I am very grateful to those who met me in Lebanon, especially Walid Jumblatt, Prince Talal Arslan, Dr. Sami Makarem of the American University of Beirut, and Sheikh Ali Zeinadin. The late Abu Muhammed Jawad, a very saintly man, was greatly mourned by the Druze when he died in 2012. Eyad Abu Shaqra gave me some useful insights into the community’s view of reincarnation. Abbas al-Halabi gave me his book, which is cited below. Rifaat Eid, Badr Wannous, and Sheikh Ahmed al-Assi were kind enough to see me when I was in Lebanon in 2012, on a return visit, to discuss the Alawite religion.
There are enough books on the Druze to justify a bibliography: The Druzes: An Annotated Bibliography, by Sami Swayd (ISES, 1998). General books on the Druze religion include The Druze, by Robert Brenton Betts (Yale University Press,1988); The Druze Faith, by Sami Makarem (Carnarvon Books, 1974); A History of the Druzes, by Kais Firro (Brill, 1992); The Druze: Realities and Perceptions, edited by Kamal Salibi (Druze Heritage Foundation, 2006); and Origins of the Druze People and Religion, by Philip K. Hitti (Columbia University Press, 1928). This last book was much criticized by those Druze whom I met, because they disliked certain of its conclusions. It does, however, honor them by declaring the Druze riddle to be “one of the most baffling in the history of religious thought.”
The sheikh al-aql gave me a brief official guide to the Druze religion: The Path to Monotheism, issued in ah 1431/ad 2010 by the Office of Druze Sheikhdom. Les Druzes: Vivre avec l’Avenir, by Abbas al-Halabi (Dar an-Nahar, 2006), forms part of a trend among Druze intellectuals to question how to keep their esoteric religion alive in a globalized world.
Matthew Arnold’s words are taken from his poem “Dover Beach.”
Between 2009 and 2011 Gallup discovered that 76 percent of Lebanese adults would not object to someone of a different religion moving in next door to them—more than the percentage in the United Kingdom, which was 57 percent, and Israel, which was 23 percent.
Gibran’s Garden of the Prophet is widely available in English, e.g., from UBS Publishers (1996), but I amended the translation to reflect the Arabic better.
“Like ants or frogs around a pond” is a remark made by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo. On Pythagoras and his legacy, I recommend Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, by Walter Burkert (Harvard University Press, 1972); Leonid Zhmud, Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans (Oxford University Pres, 2012); The Fifth Hammer, by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone, 2011), which looks particularly at Pythagorean interest in music; and Measuring Heaven, by Christiane Joost-Gaugier (Cornell University Press, 2006), which discusses medieval European (i.e., Christian) interest in Pythagoras.
The Arabic book Pythagoras I read in Beirut was written by Hubert Husun (1947) and translated by Shawqi Dawud Tamraz. The autumn 2013 edition of the Beirut-based magazine Al-Duha was the issue that contained an article about Pythagoras. Justinian’s edict is quoted from John Malalas’s Chronicles, 18:46, translated by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott (Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986)—which is also what tells us of the sequel. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” was a rhetorical question asked by the Christian polemicist Tertullian in De Prescription Hereticorum, chapter 7.
Ikhwan al-Safa’, by Godefroid de Callataij (Oneworld, 2005), gives more detail on the mysterious Brethren of Purity. A complete edition of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity was published in 2008 by Oxford University Press, edited by Nader el-Bizri. Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwa comes as number 35 in the collection of Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwas edited by Ibn Qasim and Ibn Muhammad (Matabi’ al-Riyad, 1961–67) and can be seen at http://archive.org/stream/mfsiaitmmfsiaitm/mfsiaitm35#page/n159/mode/2up. Najla Abu Izzeddin’s book, referred to in this chapter, is The Druzes (Brill, 1984)
For an understanding of neo-Platonism, the best insight of all can be gained from Plotinus’s Enneads, available in an English translation by Stephen MacKenna (John Dillon, 1991). Books that examine the ways in which early Muslims adopted and adapted neo-Platonism include The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Muslim Neoplatonists, by Ian Richard Netton (George Allen & Unwin, 1982); and the particularly useful Greek Thought, Arabic Culture by Gutas. A Short History of the Ismailis, by Farhad Daftary (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), explains more about the Ismaili Muslim context from which the Druze emerged. Caliph of Cairo, by Paul E. Walker (American University of Cairo Press, 2010), is a biography of al-Hakim bi Amr Allah.
