Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  Though called Neoplatonists, they were also enthusiasts of Pythagoras. Pythagoras appears to have been an exponent of monotheism, and one of the Pythagorean sacred symbols was a circle with a dot in the center. The circle represented the cosmos, and the dot was the One—rather like T. S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world,” it was the unchanging and timeless “still point” on which the whole universe depended. That did not mean that the One had a will, or that it did things; its nature was so distant from our imperfect, transitory world that it was beyond the power of the human intellect to find even a single sentence to describe it, save that it existed and was changeless and perfect. It did not create the world: that would have marred its perfection by anchoring it in a particular moment in time. Instead, its existence entails the existence of everything else—just as the existence of the number 1 entailed the existence of all other numbers. The universe “emanates” from the One, to use the Neoplatonists’ term, and the theory of why the universe exists is called emanationism.

  What emanated from the One at the first level was the Universal Mind or Intellect, followed by the emanation of an entity called the Universal Soul; these three formed a sort of philosopher’s trinity. From the Universal Mind and Soul emanated the physical and spiritual worlds. Some of the Neoplatonists suggested that there were a number of other spiritual beings that were intermediaries between the One and mankind. A moral code was built around this vision of the universe. To be good was to move toward the One—to unify oneself with it by turning away from the physical world. “He that has the strength,” Plotinus wrote, “let him arise and withdraw into himself, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy.” Selfishness and egotism were sources of division and the original cause of the separation from the One. Plotinus was keen that his philosophy should be kept secret from outsiders. “Nothing divulged to the uninitiated” was his rule, though this was broken after his death when his followers published his major works.

  What I could not understand at first was how these ancient ideas had come to be at the heart of a modern-day Islamic sect in Lebanon. The prince was prepared to enlighten me. He looked out the window of the reception room where we were meeting at the narrow strip of land that separated his castle from the shore. The main road north to Beirut could be seen from this vantage. “It is a strategic place,” said Prince Talal; “that is why the Abbasids gave it to us.” He signaled to an aide, who a moment later held a heavy, elegantly bound Arabic book in his hands. It was the history of the prince’s family over the past thousand years. The prince gave it to me. Reading it, and making my way through a collection of other books that I was given in subsequent days by Druze well-wishers, I pieced together at least a part of the Druze story.

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  The Arslan book recounted how, in the eighth century, the family was sent from Baghdad by the Abbasid caliphs to defend the Lebanese coast from the Byzantines. The Arslans did this job effectively, but eventually a new and completely unexpected threat emerged. In 910 the Abbasids received disturbing news: in the neglected wilds of North Africa a man was claiming to be a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and his rightful successor as the ruler of Islam. Thanks to a loyal lieutenant who had spread his message among the Berber tribes of the region, this man had many supporters, who had defeated and overthrown the Abbasids’ local vassals. Al-Mahdi, as this man called himself, belonged to a small branch of Islam called the Ismailis. He and his descendants would over the subsequent centuries build and sustain the huge Fatimid Empire, encompassing not just North Africa but also Egypt and Lebanon. They founded Cairo. They proclaimed freedom of religion to their subjects, who included many Christians and Jews. And they amassed a huge library of Greek philosophy.

  Fatimid Cairo was a particularly fertile environment for those who wanted to merge Greek philosophy with Islam. The Fatimids placed great emphasis on learning, building the al-Azhar mosque and a school that taught Islamic law, philosophy, and astronomy; Greek thought remained in fashion among Muslim scholars both in Cairo and in Baghdad. These scholars adapted the ideas of the Neoplatonists to fit with Islam. The One, naturally enough, was seen as Allah. The intermediaries between God and creation were identified as immaterial Minds or “archangels” by some scholars, and at least one philosopher, al-Farabi, said that these Minds took the form of the stars and planets.

