A History of the Druzes

Kais M. Firro is a historian, and this Brill book is his standard academic history of the Druze religious community, tracing its history from the eleventh century Fatimid proclamation that gave rise to the faith through its later historical development. Its strength is that it remains the standard scholarly single volume history of the Druze specifically, grounded in the available historical record for a community whose own religious teachings are traditionally restricted to initiated members, a real limit on any outside historian's access to internal doctrine. Its limit is exactly that access constraint, an outside historical study can document the Druze community's political and social history in detail while necessarily saying less about esoteric doctrinal content that the tradition itself keeps closed to non initiates, so a claim about that closed material needs the same caution the community itself applies.