Most religions want to be understood. The Druze faith does not, and the reticence is not incidental to it but structural, so the honest thing an outsider can describe is the shape of the silence rather than what is behind it.
The community divides into the uqqal, the knowers, who are initiated and receive doctrinal instruction, and the juhhal, the uninitiated, who are the majority. The division is not a hierarchy of worth. A juhhal is fully Druze, born into the community, bound by its ethics, married and buried by it; initiation is a vocation taken up in adult life, often in middle age, and it brings obligations rather than privileges. Initiates are marked by dress, abstain from alcohol and tobacco, and meet on Thursday evenings at a khalwa, a plain hall usually set apart from the village. Women may be initiated, and in some communities are more likely to be than men. Among the uqqal a smaller number of especially respected figures, the ajawid, carry the community's religious authority; there is no clergy in the sense of a paid, ordained profession.
The scriptures are the Rasa'il al-Hikma, the Epistles of Wisdom, 111 letters attributed chiefly to Hamza ibn Ali and to al-Muqtana Baha al-Din, arranged in six books. They are not published for the community at large, let alone for outsiders. The copies that reached European and American libraries were obtained without the community's consent, mostly in the nineteenth century, which means that almost every external account of Druze doctrine rests on material the Druze did not release and would not have released.
Underlying all of this is taqiyya, the permitted concealment of belief under threat, inherited from Ismaili practice. For a small minority repeatedly ruled by others, it was a survival technique, and it has left the community with a settled habit of answering questions about itself briefly and moving on.