  A hundred years after al-Mahdi’s dramatic revelation, his grandson’s great-grandson was ruling in Cairo. Known as al-Hakim bi Amr Allah, he broke with the tradition of tolerance and imposed shari’a law on his subjects with unprecedented ruthlessness. He issued a number of controversial decrees: he demanded that curses against the first Sunni caliphs should be posted on mosques and bazaar entrances, banned his Christian subjects from celebrating Easter, ordered the city’s raisins burned (because they might be used to make wine), called for the city’s honey to be poured into the Nile (because it might be used to make mead), and declared that cobblers could no longer make women’s shoes (as women were not to be allowed outdoors). He ordered non-Muslims to wear painfully heavy objects around their necks. He heard about the ritual of the Holy Fire, conducted at Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher Church on Easter Sunday, decided that it was a trick, and was so outraged by it that he had the church razed to the ground. It was rebuilt only after his death. The destruction of the church helped to spark the Crusades, which would forever mar the relations between Christians and Muslims.

  Although al-Hakim’s behavior seemed cruel or even irrational to his victims (and many others), his admirers thought that his eccentricities were evidence of his closeness to God. A series of millennial events—the approach of the thousandth year after Christ, and the four hundredth year after Mohammed—stirred expectations that the end of the world might be close at hand. It was in this febrile atmosphere that a set of thinkers devised the philosophy of Tawheed—the Druze faith. Even the reason for the name “Druze” is mysterious. It probably was a version of the surname of Nashtaqin al-Darazi, an early adherent who was later excommunicated. And the religion’s teachings gave rise to startling rumors. The Druze believed, or so the Cairo gossip had it, that al-Hakim was the human manifestation or epiphany of God himself. The Druze today deny these rumors. But Neoplatonism did allow for subtle ways to identify a person on earth with the divine. In its Arabic rendering, lahut was God in himself; nasut was God manifested on earth in human-like appearance.

  Whatever formula the Druze may use to express this (and it might be as subtle and complex as the Nicene Creed), they appear to have considered al-Hakim to be a manifestation (nasut) of God on earth. What was more, they considered five of their own leaders to be earthly manifestations of other, inferior celestial beings: the Universal Mind, the Universal Soul, and three others called the Word, the Precedent, and the Successor. These five entities had appeared in human form before—as Jesus and his apostles, Moses and Aaron, Plato and Aristotle and Pythagoras, and Mohammed and his companions. Each time, they had ushered mankind into a new phase of understanding by instituting a new religion. Moses had brought Judaism, Jesus brought Christianity, and Mohammed brought Islam. Now the Druze religion was to usher in a new era of mankind’s history, replacing orthodox Islam. Hamza bin Ali, the leader of the Druze movement, believed that he himself was the manifestation on earth of the Universal Mind. In previous incarnations, he had been Pythagoras and Jesus.

  While al-Hakim was still alive, the Druze were tolerated. But when he disappeared mysteriously while walking on the Moqattam Hills above Cairo in 1021, his son succeeded him and was apparently less willing to tolerate a religion that held his father (but not him) in such high esteem. Thousands of Druze were killed. They gradually retreated into the hills of southern Lebanon, accepting converts for a time—their ethnic origins are very diverse—and recognizing each other through secret signs and code words. The five-pointed star, for example (each of whose points has a different color: white, blue, yellow, red, a
nd green) represented the five Druze leaders and the five heavenly entities to which they corresponded. The community soon stopped accepting new converts, which only furthered the trend toward secrecy; as a Lebanese historian wrote, “The Druze religion thus became wholly hereditary, a sacred privilege, a priceless treasure to be jealously and zealously guarded against the profane.” Pythagoras could not have put it better.

  The new faith had a minimum of rules and rituals. The obligations of a faithful Muslim—prayer five times a day, fasting during Ramadan once a year, and pilgrimage to Mecca—were reinterpreted as more abstract requirements, such as to keep the faith, tell the truth, and help one’s co-religionists. Druze laypeople were allowed to eat pork and drink wine. They could pray in whatever manner they wished—or not at all, if they preferred. Twice a year, one Druze layman told me, he was invited to a prayer session where he could in theory have asked questions about the faith. But there was no obligation, he explained: “If you ask me about theology, I couldn’t answer you. Being Druze is a social allegiance to a community—one is born within it.”

