The Druze: A Closed Faith You Cannot Convert Into
The Druze are around a million people in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Golan Heights who follow a faith that closed its doors to converts in 1043 and has admitted nobody since. This guide covers the eleventh-century Fatimid origin, the uqqal and juhhal initiation split, the Epistles of Wisdom, taqammus rebirth, and what outsiders reliably get wrong.
Who are the Druze and what do they believe?
The Druze are an Arabic-speaking religious community of roughly a million people, concentrated in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Golan Heights, who follow a monotheistic faith that separated from Isma'ili Shi'i Islam in the eleventh century and has admitted no converts since 1043. They call themselves al-Muwahhidun, those who affirm the divine oneness, and the outsider label Druze comes from an early preacher, al-Darazi, whom the movement's own founders denounced. Their central claim is tawhid, the absolute unity of God, held so strictly that God is beyond attribute, name and comparison of any kind. Around that sit the beliefs outsiders find hardest to place: that the divine unity has appeared in human form at successive points in history, most recently in the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah; that a fixed number of souls was created at once and passes from body to body without pause; and that the full doctrine is disclosed only to initiated members, the uqqal, who are a minority of the community. Everyone else, the juhhal, lives as a Druze in every social and legal sense without ever being taught the texts.
The word Druze covers a people as much as a creed, which is why Lebanese confessional politics, Syrian provincial administration and Israeli law all treat it as a community rather than a denomination. Since there is no conversion, the boundary of the faith and the boundary of the family tree are the same line. That has produced a compact, internally organized society with its own courts for marriage, divorce and inheritance in Lebanon, Syria and Israel, and its own political record: Sultan al-Atrash led the Great Syrian Revolt against French rule from 1925, the Jumblatt family has anchored Lebanese Druze politics for generations, and Druze men who hold Israeli citizenship have been subject to military conscription since 1956 under an arrangement made with community leaders. Druze in the Golan Heights, annexed by Israel in 1981, mostly declined citizenship and are not conscripted. Historians disagree over how much of this cohesion comes from doctrine and how much is the residue of a thousand years spent as a minority in defensible mountains, where the useful thing about a high village was that armies rarely bothered with it.
What does al-Muwahhidun mean?
Al-Muwahhidun means those who profess or affirm oneness, from the Arabic tawhid, and it is what the Druze call themselves. Ahl al-Tawhid, people of unity, is the other common self-description. The name carries a claim rather than a description: that this community holds monotheism in a stricter form than the traditions around it, with God stripped of every attribute a human mind might try to assign.
Is being Druze an ethnicity or a religion?
Both, and separating them produces confusion in every direction. Druze are Arabic-speaking and, in food, dress and village life, largely indistinguishable from their Sunni, Shi'i, Maronite and Alawite neighbors. What sets them apart is a faith nobody can enter or leave, which over a thousand years has collapsed religious membership and descent into a single category.
Do the Druze have a single religious leader?
No one figure speaks for all Druze. Each country's community has its own senior authority, the shaykh al-aql, with separate offices in Lebanon, Syria and Israel, and the Lebanese post has at times been split between rival houses. Authority rests with the initiated as a body rather than with an ordained priesthood, and there is no seminary, no ordination and no central council that could issue a ruling binding on Druze elsewhere.
Where did the Druze faith come from and who founded it?
The Druze faith began in Cairo in 1017, inside the Fatimid caliphate, when a group of Isma'ili missionaries publicly proclaimed a new call, or da'wa, centered on the sixth Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Its principal architect was Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad, a Persian felt-maker from Zawzan in Khurasan who wrote most of the founding epistles and organized the movement's ranks. The Druze calendar counts its years from that proclamation, which falls in the year 408 of the Islamic calendar, and the earliest of Hamza's surviving epistles to carry a date was written in July 1017. Al-Hakim did not compose the doctrine himself; the movement formed around him and read him as the manifestation in human form of the divine unity, a reading Hamza set out in detail. On the night of 12 February 1021 al-Hakim rode out toward the Muqattam hills outside Cairo, as he often did after dark, and never came back. Search parties reported finding his mount and his bloodstained clothing; sources differ over whether the animal was a donkey or a horse, and no body was recovered. Sunni and Isma'ili chroniclers treat the episode as an assassination arranged within his own court, and modern historians have not settled it either way. Druze doctrine treats it as ghayba, occultation, a deliberate withdrawal from which he will return. The name Druze comes from Muhammad ibn Isma'il al-Darazi, an early and aggressive preacher, born in Bukhara and carrying a Persian byname meaning the tailor, whom Hamza denounced as a heretic and who was executed in 1018. The community has been known for a thousand years by the name of a man its founders repudiated.
