Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (25 page)

Whatever the reason for the cultural similarities between the two groups, a Freemason such as Carnarvon certainly would have spotted the resemblance. There is more than dispassionate observation in his description of the ascent of the Druze toward the higher secrets of the faith: “Gradually—very gradually—he is permitted to draw aside the successive veils which shroud the great secret . . . he is learning only to unlearn; he makes, and he treads on the ruins of his former belief: slowly, painfully, dizzily, he mounts each successive degree of initiation . . . and—as if to mock the hope of all return—at each stride he hears the step on which he last trod crumble and crash into the measureless abyss that rolls below him. Few indeed scale these mysterious heights.”

—————

HOW MANY SECRETS WOULD I LEARN
, I wondered, at the Jumblatt castle? As Hassan drove me up toward it, he slowed to a more reverent speed. I noticed a simple stone up ahead, by the roadside. “It is a memorial to Kamal Bek,” said Hassan, referring to Kamal Jumblatt, Walid’s father (“Bek” is an honorific). The car stopped. “He was killed just here,” Hassan said, and sat behind the steering wheel without moving, looking at the stone. Hassan could only have been a child at the time, but his tone and manner suggested that he had witnessed the scene that he was describing. “He only had one bodyguard, and his car was coming the same way we are heading now. Another car came in the other direction.” I looked ahead, toward the next hairpin bend, where the road curved upward. “From there,” Hassan said. “There was a group of men in the car and they opened fire and killed him.” He would not say who was responsible, but it is widely accepted that the attack was arranged by Syrian president Hafez al-Assad to punish Jumblatt for rejecting a Syrian-brokered peace deal intended to end the Lebanese civil war on terms Jumblatt found unacceptable. Hassan sighed. Another Druze hero had fallen.

He restarted the car and we climbed the last few hundred yards to Moukhtara village. Here I finally caught my first glimpse of Walid Jumblatt’s castle. A huge building in honey-colored stone, it dominated the hairdresser’s and grocery store and well-kept gardens of the hillside settlement. After dropping my bags at an outbuilding, I made my way to its gatehouse, where bodyguards sat chatting and drinking coffee in front of an old cupboard with a grimy glass door through which I spotted a selection of rifles and what looked like a rocket launcher.

Finally a familiar character with wild white hair came into view: Walid Jumblatt was here to collect me, his dog bounding along behind him. I avoided trying to ask him again about the Druze religion for the time being, and instead admiringly toured his ancestral home. The castle was built in what could be called the Lebanese classical style: a red tiled roof, patches of red and orange coloring on the walls, pointed arches between thin columns and a lantern hanging from the tip of each point. In the courtyard—perhaps the same place where Carnarvon had seen the jousting—there were fountains, pediments above the windows, and a Roman sarcophagus decorated with scenes of Bacchus dancing among grapes. The interior rooms were more lavish: huge marble floors, fountains, Damascene carved ceilings. A massive painting of the siege of Leningrad, a gift from the Soviet Union, was a sign of where the Druze had turned when British support ran dry.

Over dinner I tried him again on Druze religion, and he promised to introduce me to some of the clergy. But he preferred to talk about politics. Syria was descending into civil war, and the Druze there would have to take sides: to his embarrassment, he said over glasses of vodka and cups of steaming black coffee, there were many who wanted to back Assad. I asked how the Druze had ended up in Syria in the first place, and he told me that they had been forced to flee there in 1711 as a result of an internal battle among the Druze themselves, between two groups called Qaysis and Yemenis. The Yemenis had been driven out east, into what later became Syria. Their descendants are now the world’s largest Druze community; most of them live on a basalt plateau called the Druze Mountain. The Druze in Israel (now numbering a little over 120,000) were separated from their brethren in Lebanon when national borders were imposed on the region after World War I.

