Druze Faith

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.

Druze teaching holds taqammus: at death the soul passes immediately into a body being born, without interval, judgement scene or waiting place. The number of souls was fixed at creation and does not change, so the same souls circulate through successive lives, and a Druze soul is always born into a Druze body.

That doctrine does more work than any other in the tradition, because the community's social structure follows from it. If the roster of souls is closed, conversion into the faith is not forbidden so much as meaningless: one cannot join a set one was not created within. Conversion out is equally incoherent in the community's own terms. Marriage outside the community is a grave matter for the same reason, and Druze practice is strictly endogamous. The whole architecture of closure that outsiders describe as secrecy or exclusivity is, from the inside, a straightforward consequence of a metaphysical claim.

It also shapes the emotional texture of Druze life. Death is met with a composure that visitors regularly remark on, because it is a transition rather than an ending, and funerals are not organised around despair. Children who report memories of a previous life are taken seriously rather than hushed, and such reports have been collected and studied by outside researchers, who have found the Druze among the most productive communities for the purpose precisely because the belief makes families willing to talk.

The door closed at a datable moment. Preaching began in 1017 under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim; the call was suspended and then formally closed in 1043 by al-Muqtana Baha al-Din, and no new adherent has been admitted since. Nearly a thousand years of a religion that has taken in nobody explains its demography: something near a million Druze, concentrated in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan, with substantial diaspora communities in Venezuela, the United States, Australia and West Africa.

Whether the Druze faith is a branch of Islam or a separate religion is genuinely contested, and it is contested by Muslim authorities, by scholars and by Druze themselves, sometimes with the same person answering differently in different settings.

The origin is not in dispute. The movement began within Ismaili Shia Islam, in the Fatimid caliphate of the early eleventh century, and its scriptures are in Arabic and use an Islamic vocabulary. Several Arab states classify Druze as Muslims for purposes of personal-status law, and Druze have at times accepted the classification, which under taqiyya is unproblematic and has often been prudent.

The case for treating it as distinct is substantial. The five pillars are not observed in their Islamic form; in their place the tradition sets seven duties: truthfulness of speech, protection of one's fellow believers, renunciation of former creeds, repudiation of evil, acknowledgement of the divine unity in every age, acceptance of God's acts, and submission to God's will. There is no mosque, no hajj, no Ramadan fast as Muslims keep it. The canon of revelation closed in 1043, after the Quran and independently of it. And transmigration of souls is rejected by mainstream Sunni and Shia teaching alike. Medieval jurists, including Ibn Taymiyya, ruled the Druze outside Islam, a ruling that has had lethal consequences for the community at intervals ever since.

The name is itself a small monument to outside misunderstanding. Druze prefer al-Muwahhidun, those who profess the unity of God, or simply Banu Maruf. Druze derives from Muhammad al-Darazi, an early preacher whom the movement condemned as a heretic and repudiated. The community is therefore known to the world by the name of a man it regards as a false teacher.

Its most honoured prophet is Jethro, Nabi Shu'ayb, the father-in-law of Moses. His shrine near the Horns of Hattin in Galilee is the site of the community's principal annual pilgrimage, held in late April.