After al-Hakim's disappearance his successor al-Zahir moved hard against the movement, and the persecution that followed pushed it out of Egypt and into the mountains where it has lived ever since: Wadi al-Taym at the foot of Mount Hermon, the Chouf in Mount Lebanon, the Galilee, and later the volcanic uplands of southern Syria that became known as Jabal al-Druze. Hamza wrote a farewell epistle after al-Hakim disappeared and then vanishes from the record; one later Baghdadi account has him recognized and killed at Mecca, and no version of his end can be confirmed. Leadership passed to Baha al-Din al-Muqtana al-Samuqi, one of his chief disciples, who by the later 1020s was writing letters to scattered communities, arguing with rival claimants and consolidating doctrine, and who kept it up for roughly two decades. The epistles of that period read less like scripture composed in tranquility than like correspondence from a movement under pressure, which is exactly what it was. Isma'ili roots stay visible in the vocabulary of the texts, the ranked cosmology and the habit of reading scripture for an inner meaning, but the Druze discarded the Fatimid imamate after al-Hakim and the ritual law along with it.
Who was al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah?
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ruled the Fatimid caliphate from Cairo between 996 and 1021, succeeding his father al-Aziz on 14 October 996 at eleven years old, and he is reckoned the sixth Fatimid caliph and the sixteenth Isma'ili imam. Hostile chroniclers describe erratic decrees, including measures against Christians and Jews and the order of October 1009 that destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Modern historians differ sharply over how much of that portrait is politics written by his enemies. Druze doctrine reads him as a manifestation of the divine unity.
Who was Hamza ibn Ali?
Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad was a Persian from Zawzan in Khurasan who arrived in Cairo and became the organizing mind of the Druze call from 1017. He never claimed divinity for himself. He wrote the core doctrinal letters, ranked the movement's officers, set out the seven duties and denounced al-Darazi in writing. Druze cosmology identifies him with al-Aql, the Universal Intellect, first of the five cosmic principles.
Why is the faith named after a man its founders rejected?
Because outsiders did the naming. Al-Darazi preached the new call loudly in Cairo and drew the attention of chroniclers, so opponents recorded his name and attached it to everyone associated with the message. The label stuck, passing through Arabic as Duruz and into European writing as Druze. Members generally accept it in conversation with outsiders while using al-Muwahhidun among themselves, and some object to the outsider name on principle.
Why is it impossible to convert to the Druze faith?
Conversion to the Druze faith is impossible because Baha al-Din al-Muqtana, who led the community after Hamza, closed the da'wa, the public call, in 1043. The closure was doctrinal rather than administrative, and the reasoning follows from what the faith teaches about souls: a fixed number were created at once, each one has already had its chance to accept or reject the call, and the total never rises or falls. A person born outside the community therefore carries a soul that was already offered the message and declined it. No ceremony could change that, no missionary work is undertaken, no outreach exists, and nobody inside the community is authorized to admit anyone. This is not secrecy about a procedure. There is no procedure. The practical consequence is endogamy: Druze marry Druze, a marriage outside the community is treated as leaving it, and children of such a marriage are generally not recognized as Druze. For the broader ethics of traditions that do not invite outsiders in, see Smudging and Space Clearing: Practices, Ethics and Alternatives.
