Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (24 page)

The preachers would have found not only Christian villagers but the last remnants of a pagan cult. The Harranians had a temple at Baalbek in Lebanon—just sixty miles north from the Shouf Mountains, where I was now—at the time when the first Druze missionaries arrived. Perhaps some Harranians were among those who adopted the Druze philosophy, finding that it made Islam easier to accept, since it shared their belief in reincarnation and allowed them to continue revering Pythagoras and other figures from the ancient Greek tradition whom Christianity and Islam ignored.

I noticed curious shop names in one Druze town: Wisdom Pharmacy and Enlightenment Hospital, for example. At a dry cleaner’s, I saw a Druze religious poem posted that began: “O Creator of the Universe . . . ” It had been written by al-Halawi, the respected sheikh whose name I learned at Prince Talal Arslan’s castle. One building, otherwise plain, had a single five-pointed star painted above its entrance.

One other quality marked Druze villages as unique: oddly ubiquitous men in brown coveralls, with white woolen caps on their shaved heads, working on houses and gardens and at gas stations. The only hair each of them had was a bristling mustache. I asked Hassan who they were. “Sheikhs,” he said. These were
uqqal
—more junior versions of the ones that I had seen when I visited the House of the Sect. The laypeople among the Druze live as they choose, but the Druze clergy abide by a philosophy of self-denial. Male sheikhs are encouraged to live off the land, and it is particularly virtuous for them to eat only the food that they themselves have grown. They live austere lives, praying and meditating regularly, fasting during Ramadan, avoiding pork and alcohol, and never engaging in any kind of excess (a sheikh, for example, even when presented with a glass of water, is not supposed to drink it all down but only to sip at it without slaking his thirst). Druze clergy are proportionally a large group: perhaps 15 percent of all Druze, both men and women, are sheikhs. Joining the clergy was not a complicated business, Hassan had told me: a person applied for admission, and over a period of time was evaluated for the level of his or her commitment and capacity for religious understanding.

Hassan’s wife was a member of the Druze clergy. Just as the male sheikhs tilled the land, she and other women sheikhas worked on embroidery and other home crafts that allowed them to earn an income without going out into the world. If Hassan’s wife did go outside her home, she would wear a white handkerchief on her head and half covering her face, like the women I had seen in the House of the Sect. Hassan was not a talkative man, but he was beginning to open up. Where had he been in Lebanon? I asked. “Down to Beirut, and back here.” He had never left the Druze areas; his whole world, I guessed, could be no more than a square fifteen miles on each side. I guessed he had been a fighter in the civil war.

On our journey we passed through Druze towns and villages dotting the hillsides. The houses were large, some huge, and yet were used only as summer homes by wealthy Druze émigrés. Hassan told me that of the six thousand residents of his home village, between twenty and twenty-five had over $100 million each. Much of this wealth was the result of successful business ventures abroad, especially in West Africa. Many Druze villages had become ghost towns, with maybe only a third of the houses actually inhabited year-round. When we passed a village that was near Hassan’s own, I asked whether there had been many killed there during the years of violence. Thirteen, he said: five when the village was bombed by Israel, the others killed at checkpoints when their ID cards showed them to be Druze. “It was a horrible war.” When had it stopped? I asked. “It hasn’t,” he told me. “It’s still going on.”

The “tomb” of the Prophet Job, in Lebanon’s Shouf Mountains, is a holy site for the country’s 250,000 Druze. Since they believe in reincarnation, however, they consider it a cenotaph. Photo by the author

When the civil war began, the Shouf Mountains saw some vicious fighting between the Druze and their Christian neighbors, who had been brought here by Druze rulers as tenant farmers in the seventeenth century. The Druze eventually gained the upper hand and cleared Christians from parts of the Shouf (though Jumblatt has recently encouraged them to return). Later in the war, the Druze were more often battling the Shi’a militias whose heartland was to their south. After the civil war was resolved in 1989, tension between Druze and Shi’a occasionally resurfaced. The worst single incident came in May 2008, when Hizbullah shelled Druze in the Shouf and took control of two strategically located Druze villages. In the ensuing fighting, the Druze resumed a trademark method of killing their enemies—cutting throats. Advisers to Jumblatt and Arslan later told the US ambassador (in conversations eventually published by Wikileaks) that the Druze were living in a “sea of Shi’a” and feared Shi’a vengeance. The events of 2008 served as an example of how communal violence could reemerge in Lebanon without notice, since there was no effective central authority that could resolve disputes: Lebanon’s government is itself hostage to the same tensions. “We are a small people,” was a refrain that I heard often in the Shouf hills.

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ONCE IT HAD BEEN DIFFERENT
. Fakhreddin, the preeminent Druze feudal lord in the early seventeenth century, carved out of the Ottoman domain a territory that was essentially independent, and whose borders were close to those of modern Lebanon. Fakhreddin is a figure of national importance: he gives Lebanon a native founder and a historical legitimacy in the face of those who say that the country was a creation of the French colonial powers in 1926. The Ottoman Turkish army eventually brought his independent statelet to an end. Hassan took me to a ruined fortress at the top of a tall cliff on the southern edge of the Shouf. Only fragments remained of a great castle that had once stood there, commanding the plain below. This, too, had been one of Fakhreddin’s castles. “The Turks surrounded this place,” Hassan said, “but Fakhreddin would not give up. He carried on resisting. And then the Turks poisoned the springs from where the castle got all its water. But even then he refused to surrender. I’ll tell you what he did. He blindfolded himself and his horse, and together they jumped off this cliff so that he would not be caught.” I looked down. The fall must have been a hundred feet or so. Hassan had walked back to the spot where the poisoned spring had been. Now there was only dampness underfoot. But for him it seemed almost sacred ground. Here was where a great Druze hero had been brought low. “Forgotten kingdoms?” said Hassan when I told him my book’s title. “We have not forgotten.”

