The Druze rejected the more outré versions of reincarnation that had been espoused by earlier Muslim groups (one of which saw the possibilities that rebirth in a new body can offer for poetic justice. A man who had had sex with a sheep, this group believed, might be reborn as a sheep in a future life.) Alawites believe that people can be reborn as plants, for example, but the Druze reject this. They believe that members of their own community are always reborn within it. The Druze existed as a people, on this view, long before the religion came into existence: their bodies are young but their souls are thousands of years old, and before they were the Druze community of today they were the companions of the prophet Mohammed and the disciples of Pythagoras. And the Druze have an answer to the age-old question of what happens to souls when there are not enough bodies to receive them: Druze souls go in that case, says Druze folk mythology, to China.
As I wandered through the streets of Moukhtara that night, I mused on the ways that belief in reincarnation has shaped the Druze community. In the beginning it may have helped them to win converts. To a Christian I imagined the early Druze saying, “By accepting Mohammed as a prophet you are not rejecting Jesus: for Mohammed is Jesus reborn.” To a pagan who revered the Greek philosophers, they could argue that the Druze leader Hamza bin Ali was Pythagoras returned to life. In later centuries, the famous Druze characteristic of courage in battle was fortified by the belief that death would quickly lead to rebirth. Going into battle, Druze soldiers would shout, “Who wants to sleep in their mother’s womb tonight?”
The belief also gives the Druze a profound sense of group loyalty. They consider themselves to have sworn the Covenant of the Lord of Time, a pledge of allegiance to the caliph al-Hakim. They made this pledge not in this lifetime, of course, but back in the eleventh century—in a previous incarnation, when they were the people who constituted the first Druze community.
Finally, the belief underpins their strict rules against accepting converts or intermarriage. One of the few requirements for the average Druze layman or woman is to marry within the faith. Since they have eternal life through their rebirth within the community, then having children by an outsider—who do not count as Druze—affects those children not only in this life but in their future ones, too. It can have some nasty consequences in this world, for that matter. In July 2013 a man married a Druze woman, telling her family that he was a Druze from another village. When they found out that he was a Sunni Muslim, they tracked him down and castrated him. The incident was condemned by Walid Jumblatt. The community was more tolerant when Amal Alamuddin, descendant of a famous Druze family, became engaged in 2014 to American actor George Clooney. One old Druze lady in Amal’s home town, though, when interviewed by a female journalist, was unimpressed. “Aren’t there any young Druze men left?” she asked. “God give you better luck, my girl.”
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The Shouf is the Druze heartland in Lebanon, but they also inhabit a mountain further south, near the border with Israel. On this mountain there is a shrine called Hasbaya, and the day after the lunch with the uqqal I had the chance to visit it with the British ambassador and Rabieh, the same man who had asked the cheeky question about reincarnation when we met the Sheikh al-Aql back in Beirut. It was a long journey: we went up to the top of the mountain, then steeply down to a valley below the cliff where Fakhreddin had supposedly plunged with his horse, through a Christian village surrounded by vineyards, and then through a Shi’a village decorated with Hizbullah posters.
When we reached Hasbaya I saw that it was a town of old stone buildings. One of these was a ruined castle, one of its crumbling stone corners still inhabited by a family that had been there since the Crusades. They had relieved the starkness of its gray stone courtyard with flowers. Another corner, less habitable, was owned by a separate branch of the same family, which was using it to hold political rallies. On the inside of a tall stone arch a large portrait of Jumblatt’s rival, Talal Arslan, was suspended, and plastic chairs had been set out for an impromptu reception in honor of the ambassador.
Once the reception had ended we went to visit the nearby hilltop shrine called al-Bayyada. It was a khalwa, or a place where a Druze person might seclude himself or herself from the world and pray—a hermitage, in Western terms. At its heart was a prayer room (simple and unadorned, as I could see from looking in through the window; the room itself was off-limits). Its outlying buildings served mostly as living quarters for a community of monklike Druze sheikhs. Five of these, one in sandals, had prepared a meal of pine nuts and honey for us. They sat and answered our questions patiently. The one in sandals had been there for forty years. As with other Druze sheikhs, it was their custom to eat only food that they had made for themselves. “This place was founded 350 years ago by a very spiritual man,” another of them explained. “He became a very holy man and decided to build a khalwa here. It was below, and then it was moved to top of hill. He wasn’t aiming for any worldly gain, so it became famous. People came and built private khalwas.”
The Druze had also at some stage built next to the shrine a curious thing—a circular slab of stone, surrounded by a low stone rim. It appeared to have some religious significance that our hosts did not explain, for I had to remove my shoes before stepping onto it. A darker stone, small and round, was set in its center: the whole, seen from above, was a point in the center of a circle. The symbol of a dot at the center of a circle was a sacred sign of Pythagoras, representing the One at the heart of the universe, the “still point in the turning world.” Standing on the dot and speaking, I could hear my voice echoing clearly off the circular rim. This acoustic would have appealed to Pythagoras, too. He was the first to delineate the musical octave, spotting that pleasing harmonies operated according to mathematical formulae (halving the length of a metal rod means that the note it will sound when struck is an octave higher). He believed that the planets made music as they rotated across the sky, and that a person who concentrated long enough and knew what to listen for could hear the “music of the spheres.” One of the sheikhs I had met had come across this idea. Hanin al-aflak, he called it in Arabic. And although I had studied Greek philosophy for years at Western universities, this was the first time I had heard it mentioned.