The closure has a history as well as a rationale. The movement had spent twenty-six years being hunted, first by al-Zahir's forces in Egypt and then by successive Sunni powers, and shutting the door removed the one activity, public preaching, that made it visible. What followed was a thousand years of survival by attracting no attention, in mountain districts that were hard to police, under rulers who mostly could not distinguish one hill community from another. Endogamy did the rest. Because there is no route in, the community's demography is its theology made visible: Druze numbers move only with birth, death and emigration. Diaspora communities in Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Australia and West Africa have found this difficult, since a small local population combined with a rule against outside marriage puts real pressure on young people. Community writers and outside researchers both describe marrying out as more frequent in the diaspora than in the Levantine heartland, though no systematic count exists and the numbers quoted in community argument are estimates rather than measurements.
What exactly happened in 1043?
Baha al-Din al-Muqtana closed the da'wa, the public call, with a final set of letters and then withdrew from active leadership. After that date no new members were admitted and no preaching was directed outward. Druze tradition dates the closure to 1043, the year 435 of the Islamic calendar, though some accounts place his farewell epistle a year earlier and the exact date is not settled. Almost everything about the community's later shape, endogamy included, follows from that one decision, which no later authority has claimed the standing to reverse.
Can a person born Druze leave the faith?
Socially yes, doctrinally not really. A Druze who converts to another religion or marries out loses standing in the community and may be cut off by family, but the doctrine holds that the soul remains what it is and will be born Druze again regardless of what the person professes. Some in the diaspora describe themselves as culturally Druze and religiously nothing in particular, which the community absorbs more easily than an outright conversion.
What can an interested outsider actually do?
Quite a lot, short of joining. Read the scholarship, which is substantial and public: Nejla Abu-Izzeddin's The Druzes: A New Study of Their History, Faith and Society from 1984, Kais Firro's A History of the Druzes from 1992 on the community's modern politics, and the published editions of the epistles. Shrine sites such as Nabi Shu'ayb near Hittin do receive visitors, though the gathering held there each April is a community occasion rather than an event laid on for outsiders. Ask Druze friends about their community rather than their doctrine, since most are juhhal and have never been taught it.
What is the difference between the uqqal and the juhhal?
The uqqal are initiated Druze who have been admitted to the community's texts and hold to a strict code of conduct, and the juhhal are everyone else, the uninitiated majority who are fully Druze but have not been taught the doctrine. The terms translate roughly as the knowers and the ignorant, though ignorant here means uninstructed rather than foolish, and no stigma attaches to it. Estimates commonly place the uqqal at somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the community, though nobody counts precisely. Initiation is not a birthright, an inheritance or a purchase. A person born Druze may request it, usually after adolescence and often much later in life, and admission depends on demonstrated conduct over an extended period and on the judgment of existing uqqal. Women are admitted on the same footing as men and in some districts make up a large share of the initiated. Above the uqqal sits a further degree, the ajawid, reserved for those of exceptional discipline. Initiation can also be withdrawn if conduct fails. For the wider comparison with graded initiation elsewhere, see Manly P. Hall: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices.
Uqqal are recognizable on sight. Men shave the head, grow a moustache and wear a white cap over a dark tarbush with plain dark clothing, and women wear a white head covering. The conduct code rules out alcohol, tobacco and pork, and in stricter readings ostentation, lending or borrowing at interest, and food or money obtained by means the initiate judges unclean. Uqqal attend the Thursday-evening meeting at the khalwa in full, while juhhal typically join the opening portion, which deals with community business and moral instruction, and leave before the doctrinal reading begins. The arrangement places religious knowledge in the hands of a self-selecting minority who accepted an ascetic life to get it, and leaves the majority to live by conduct and communal loyalty. Critics inside and outside the community call this an unnecessary opacity. Defenders answer that a text nobody can misuse is a text that survives. Both positions are argued openly in Druze writing.
Can women become uqqal?
Yes, and this is one of the more distinctive features of the community. Druze women are initiated on the same basis as men, take the same obligations, and in some Lebanese and Syrian districts are reported to be initiated in greater numbers than men. Initiated women wear a white veil, attend the khalwa, and may teach and lead religious instruction among other women.
How does someone become uqqal?
By asking, and then by being watched. A Druze adult approaches the uqqal of their locality and requests admission, after which there is a period, often a long one, during which conduct is observed, followed by a formal moment of acceptance. What gets tested is behavior rather than knowledge, since the knowledge only comes afterward. Refusal happens, and a candidate may be told to wait years before asking again, which is understood as instruction rather than rejection.