Fakhreddin’s story is a myth, symbolizing Druze courage. He was in fact caught and put to death by the Turks. After him various other families competed to be preeminent among the Druze. Today’s winners, the Jumblatts, have been living in a castle at Moukhtara since the eighteenth century. In 1853 the castle was visited by the English peer Lord Carnarvon (whose son would later fund the Tutankhamun expedition). The British had discovered in the 1840s that the Druze were a minority community in need of a sponsor, and had decided to fill that role. Carnarvon, who was on his way to becoming a senior British statesman, wanted to make the acquaintance of his nation’s latest allies. Carnarvon’s own stately home in England was itself fairly imposing—in recent years it has featured as Downton Abbey in the TV show of that name. Even so, he seems to have been greatly impressed by Moukhtara, which he described in a book published a few years later. Its finest scene is an account of a medieval-style joust held in the castle courtyard: “The cavaliers of the
maidan
in their gay colours, the ‘varlets’ standing by the horses and handing fresh spears to the riders, the shouts of approval which hailed each fortunate stroke, the ladies on the battlements . . . the armed and haughty crowd . . . the square towers rising from the long sweep of wall on every side.”

Carnarvon was certain that he had visited a relic of the Middle Ages that would not long survive. Even as he remembers the carnival of Moukhtara, he writes elegiacally of the Druze’s “picturesque and feudal independence . . . which is possibly now doomed to extinction in the mountains in Syria.” The Druze have outlasted that prediction, in part owing to the support of Carnarvon and others. In the 1860s Druze communities wrote in a collective petition to the British that “we Druses have, after God, no other protector than the British Government.” The belief even spread among the Druze that they were British by origin, or at least that they and the British shared a common ancestry. Some Druze believed this as late as the early twentieth century, and Druze leaders apparently still sometimes ask the British for aid. When I later met one of the most senior of Druze sheikhs, Abu Mohammed Jawad, as he lay on his deathbed in a simple cottage—where homemade confectionery sat on a cart ready to be served to guests—the one thing he had the strength to utter was a reference to this old and curious alliance.

The pro-Druze policy may have seemed a surprising one for a Christian country to adopt, since one of the principal enemies of the Druze at the time were the Maronite Christians. In the eyes of the British, however, the Maronites’ Christianity was far less important than the fact that they were backed by the French. There was another reason the British favored the Druze, though, a wonderful find for a conspiracy theorist. Among all the colorful theories about the origins of the Druze—as well as their putative British ancestry, they were said to be descended from a French count called Dreux, or, according to the Russian theosophist Madame Blavatsky, from Tibetan lamas—the most intriguing suggestion of all is in a volume deep in the London Library, dating from 1891. The book contains the proceedings of a Masonic lodge called Quatuor Coronati. Its first article, by Brother the Reverend Haskett Smith, argues “that, to this very day, the Druses retain many evident tokens of their close and intimate connection with the Ancient Craft of Freemasonry.”

The Freemasons believed that they carried on the traditions of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple. Brother Haskett thought that the Druze were the real thing—the masons’ actual descendants—and he was determined to prove it. He spent several weeks in Lebanon, living among the Druze and trying out a simple test. The Freemasons believe that the code words they use were handed down from the builders of the Temple; Brother Haskett thus assumed that the Druze must know the same words. But since he had great difficulty penetrating their wall of secrecy—as he ruefully recounted, each time he asked them about their beliefs, “the whole subject is adroitly turned”—he realized he would have to overcome their secrecy with guile.

He summons up, perhaps sincerely, a fascinatingly bizarre image for us: “I have made many attempts to gain the ear of a Druse by words, mysteriously whispered, as a dramatic theatrical aside, solemnly pronounced, or casually uttered when the Druse would be least on his guard.” This made me imagine a scholarly English cleric in his dog collar trying to surprise tough and wizened Druze farmers by coming up behind them and shouting words in ancient Hebrew. If the Druze knew the words, they nevertheless maintained their aplomb, for Brother Haskett never found proof of his theory. He presented it to his fellow Freemasons nonetheless, as the 1891 record shows—noting their skepticism as it does so. One of Brother Haskett’s audience, indignant that his movement should be regarded as a mere offshoot and a Middle Eastern community presented as the original, claimed that the Druze must simply have borrowed their customs from the Freemasons. (In fact, the historian Philip Hitti claimed that the Knights Templar, whom Freemasons have attempted to imitate, might have been influenced by the Druze “organization and teaching.” The concept of the self-denying, austere warrior-monk is one that the Templars and Druze shared, although there is not much evidence of philosophical ideas that they held in common.)

British war artist Anthony Gross painted this depiction of Druze religious leaders (seated in the circle, at center) accompanied by members of the British Druze Cavalry Regiment in 1942, during World War II. The Druze had a friendship with the British dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, though in fact this Druze regiment had been deployed by the Vichy French against the British before being won over to the British side. Image courtesy Anthony Gross/Imperial War Museum