The US telegram published by Wikileaks can be seen at https://www .wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIRUT972_a.html.
Recollections of the Druses of the Lebanon, by the Earl of Carnarvon (John Murray, 1860), contains his account of visiting Moukhtara and speculations on the Druze religion. “Druses of Syria and Their Relation to Freemasonry,” by Haskett Smith, can be read in the 1891 edition of Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. I gathered a broader knowledge of Freemasonry’s history from Freemasonry: A Celebration of the Craft, edited by John Hamill and R. A. Gilbert (Angus Books, 1993). Hitti’s observation comes in his Origins of the Druze People.
The July 2013 assault was reported in the Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star, July 23, 2013. The old lady commenting on George Clooney’s marriage was quoted by Zeina Hariz in an article in Arabic for the Al-Nahar newspaper, April 29, 2014.
Details of Israeli land confiscation came from “The Druze in Israel: Questions of Identity, Citizenship, and Patriotism,” by Mordechai Nisan, Middle East Journal 64, no. 4 (Autumn 2010). Chapter 10 of “On Loving God” by St. Bernard of Clairvaux can be read at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library website, www.ccel.org.
Chapter 5: Samaritans
I lived in Jerusalem for three years as a British diplomat between 1998 and 2001 and visited the Samaritans twice during that time, but the Passover sacrifice described in this chapter happened in 2012. I would like to thank the Samaritan community and Benny Tsedaka in particular for their cooperation and help, and also their representative in London, Felicity Devonshire.
General books on the Samaritans include History of the Samaritans, by Nathan Schur (Peter Lang, 1989) and The Keepers: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Samaritans, by Robert T. Anderson and Terry Giles (Hendrickson, 2002). A Companion to Samaritan Studies, by Alan David Crown, Reinhard Pummer, and Abraham Tal (Mohr Siebeck, 1993), is a good reference work.
Jesus’s encounter at Jacob’s well is told in John 4:9. Tudor Parfitt’s The Lost Tribes of Israel provided much of the material on the legend of the Ten Tribes and its influence on medieval Europeans, with which the chapter begins. The Book of Kings quote is from verse 17:24. The quote from the Babylonian Talmud is taken from a translation by Professor Mahlon H. Smith at http://virtualreligion.net/iho/samaria.html.
The estimate of the Samaritan population in Jesus’s time is taken from Alan David Crown, The Samaritans (Mohr, 1989), who estimates their numbers in the Helleno-Roman period on page 201. Jesus’s instructions to avoid Samaritan towns are in Matthew 10:5, and his first visit there himself in Luke 9:51; the accusation that he was a Samaritan comes in John 8:48; and Samaritan converts are mentioned in Acts 8:14.
Antoninus of Piacenza’s observations are taken from John Wilkinson’s Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades (Aris and Phillips, 2002). Maimonides, by Joel Kramer (Doubleday, 2010) is the source of the sage’s remark on Islam. Schur’s assessment of the initial effects of the Arab conquest is given on page 93 of his History of the Samaritans.
Joseph Scaliger’s letters are quoted from An Account of the Samaritans in a Letter to J—— M—— Esq. (R. Wilkin, ca. 1714). Another quote at the end of the chapter is taken from this book.
Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff was republished by Cambridge University Press in 2012. Memoir of the Rev. Pliny Fisk, by Alvan Bond, was published by Crocker and Brewster in 1828. Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, by John Mills, was published by John Murray in 1864.
The Sam
aritan high priest commenting on the foundation of Israel is quoted by Douglas V. Duff, a British policeman in Palestine during the 1930s and a prolific writer who recorded his experiences in Palestine Picture (Hodder and Stoughton, 1936). H. V. Morton’s observation comes in his book In the Steps of the Master (Rich & Cowan, 1934). Schur’s remark about “probably the smallest group” is on page 11 of his History of the Samaritans.
The 2010 genetics study is by Gil Atzmon, Li Hao, and others and is published in the American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (June 11, 2010). The 2004 paper by Peidong Shen, Tal Lavi, and others was published in Human Mutation 24 (2004) and can be read at http://evolutsioon.ut.ee/publications/Shen2004.pdf.
Yitzhak Magen’s excavations of the Samaritan temple are described in “Israel’s Other Temple,” Der Spiegel International, April 2012.