What happens at a khalwa meeting?
The Thursday-evening meeting opens with matters concerning the community and with moral exhortation, and the uninitiated may attend that part. They then leave, and the initiated remain for reading and discussion of the epistles. The building is plain, with no decoration, images or music, and often sits slightly apart from the village. Outsiders are not admitted to the second portion, and the details of what happens in it vary between regions and between individual khalwas.
What are the Epistles of Wisdom, and why are they kept restricted?
The Epistles of Wisdom, Rasa'il al-Hikma in Arabic, are the Druze scriptures: a collection of one hundred and eleven letters and treatises gathered into six books, written mostly between 1017 and 1043 by Hamza ibn Ali and Baha al-Din al-Muqtana, with further epistles from Isma'il al-Tamimi and a small number attributed within the tradition to al-Hakim himself. They are correspondence rather than revelation delivered whole, addressed to named recipients and communities, and they argue, rebuke, instruct and answer objections. Their subjects run from the nature of divine unity and the five cosmic principles to the conduct required of members and the errors of rival preachers. They are restricted because access to them is precisely what initiation confers. A juhhal Druze has not read them. An uqqal has, and reads them in company at the khalwa rather than privately at home. The restriction is a rule about who may be instructed, enforced by the community, and it has never depended on the physical texts being unobtainable. Manuscripts have circulated for centuries, and scholars outside the faith have been publishing from them since the early nineteenth century. The Druze position is that reading is not understanding, and instruction is what the initiated receive.
Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy published the first systematic European account of Druze doctrine in Paris in 1838, working from manuscripts acquired in the Levant. Editions and translations have appeared steadily since. Daniel De Smet published a critical edition of the Arabic text with an annotated French translation through Peeters in Leuven in 2007, covering the first two of the six books, epistles one to forty, which that edition attributes to Hamza ibn Ali and Isma'il al-Tamimi. The remaining four books have no edition of comparable standard. So much of the content is out, and the scholarly apparatus for reading it keeps growing. The community's rule about who may be taught it has not moved an inch. Treating the epistles as occult revelation misreads what they are, and the comparison sometimes drawn with Western hidden-teaching literature belongs elsewhere, in the history covered by Helena Blavatsky: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices. The Druze texts carry named authors, datable circumstances and identified recipients, and they read like the internal papers of an eleventh-century religious movement, because that is what they are. Druze also hold the Qur'an, the Torah and the Gospels in respect, reading them for an inner sense rather than a legal one.
Who wrote the Epistles of Wisdom?
Hamza ibn Ali wrote the largest share, composing the founding doctrinal letters between 1017 and about 1021. Baha al-Din al-Muqtana al-Samuqi wrote most of the remainder during the following two decades, including the letters that closed the call. Isma'il al-Tamimi wrote several of the earliest pieces, and a small number are attributed within the tradition to al-Hakim himself. The writing all belongs to the eleventh century and nothing has been added since, which is one reason the Druze have no tradition of later revelation or continuing prophecy, though the gathering of the letters into the six-book arrangement used today came much later and is credited to the fifteenth-century Druze reformer al-Sayyid Abdallah al-Tanukhi.
Have outsiders read the Epistles of Wisdom?
Yes, for nearly two centuries. Manuscripts left Druze villages during periods of conflict, were sold on, and reached European libraries, where Silvestre de Sacy used them for his two-volume Expose de la religion des Druzes. Modern scholars work from published editions. The community has never conceded that availability makes the texts public property, and the rule limiting instruction to the initiated stands unchanged. Availability and permission are separate things.
Do the Druze read the Qur'an or the Bible?
Both, with respect, and without treating either as a legal code binding on them. Druze doctrine reads earlier scriptures for a hidden meaning, the batin, of which the plain text is the outer shell. Figures from both books are honored, Jethro above all. Greek philosophers including Plato and Pythagoras appear in some Druze accounts as earlier bearers of the same unity teaching, which is unusual company for a scriptural canon to keep.