  Unsurprisingly, the Druze’s liberal take on Islam provoked the ire of fundamentalist clerics. In the fourteenth century, when the Arab lands were beset with enemies on all sides—Crusaders to the west, Mongols to the east—the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah wanted to use violence to crush all “deviant” ideas. He was so conservative that (it is said) he never ate watermelon because he had no evidence that the Prophet or his companions had done so. To do something that they had not was to risk “innovation,” which conservative scholars regarded as dangerous. Unsurprisingly, Ibn Taymiyyah was a formidable enemy of the Druze. He issued a stern fatwa against both Druze and Alawites, calling them “deceptive unbelievers.” Their food was not to be eaten, their women were to be enslaved, their money seized, their repentance denied, their scholars killed, their funerals boycotted: “They must be killed wherever found, and to be cursed as described.” A period of persecution followed in which the Druze were forced to conform outwardly to orthodox Islam. But eventually their overlords, who by this time were the Ottomans, relented and granted them self-rule and (in effect) freedom of worship.

  What about today? I wondered. What attitudes did the Druze encounter in Muslims who did not share their esoteric vision? In a trendy bar in downtown Beirut I met a woman whose father had died fighting in the civil war, as a member of the Druze militia. She arrived in a yellow Porsche. The bar gave the appearance of being a dive but was actually a haunt of Beirut’s rich youth. “It’s all down to politics,” she told me as we sat on a couple of faded chairs. “When Walid Jumblatt is siding with the Sunnis, then the Sunnis are friendly, and when he is with the Shi’a, then they all say the Druze can’t be trusted.” The twists and turns of the civil war had given way to a less bloody, but equally changeable, set of political alliances.

  She had encountered various unpleasant accusations at school—that the Druze have yearly orgies, for instance, or that they worship a golden calf hidden inside a box. These allegations are commonly directed against all minority groups in the Middle East. The first has been made against the Druze, the Samaritans, the Alawites, and the Yazidis. The second has been made against the Druze and the Samaritans. Both accusations were historically leveled against Christians, too, and some version of the same accusations has been thrown by Christians against Muslims. What lies behind this habit is unclear: not merely malice, but perhaps an element of prurient fantasy, and maybe, too, some vestigial memory of sects—a breakaway Zoroastrian movement, various ninth-century Sufi groups—that really did promote free love. Probably the biggest reason that the Druze were accused of sexual immorality is that they allowed men and women to pray together, and gave women something approaching equality. (The Pythagoreans likewise were known for allowing women as well as men to share in their mysteries.)

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  To uncover more of Druze theology, I was going to visit their heartland, in the Shouf Mountains of southern Lebanon. Every journey in Lebanon is a religious education, because the country’s different religions all tend to advertise themselves. One can go north on a huge coastal motorway, often choked with traffic, past casinos and supermarkets and the offered embrace of a huge statue of Christ; then up into the mountains, into villages populated with statues of the Virgin Mary, vineyards, and Aramaic names, on the edges of dizzying crevasses. Heading south from Beirut, one travels through crowded suburbs decorated with posters of Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Past the sprawling cities of Tyre and Sidon, one descends to the pastoral open spaces of the Shi’a heartland; entering villages there, I might be greeted by the picture of a fist smashing down on the head of an Israeli soldier, and at the notorious al-Khiam jail, a list is posted of those who died while imprisoned during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. These political symbols leave no doubt about the religious identity of the region’s residents.