The shrine’s guardian, whom we saw at his home in the town rather than at the shrine itself, was an elderly man with a long beard and a mischievous sense of humor. He showed us into his living room, where a table was laden with huge plates of food in our honor. The ambassador and he had a rather jocular conversation about the status of women in the Druze clergy: they could be sheikhs, but with a limited authority, he explained, before turning the tables on the ambassador by asking how the British Empire had ended. “Has the sun set on it?” he asked. (The phrase “The sun never sets on the British Empire” is a popular one in the Middle East, for some reason. I have lost count of the number of times it has been quoted to me.)
The guardian turned more serious when I asked him about Pythagoras. Could he explain why the philosopher had forbidden his followers to eat beans? The sheikh was amazed. Pythagoras, he said, had done no such thing. He pointed to the plates of food that his family had prepared for their visitors. “I wish we had prepared for you a plate of beans,” he said, “so that you could see that the Druze are allowed to eat them!” His instant assumption was that if I was asking what Pythagoras had allowed and forbidden, then that was a question about Druze custom, too. (In a Lebanese Druze magazine that ran an article on “the wise Pythagoras,” a list is given of his instructions that interprets them all as metaphors, which is the same approach that the Druze take toward the rules of Islam.)
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As a community, the Druze today are doing better than the Yazidis or Zoroastrians. They have managed, so far, to hold on to their land and their autonomy, in part because no single religious group dominates Lebanon. Jumblatt has so far escaped assassination and remains politically relevant in Leb
anon; in Syria, their remoteness from the main cities and the size of their community have so far shielded them from the worst of that country’s civil war; in Israel they have religious freedom, and many serve in the Israeli army. Threats abound. Lebanon is unstable, Syria is bloody, and Israel has confiscated a large proportion of Druze land to house the country’s Jewish immigrants. The ignorance of lay Druze about their religion ill suits them for maintaining it abroad. Yet in every region their clergy and secular leaders have succeeded in maintaining the unity and distinctiveness of their community. Having seen how wrong Carnarvon was to write off the Druze, I came back from Moukhtara and Hasbaya unwilling to do the same.
Back in Beirut I set up one final meeting, with a Druze professor at the American University of Beirut named Sami Makarem. He invited me to his flat, and when I arrived, he offered me a glass of sweet mulberry juice. “Our God is different from your Abrahamic God,” he said. “In Semitic religion, God is known by his deeds. But for us, he is immanent and transcendent at the same time.” The Druze see God, like the Neoplatonic One, as unchanging—not the cause of the Universe, but the cause of the causes of the Universe (the One causes the Universal Mind and Soul; the Universal Mind and Soul cause the Universe). God cannot be described—and is therefore addressed by Druze only as “Creator of the Universe,” because no other appellation can be used with any confidence.
True to the idea of emanationism, the Druze believe that the world is part of God in the same way as the dream is part of the dreamer. Makarem continued: “Separating oneself from God and thinking of one’s separateness is evil. The ego is in individuals who are otherwise emanations of God. The ego comes necessarily. And what can we fight it with? With love. Love, and by accepting that we are dependent on the cosmic order.” This notion reminded me of the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux: “As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the colour and savour of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God.”
Were the Druze, I asked the professor, successors to the Pythagoreans? He smiled at me guardedly and did not reply. He had obviously decided that a non-initiate could not be given the answer to this question. As he told me, “Hermes Tresmegistus, the founder of astronomy, says that to reveal a truth to man unready to accept it is three sins at once. It makes him disbelieve in truth, makes him think wrongly about you, and makes him say the truth is nonsense.” What, in Makarem’s view, might make a person ready to accept the truth? Did my study of Greek philosophy qualify me? It seemed not. Makarem said that “it takes generations to adapt for truth. That is what reincarnation means. True knowledge is recollection.” Pythagoras had thought that by recalling his past incarnations he could accumulate more than a lifetime’s worth of wisdom. Similarly, the Druze believe that since they are reincarnated in the community of the enlightened, only they can ever hope to attain real wisdom. It is a truly Pythagorean notion.
5: Samaritans
The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel must be the most found of all lost people. In the ninth century, they were reported to be in Arabia. A few centuries later, they were apparently near India—where, a medieval fabulist reported excitedly, they were guarded by Gog, Magog, and the queen of the Amazons and plotting the destruction of Christianity. Even when Europeans were exploring new continents they saw the Ten Tribes everywhere, like a ghostly army. Perhaps that was where the Native Americans came from, some suggested; Thomas Jefferson asked whether they might even want to return from America to their homeland in Zion.