What do the Druze believe happens at the moment of death?
The Druze hold that at the moment of death the soul passes instantly into a body being born at that same instant, with no gap, no waiting state and no judgment scene in between. The doctrine is called taqammus, from the Arabic qamis, a shirt: the soul changes bodies the way a person changes shirts, and the body left behind is discarded clothing. Three constraints make the Druze version distinctive. The circuit is closed: a Druze soul enters a Druze body and only a Druze body, never an animal, an object or a person outside the community. Sex carries over, so a man is reborn as a man and a woman as a woman, which rules out the ascent-and-descent schemes of Indian rebirth doctrine. And there is no exit while the world lasts, since the number of souls is fixed and the circulation continues until the final accounting. Funeral custom follows from this. Burial is prompt, usually within a day, and prolonged public mourning is discouraged, on the reasoning that the person is already elsewhere and already alive. For how other traditions frame rebirth and how sharply they differ from each other, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
The most visible consequence is nutq, speaking: young Druze children who begin describing a previous life, naming a village, a house, relatives and sometimes the manner of their death. Families take such statements seriously and will often try to locate the household described, and meetings between a child and the family of the deceased do happen, sometimes with considerable local attention. Because the belief is universal in the community and the geography is compact, Lebanese and Syrian Druze children have supplied a large share of the cases collected by the researchers who study childhood past-life reports, chiefly Ian Stevenson and, after him, Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia. The community's own expectations are part of the explanation for that concentration. Whether the reports amount to memory has not been settled by any method that specialists inside and outside that field agree on, and the case collections are disputed on exactly those grounds. The methodology behind them, and the skeptical assessment of it, sit in the comparative article linked above. What matters here is the internal logic. These accounts arise unprompted in early childhood, inside the family, and Druze teaching supplies no technique for producing them: nothing a parent is meant to do, and nobody in the community whose work is to draw such memories out.
What does taqammus literally mean?
Taqammus comes from qamis, the Arabic word for shirt, and means putting on a shirt. The soul is the wearer. The body is what gets changed, so death is a change of clothes rather than a passage to anywhere. The image also carries the doctrine's indifference toward the corpse, since nothing of the person is understood to remain in the grave once the transfer has happened.
Do the Druze believe in heaven and hell?
Not as destinations reached at death. Reward and punishment work themselves out across the successive lives a soul lives, with the circumstances of each birth shaped by what came before, and final resolution deferred to the end of the cycle, when al-Hakim is expected to return and the accounting is completed. The paradise and torment imagery familiar from neighboring traditions plays no comparable part, and Druze funerary language avoids it almost entirely.
What is a natiq, or speaking child?
A natiq is a child who speaks of a previous life, typically between the ages of two and five, giving names and places that the family may then attempt to verify. Druze say of such a child that it has spoken. The earlier household is called the family of the previous life. The speech usually fades by school age and is not encouraged afterward, since a settled child is understood to have finished with the previous life rather than to have forgotten it.
What do Druze religious practices look like day to day?
Day-to-day Druze religion is built around conduct and one weekly meeting rather than around ritual obligation. There are no five daily prayers, no fast for Ramadan, no pilgrimage to Mecca, no mosques and no call to prayer. In place of the Islamic pillars stand seven duties set out by Hamza ibn Ali: truthfulness of the tongue, protection and mutual support of fellow believers, renunciation of former beliefs, repudiation of evil and its agents, acknowledgment of God's unity in every age, contentment with whatever God does, and submission to the divine will. The first two carry most of the weight in ordinary life, and Druze communities are known among their neighbors for keeping their word and for closing ranks around their own. The weekly gathering happens on Thursday evening at the khalwa, a plain meeting house with no decoration, imagery or music. Initiates abstain from alcohol, tobacco and pork; the uninitiated are not bound by those rules, and many drink and smoke without any religious objection being raised. Charity is expected and hospitality is close to obligatory.
