us to visit the House of the Sect, the administrative headquarters of the Druze religion in Lebanon. It was a short ride away through Beirut’s traffic-clogged streets.
When we arrived at this mysterious-sounding place I found that it was an unassuming two-story building in a Druze enclave of west Beirut called Verdun. Inside the building, men in black cloaks, baggy black trousers, and tall brimless tarbush hats wrapped in white fabric—the traditional garb of the Druze sheikhs—were walking the corridors. Occasionally I would see women, too, white fabric covering their hair and half their faces. These were female sheikhs (a female sheikh is called a sheikha).
We had an appointment with a figure called the Sheikh al-Aql. This man was the official head of the Druze clergy. I was forewarned not to take up too much of his time; he was known for being busy and rather bad-tempered. So I entered his office with some trepidation, along with Rabieh and the ambassador. I asked him about the relationship between the Druze and Islam, and he showed himself to be erudite about Islamic issues, quoting often from the Koran, keen to demonstrate that the Druze were orthodox Muslims. “We teach the need for good deeds. Everything forbidden in religion and international law is avoided. We respect others. Our religion is Islam. Our sect are the Muwahhidun, the Unifiers. Our title is Druze.”
He made no apology for not telling me more. “It is about privacy, not secrecy,” he said. “Doesn’t a woman have privacy in her home? We’re asking for the same privacy for our beliefs.” He had intimidated me into silence. But Rabieh wasn’t content to leave it there. He spoke up from the back. “Sheikh, tell us about taqammus. What is the basis for our belief in it?” The sheikh glared at him and shot back a question in the manner of a schoolteacher trying to suppress an impertinent schoolboy. Did Rabieh understand the meaning of taqammus? If not, then what was he doing asking the question? The message of his tone of voice was clear enough: Rabieh was violating the privacy of his own faith.
Taqammus was a new word to me. It sounded like the Arabic word for “shirt,” qamis. Why did the sheikh not want to talk about it? Rabieh explained as we drove away that taqammus means “reincarnation.” It is the idea that people can change bodies as they can change shirts: the body is just a cloak for the soul. I understood why the sheikh hadn’t liked the question. Most Muslims do not consider reincarnation an orthodox belief. It did explain the Druze interest in Pythagoras, though. He was famous for his belief in reincarnation: one time he stopped a man from beating a dog, saying that he recognized in its yelps the voice of a friend who had died. For the same reason, Pythagoreans were often vegetarians. How deep did the Druze veneration for the Greek philosophers go?
I hoped I might find out more from my next meeting, which took place in a still grander location than the previous ones. The castle was set on a hill south of Beirut. At its doors we were met by a flurry of retainers. They escorted us to a reception room where Prince Talal Arslan, a large and jovial man in early middle age, was sitting under a portrait of his father, who looked even more jovial than the son, and who was depicted smoking a water-pipe. The prince—a title given him because of his descent from Arab kings in the period before Islam—confirmed what I had learned about taqammus. “We do not believe in death at all,” he said. The Druze set no store by graves: the soul only occupied the body as a temporary casing, and was eternally reborn. It was not the custom to weep at funerals. The few “tombs” the Druze held sacred were in fact empty cenotaphs. “Three things are important in our beliefs,” the prince explained. “Reincarnation, respect for all heavenly religions, and a belief in the Universal Mind.”
But when I pressed him to say more, the answers I received were vague. A red-haired man who was sitting next to the prince told me that the Druze faith was more spiritual than ritualistic. It was more philosophical than religious, said another of the prince’s subordinates. “Not all the sheikhs understand the philosophy,” this man added scornfully. “Few of them would understand the Neoplatonism of Sheikh Abu Aref Halawi.” Halawi was a Druze holy man, famous for his asceticism, who died in 2003 at the age of over a hundred; his religious poems, addressed to “the Creator of the Universe,” are displayed in Druze homes. But what did it mean to say that he was a Neoplatonist? And what was the Universal Mind?
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A pa
inting by Raphael shows all the philosophers of ancient Greece in one imaginary scene, with Aristotle and Plato standing side by side at the center of them all. Aristotle is pointing down toward the earth and Plato up toward the heavens. The picture neatly sums up the difference between two schools of thought. Aristotle’s philosophy focused on the material world: the modern word “physics” derives from the title of one of his books. Plato saw the material world as a mere shadow of the world of ideas. His view was very influential with the writers who reshaped Greek philosophy in the early centuries ad, who are called Neoplatonists by modern scholars and among whom the most prominent was a third-century writer called Plotinus. Plotinus and his followers Iamblichus and Porphyry were all from the Middle East (having been born in the Egyptian delta, a Syrian town near Aleppo, and the Lebanese city of Tyre, respectively)—a sign of how Greek philosophy had already become an integral part of Mediterranean or even Middle Eastern culture. These three, along with other less influential writers of the same period, attempted to create a synthesis of Greek philosophy that would iron out any disagreements between various different schools of Greek thought.
When I shut my eyes and think, it feels as if I can contemplate abstract concepts—numbers, say, or ideas such as love or truth—that are perfect and unchanging, in contrast with the things that I encounter in the physical world. Plato compared the physical world to shadows flitting on the wall of a cave; only if the mind turned in on itself and focused on the world of ideas would it glimpse the realities of which the physical world is merely a shadow. It was the thinking part of the person, rather than the body, that Plato believed might survive death. And yet this spiritual or intellectual world clearly had the ability to influence the physical world. By thinking, I can make a decision about what to do; then I move my arm to carry out my decision. So the Neoplatonists suggested that the soul or mind can operate on both the physical plane and on the intellectual one. They theorized about a hierarchy of planes of existence, and entities such as the mind that could cross from one to another. At the top of this hierarchy was the One.
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