I found the Lost Tribes myself when I was living in Jerusalem, between 1998 and 2001. I was there for a quite different purpose. As a political officer at the British consulate general in Jerusalem, my main task was to persuade Palestinians to support the Middle East peace process. At the time I was there, it seemed possible that some kind of deal would be reached. It would not have given either side exactly what they wanted, but it would have ended the cycles of rebellion and repression that had marked the Palestinian experience, and offered both Palestinians and Israelis the chance to live in greater peace and dignity.
Although this later proved a false hope, it meant that when I first arrived in Jerusalem in 1998 there was a sense of optimism—and it was safe enough to explore the fascinating region in which I was living. I saw the almost miraculous cities of Israel, in which a state and language and pioneering economy had all been developed in the few decades since Israel’s founding in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. (The language, modern Hebrew, was actually devised from the 1880s onward as a simplified version of biblical Hebrew by a scholar called Eliezer Ben Yehuda. Ben Yehuda’s son was brought up, at his father’s insistence, to speak only Hebrew—a tough rule, because it meant that no other children could understand him. But eventually, in the face of skepticism and some hostility, Ben Yehuda’s project succeeded and the language was widely adopted.) I saw, too, the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which Israel had conquered in 1967. The Palestinians had one of the liveliest cultures of any Arab people: their desire for freedom had inspired them to develop a strong identity, expressed through film, art, and theater.
Several times I visited Nablus, a city of white limestone houses once famous for its beauty and its olive oil, which was about thirty miles north of Jerusalem. Its name came from the name given it by the Romans, Neapolis, which meant “new city.” The old city that had existed nearby, and which the Romans had destroyed, was called Shechem, meaning “saddle,” because just like a saddle dipping in the middle with a ridge on either side, two mountains here enclose a valley. These are Mount Gerizim, to its west, and Mount Ebal, to its east. They are close enough that jackals once could howl to one another across the valley between them. The site of ancient Shechem is now occupied by a United Nations refugee camp called Balata, which I had the chance to visit when the consulate funded a theater project there.
In 1950 Palestinians from villages near what is now Tel Aviv, fleeing or driven out by the victorious Israeli army, settled here in tents. Now the tents have been replaced with concrete houses, and the place has become a poor suburb of Nablus, though its people have never been reconciled to the confiscation of their original homes. A group of young men from the camp who were involved with the theater project gave me a tour of the local area. We walked through the city of Nablus and tried some of its famous sweet konafa, made with cheese and dripping with honey, which along with olive oil soap is one of the local specialties.
On the edge of Balata was Jacob’s Well. Whether or not the Jewish patriarch Jacob did himself use this well, it certainly has been treated as a holy site for thousands of years. In the Christian Gospels, Jesus asks a woman to draw water from it for him to drink. The woman, a Samaritan, is amazed that he speaks to her, because “the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.” The same conflict between Jews and Samaritans crops up in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan: a Jewish man lies wounded at the roadside, and a Jewish priest and a Levite pass him by (not because they are callous, but because it was taboo for a priest to touch a corpse, and they fear he may be dead). A Samaritan is the one who helps the wounded Jew, and so he is the one whom, Jesus says, his own Jewish followers should love. The fact that he is a Samaritan is the twist in the tale, because Samaritans and Jews were old enemies. They were almost identical in their religious practices, but different interpretations of history had set them at war.
The Samaritan interpretation goes like this. Back in the eighth century bc two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, occupied roughly the territory of modern Israel. The two kingdoms fought each other, but their inhabitants shared a religion and a common ancestry, because all of them belonged to one of twelve tribes descended from the twelve sons of Jacob. The kingdom of Israel was the older of the two and was o
riginally the location of the religion’s holy sites. When that kingdom was invaded by the Assyrians in the eighth century bc, though, tens of thousands of its inhabitants were carried off to northern Iraq. The kingdom of Judah was spared; its inhabitants came to be called Judeans, and then Jews. They, too, were taken into exile in Babylon, and came back with new ideas and changed traditions. As for the exiles from Israel, they were never heard of again, and came to be called the Ten Lost Tribes.
But not all the ten tribes were truly lost, say the Samaritans. Some were deported by the Assyrians, yes, but others remained. Revering Mount Gerizim was their tenth commandment. In Samaritan belief, Adam had been made from dust gathered from Mount Gerizim. It was here, not Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark came to rest; here, not Mount Sinai, where Moses was given the law; and here, not Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where Abraham took Isaac for sacrifice. They had thirteen different names with which they honored it, such as Ar Gerizim, “Mount of the Commandments”; Gabat Olam, “World’s Mountain”; and Ar Ashekina, “Mountain of the Dwelling Place of God.” They built a temple on it, and each year they pitched tents on the mountaintop and reenacted the Passover sacrifice according to the ritual in the book of Exodus.
They did not call themselves Jews, but rather Hebrews or Israelites. They also called themselves Shamarin, an Aramaic word meaning “the guardians”—the origin of the word “Samaritans.” The Samaritans saw themselves as keeping to the letter the ancient traditions that their southern neighbors the Jews had abandoned. They saw the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as an unholy innovation by King David, who is a figure they particularly dislike: to this day, no Samaritan is ever given the name David. Jerusalem, as the Samaritans see it, is a pagan city unfit to be the site of the Temple.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 19