The two Israeli documentaries made about the Samaritans are New Samaritans (Journeyman Pictures, 2007) and Lone Samaritan (Heymann Brothers Films, 2010).
Jacob Esh Shalaby’s life is described in Notices of the Modern Samaritans, by E. T. Rogers (Sampson Low & Son, 1855).
Lord Rothschild’s envoy’s positive appraisal of Samaritan-Muslim relations is quoted in Schur’s History of the Samaritans, page 194.
The Song of the Sea is Exodus 15:1–18.
Chapter 6: Copts
I lived in Egypt for a year from 1997 to 1998, and returned twice for this chapter: once in April 2011, and once in May 2012. It was during this last visit that I spent a week down in Minya.
I am very grateful to Dr. Cornelis Hulsman and his Arab-West Report for their introductions and information. This charity tries to produce objective analysis of violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt; its website can be visited at www.arabwestreport.info. I am also grateful to those quoted in the text: Tariq Al Awadi, George Ishaq, and Yousif Sidhum. Fr. Yoannis of Qufada kindly showed me around his parish on several successive days. Others in the text are unnamed, but not for lack of appreciation of how generous they were with their time and thoughts.
Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs, by Jill Kamil (Routledge, 2002), and Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, by Otto Meinardus (American University of Cairo Press, 1999), were both useful on the Copts in general. On Copt-Muslim relations, I read Christians Versus Muslims in Modern Egypt, by S. S. Hasan (Oxford University Press, 2003)—a book whose authorship somewhat belies its gloomy title, since it was written by a Muslim Egyptian with great though not uncritical sympathy for the Copts; The Copts of Egypt, a document issued by Minority Rights International and written by Saad Eddin Ibrahim and others, published in 1996; Copts and Moslems, by Kyriakos Mikhail (Smith, Elder, 1911); and Motherland Lost, by Samuel Tadros (Hoover Institution Press, 2013).
The travel writer Anthony Sattin also looked at the survival of ancient customs in Egypt, though without much focus on the Copts, for In the Pharaoh’s Shadow (Eland, 2012). Max Rodenbeck’s book Cairo: The City Victorious (Vintage, 2000) is an excellent history of the city since its medieval Islamic foundation. The Osirites recommended to me Dawn of Conscience, by James Breasted (Macmillan, 1976), for evidence of the spiritual sophistication of the early Egyptians. More than one Egyptian directed me to Fellahin of Upper Egypt, by Winifred Blackman (Harrap, 1927), for evidence of ancient customs that are still practiced.
The number of Copts in Egypt is a matter of controversy. The official Egyptian census found that Copts were 8.34 percent of the population in 1923, 5.87 percent in 1986, and an estimated 5.50 percent in 2000. Cornelis Hulsman, in Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Etudes Orientales à Caire 29 (2012), defends the census findings against skepticism expressed by many Copts, who estimate their own numbers at anything up to 20 percent of the population.
The Egyptians of Disert Ulaidh are mentioned in the Litany of Aengus the Culdee, dated to 799. This is discussed by the Middle East Journal’s editor in a 2009 blog: http://mideasti.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/saint-patricks-day -special-patrick-and.html.The chanting of the seven vowels is described by Demetrius of Phalerum in his book On Style, chapter 71. The number of Coptic Catholics is given by the Roman Catholic agency CNEWA as 162,000 in a February 2013 estimate. Herodotus’s comment on Egyptian religiosity is on page 143 of de Sélincourt’s translation of The Histories. Shibley Telhami in “Egypt’s Identity Crisis,” a Brookings Institution paper of August 16, 2013, concluded from ten years of opinion polls in Egypt that “Egyptians see themselves as the most religious people in the world.”
The Gilgamesh quote is from the George translation (see notes to Chapter 1). The twenty-fourth-century bc inscription is from Samuel Mercer’s 1952 translation of the Pyramid Texts.
It was the Greek historian Plutarch, in chapter 43 of his Isis and Osiris, who tells us that in his time the Egyptians called the spring equinox “Osiris’s coming to the Moon” (translation by Babbitt; Loeb Classical Library, 1936). Akhenaten’s hymn is taken from Cyril Aldred’s book Akhenaten, King of Egypt (Thames and Hudson, 1991). Dr. Amin Makram Ebeid has written several books on religion and culture in Egypt including Egypt at a Crossroads (El Hadara, 2010). It was he who told me the story of the Copts who sang dirges for a patient while he tried to operate on her.
