A Faith That Closed Its Doors Nine Centuries Ago

This entry records that the Druze Faith, which developed from Ismaili Islam in eleventh-century Egypt before closing itself permanently to new conversion shortly afterward, maintains a distinctive and sharply two-tiered religious structure dividing the uqqal, initiated religious knowers granted access to the faith's esoteric scriptures and full religious instruction, from the juhhal, the uninitiated majority of the community who follow the faith's ethical and social practice without access to its most detailed theological and scriptural content, without reproducing specific Druze prayers or scriptural material here. This structural division is not simply a matter of historical circumstance but a core and actively maintained feature of Druze religious organization today, meaning that even within the Druze community itself, the great majority of members do not have access to the specific scriptural and liturgical material that only initiated uqqal study and use, a restriction considerably more internally stratified than most other traditions catalogued in this atlas. The faith takes its name from the historical figure al-Darazi, an early preacher associated with its formative period, though the community itself generally prefers the name Muwahhidun, unitarians, reflecting its own core theological emphasis on the absolute oneness of God.