The next day Walid Jumblatt fulfilled his promise and took me to meet the
uqqal
at a lunch in a garden higher up the hillside. He drove the car, rather to my surprise: wasn’t he worried that what had happened to his father might happen to him, too? “It’s down to fate,” he said. A belief that certain events are destined to happen and cannot be avoided is common in the Middle East (and it is an old one; Babylonian astrology rests on this belief that human affairs are fore-ordained). It was an uneventful journey, except for people waving at Jumblatt in the one village through which we passed. When we reached the garden where the lunch was being held, it was like encountering an ocean of white fezzes and black cloaks: there were upward of a hundred sheikhs seated at the long tables, contemplating huge dishes of lamb and rice. The host, Sheikh Ali, came to greet us. He was an enormously jolly and rotund man, who in his nineteenth-century Druze dress of black baggy trousers and Ottoman fez looked like a pasha out of a 1930s film about the Orient. He was especially talented, I was told, at arranging picnics. I could believe it. Touring his house after the meal, though, I saw photographs on his living room wall that showed another side of the sheikh. They were from the early 1980s, when the civil war was just beginning, and showed a young Sheikh Ali training cadets for battle. In those times, the crisis was so great that the sheikhs had to fight despite their commitment to asceticism.

The sheikhs were keen to explain that this was not a normal practice—ordinarily they scrupulously avoid involving themselves in conflict of any kind. “We sheikhs are in the service of people,” said Sheikh Ali, “maintaining customs that keep the sect going, preserve the Druze honor, and prevent social ills.” But when Druze honor was at stake, he added, everything was permitted: “Yes, everyone in time of war must turn out, and fight with sticks if need be. Our community comes alive in war; it’s in peacetime that we get fed up.” The small group of young men gathered around the sheikh laughed in agreement. Sheikh Ali explained that his reference to sticks was meant seriously: that was how the Druze had fought the French in the 1920s, overcoming armed soldiers with swords, sticks, and stones before seizing their weapons and starting a full-scale insurrection. It all began because the French had arrested a guest of the local Druze chieftain, which the Druze considered to be an insult to their honor.

Another sheikh, blind in one eye, talked to me about the Greek philosophers. He told me how during the eleventh century, in a brilliant piece of polemic, the Muslim scholar al-Ghazali argued that philosophy was self-contradictory. It could not explain God and therefore could only lead those who studied it to skepticism. Al-Ghazali led the intellectual charge against the Greeks, and orthodox Sunni Islam gradually stopped taking inspiration from the philosophy of others. The Druze, though, isolated in their mountain villages and already determinedly unorthodox, were untouched by al-Ghazali. They continued to revere Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle.

After the lunch, back at Moukhtara, I wandered through alleyways and down stairs littered with oranges freshly fallen from trees. I passed a church, but its one tiny door was shut. Nearby there was a small restaurant where I sat writing for a while before a cheerful group of young men sitting at the next table invited me to join them for
arak.
They offered me
hummus
and
fattoush.
“We wish we could give you our local dish,” they said. “There are little pigs in the hills that people shoot, and cook them in red wine. But it’s not the season.” There is no dish that could be more forbidden in Islam than pork cooked in wine. I knew they must be
juhhal,
the uninitiated Druze who are not bound by any religious laws governing food.

“Tell us what you think about reincarnation,” they said. “Do you believe in it?” I tried to answer tactfully, but this wasn’t enough for them. “No, it’s real,” one of them said. “We have proof.” Another piped up: “My cousin could speak as a child in words that an ordinary person could not say, could do things that were remarkable for her age.” Another told a story of a man who remembered that he had been killed on his wedding day and who was able to draw pictures of the dresses the women in attendance had worn. He even met the man who had killed his former self, and forgave him.

Later that day I met a woman who had changed her name because of a dream in which she was living in America. After considering the dream, her family decided that she was the reincarnation of a Druze girl who had gone to live there and had died young. That girl’s name had been Carmen, so she was renamed Karima in honor of her dead self. The belief in reincarnation is so widespread, a Druze friend later told me, that a boy who appeared to have knowledge of the life of a man who had died around the same time the boy was born was accepted as the new incarnation of the dead man’s soul and was trusted by the dead man’s children to divide up their inheritance.

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.”

—————

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
khalwa
s.”