“Prevalence of Female Genital Cutting Among Egyptian girls,” by Tag-Eldin and others, in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization for April 2008 (www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/4/07-042093/en) lists some of the surveys by the UN and others showing the remarkably high prevalence of FGM in Egypt. Murgan al Gohary called for the Sphinx and Pyramids to be destroyed on November 10, 2012, during an interview on Egypt’s Dream TV.
For Egypt’s pre-Christian religion I read Religion in Roman Egypt, by Max Frankfurter, which provided me with the Oxyrhynchus hieroglyph guild’s lament that their profession was dying out.
The voyages of J. M. Vansleb (aka Wansleben) are recounted in his book Nouvelle Relations d’un Voyage Fait en Egypte (an Elibron Classics facsimile of Estienne Michallet’s 1677 Paris edition). Al-Maqrizi tells the story of how the Sphinx lost its nose in his Kitab al-Mawa’iz wa-al-I’tibar bi-Dhikr al-Khitat wa-al-Athar; this is also the source for his observations on the Abu Fana monastery. William Browne can be read in The Modern Traveller (Cawthorn, 1800).
On Egyptomania and its effects on Egyptian nationalism, I owe much—including quotes from Tahtawi and Khedive Ismail—to Whose Pharaohs? Archeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I, by Donald Malcolm Reid (University of California Press, 2002). Ismail’s appointments are given in Iris Habib al Masri’s Story of the Copts (Saint Anthony’s Coptic Monastery, 1982). For the events of 1919, including Father Sergious’s sermon, I am indebted to Tadros’s Motherland Lost.
The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties’ activities are described by S. S. Hasan in chapter 3 of her Christians Versus Muslims, and also in The Muslim Brotherhood, by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham (Princeton University Press, 2013).
The Last Arab is a book by Sa’id Abu Rish (Duckworth, 2005). The figure of 75 percent losses for the Copts from Nasser’s nationalizations comes from Ibrahim et al., The Copts of Egypt. Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994), evocatively tells how the diverse Egyptian community in which the Jewish Aciman was brought up was dispersed.
Kamal Mougheeth’s recollections came in the article “M Is for Mosque,” by Yasmine Fathi, for Ahram Online, May 4, 2013. Mehdi Akef’s “at-tuz” interview was published by Rose al-Youssef on April 9, 2006 (as reported by International Crisis Group, “Egypt’s Muslim Brothers,” June 18, 2008). The 92 percent reference comes from a Gallup poll in March-April 2011: www.gallup .com/poll/157046/egypt-tahrir-transition.aspx#1.
The damage from the Minya riots is listed by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (which gave me the names of the two men who died) at its website, www.eipr.org/en/content/2013/08/25/1796. The estimate of 65 percent of violence taking place in Minya is from an arti
cle by Soliman Shafiq in the February 15, 2014, issue of Watani, online at http://wataninet.com /watani_Article_Details.aspx?A=51783. Statistics on poverty and unemployment in Minya can be found in Al Monitor, “Egypt’s Minya Province Flashpoint for Muslim-Christian Violence,” www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals /2014/04/egypt-sectarian-violence-minya-province.html#. The statistics from the Pew poll 2011–12 are from “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society” at www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion -politics-society-interfaith-relations.
For more detail on the Egyptian curriculum, including recent reforms, see “New Approaches in the Portrayal of Christianity in Egyptian Textbooks,” by Dr. Wolfram Reiss, Cairo, November 2006.
Chapter 7: Kalasha
I made my visit to the Kalasha valleys in December 2012. That came after two years spent in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009 and a visit to the northern areas of Pakistan in 2008. Siraj Ul-Mulk’s excellent hotel in Chitral, where I stayed, is called the Hindukush Heights. I am very grateful to him and his wife, Ghazala, and more especially to the Kalasha people, who received me so kindly. Azem Bek and Wazir Ali Shah deserve special mention. Humira Noorestani very kindly gave me insights into what it is like to be a contemporary Afghan American of Nuristani origin, and helped provide a corrective to the perception of her people as poor and fanatical.
The quotation in the first paragraph is from Peter Mayne’s The Narrow Smile (Murray, 1955). The references to Alexander the Great’s travels in the third paragraph come from Arrian’s Anabasis in Martin Hammond’s translation (Oxford University Press, 2013). Marco Polo’s remarks are in Latham’s translation of Polo’s The Travels (Penguin, 1958).
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 36