  The route to the east, though, is rather more subtly adorned. An hour’s winding, high-speed, brake-squealing drive in a car sent by Walid Jumblatt took me up into the Shouf Mountains, where the Druze community has traditionally been concentrated and where Jumblatt has his castle, and in the villages through which we passed I saw no sign of religion at all. Hassan, the driver, bought a piece of konafa, an oily and sweet cake made with cheese, at a shop where we paused on our route. As I ate it I looked out at the orange groves, tall mountains, and deep valleys of the Shouf. Tomatoes, olives, bananas, and lemons were grown here. Pink bell-shaped flowers gave extra color to the scene. Extensive construction had left the hillsides peppered with red-roofed concrete villas, covered with a thin layer of cream-colored limestone.

  Far below, the sea sometimes showed through the encompassing hills. The scene was a figurative portrait of Lebanon, in addition to being a literal one. Sea and mountains together, I thought, have made Lebanon what it is—an intoxicating mixture of the international and the parochial, liberal modernity and stubborn tribalism, joie de vivre and fanatical religiosity. Holy men and women came into the Lebanese mountains early in the Christian era to live solitary lives sustained by donations of food from local villagers. After the arrival of Islam, medieval accounts show that Muslim hermits were similarly welcomed by Christian villages. When the first Druze preachers headed into the Shouf Mountains in the aftermath of their emigration from Egypt, preaching and practicing self-denial, they were treading in well-worn footsteps. “Go to the people who live in the shadow of Mount Hermon,” says an early Druze text: “they are apt to follow.”

  The preachers would have found not only Christian villagers but the last remnants of a pagan cult. The Harranians had a temple at Baalbek in Lebanon—just sixty miles north from the Shouf Mountains, where I was now—at the time when the first Druze missionaries arrived. Perhaps some Harranians were among those who adopted the Druze philosophy, finding that it made Islam easier to accept, since it shared their belief in reincarnation and allowed them to continue revering Pythagoras and other figures from the ancient Greek tradition whom Christianity and Islam ignored.

  I noticed curious shop names in one Druze town: Wisdom Pharmacy and Enlightenment Hospital, for example. At a dry cleaner’s, I saw a Druze religious poem posted that began: “O Creator of the Universe . . . ” It had been written by al-Halawi, the respected sheikh whose name I learned at Prince Talal Arslan’s castle. One building, otherwise plain, had a single five-pointed star painted above its entrance.

  One other quality marked Druze villages as unique: oddly ubiquitous men in brown coveralls, with white woolen caps on their shaved heads, working on houses and gardens and at gas stations. The only hair each of them had was a bristling mustache. I asked Hassan who they were. “Sheikhs,” he said. These were uqqal—more junior versions of the ones that I had seen when I visited the House of the Sect. The laypeople among the Druze live as they choose, but the Druze clergy abide by a philosophy of self-denial. Male sheikhs are encouraged to live off the land,
and it is particularly virtuous for them to eat only the food that they themselves have grown. They live austere lives, praying and meditating regularly, fasting during Ramadan, avoiding pork and alcohol, and never engaging in any kind of excess (a sheikh, for example, even when presented with a glass of water, is not supposed to drink it all down but only to sip at it without slaking his thirst). Druze clergy are proportionally a large group: perhaps 15 percent of all Druze, both men and women, are sheikhs. Joining the clergy was not a complicated business, Hassan had told me: a person applied for admission, and over a period of time was evaluated for the level of his or her commitment and capacity for religious understanding.

  Hassan’s wife was a member of the Druze clergy. Just as the male sheikhs tilled the land, she and other women sheikhas worked on embroidery and other home crafts that allowed them to earn an income without going out into the world. If Hassan’s wife did go outside her home, she would wear a white handkerchief on her head and half covering her face, like the women I had seen in the House of the Sect. Hassan was not a talkative man, but he was beginning to open up. Where had he been in Lebanon? I asked. “Down to Beirut, and back here.” He had never left the Druze areas; his whole world, I guessed, could be no more than a square fifteen miles on each side. I guessed he had been a fighter in the civil war.