Life-cycle observance is sparse by regional standards. A Druze child reaches adulthood without a religious ceremony of any kind. There is no baptism or naming rite carrying doctrinal weight, and religious law does not require circumcision, though many families follow the regional custom anyway. Marriage is a contract concluded under Druze personal status law, monogamous by rule, with divorce permitted and remarriage to the same former spouse forbidden. Funerals are quick and plain. The main festival kept is Eid al-Adha, observed on the neighbors' calendar though not with the neighbors' theology. The largest annual gathering is the pilgrimage to the shrine of Nabi Shu'ayb, identified with the biblical Jethro, at Hittin near Tiberias in late April, which Israeli authorities recognize as an official holiday for Druze citizens. Other shrines, including those attributed to Nabi Ayyub and Nabi Sabalan, draw regional visits and are where families across a district meet once a year. Druze religious courts handle marriage, divorce and inheritance in Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
What is a khalwa?
A khalwa is the Druze house of religious assembly, usually a plain rectangular building set slightly apart from the village, with no minaret, dome, decoration or images. The word means retreat or seclusion. Meetings are held on Thursday evenings. It is not a mosque and is not used for daily prayer, and outsiders are not admitted to the doctrinal portion of a meeting.
Which prophets do the Druze honor?
Jethro comes first. Called Nabi Shu'ayb, he is treated as the community's chief prophet and its ancestor, a rank no neighboring tradition gives him. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham, John the Baptist and Job are honored too, along with Salman al-Farisi. Plato and Pythagoras appear in some Druze accounts as bearers of the same unity teaching in a different idiom.
Do the Druze fast or give alms?
Not on the Islamic pattern. Ramadan is not kept, and the seven duties include no fixed alms tax comparable to zakat. What replaces both is a general obligation of generosity and mutual support, particularly toward other Druze, which the second duty makes explicit. Initiates keep their own dietary and behavioral abstentions year-round rather than concentrating them into a designated month, which makes the discipline continuous rather than seasonal.
Are the Druze Muslims, and how do they relate to Islam?
Whether the Druze are Muslims depends on who is doing the classifying: history, doctrine, state law and Druze self-description give four different answers. Historically the faith grew out of Isma'ili Shi'ism inside the Fatimid caliphate, and its vocabulary, its ranked cosmology and its method of reading scripture all come from there. Doctrinally it left: the Druze abandoned Islamic ritual law, set aside the Fatimid imamate after al-Hakim, and teach transmigration, which mainstream Sunni and Shi'i theology rejects under the name tanasukh. Most academic reference works therefore describe the Druze faith as a separate religion of Islamic origin. Legally the picture is mixed. Lebanon counts the Druze among its Muslim communities for the purposes of confessional politics while granting them their own personal status law, and Israel recognized them as a distinct religious community in 1957, with their own courts operating from 1962. Druze themselves answer differently depending on who is asking and why. Some describe themselves as Muslims in a broad sense, some as Muwahhidun and nothing else, and the disagreement runs through families as well as between scholars.
The question is loaded because the answer has had consequences. Ibn Taymiyya, the Damascene jurist who died in 1328, issued rulings declaring the Druze outside Islam and permitting action against them, and those rulings have been cited by hostile parties ever since, including during the Syrian conflict after 2011. That history explains taqiyya, the concealment of belief under threat, which Druze communities used extensively through centuries of Sunni and Ottoman rule and which outsiders often misread as constitutional dishonesty rather than as a survival tactic shared with other persecuted Shi'i groups. It also explains the reluctance many Druze feel about the question itself. A community declared heretical repeatedly across seven centuries has good reason to answer carefully, and to give a different answer to a census taker, a neighbor and a visiting scholar without regarding any of the three as a lie. Druze writers who address this publicly differ among themselves, and no council exists that could settle it.
What is taqiyya, and did the Druze use it?
Taqiyya is the permitted concealment of religious belief when disclosure would bring danger, and the Druze share it with Shi'i Muslims. They used it heavily under Sunni and Ottoman rule, presenting outwardly as Muslims while keeping their own faith private. It outlasted the danger. That is part of why outsiders knew so little about the doctrine before the nineteenth century.
Why did Ibn Taymiyya rule against the Druze?
Three things decided it for him. Writing in early fourteenth-century Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya judged that the Druze denial of Islamic ritual obligation, their reading of al-Hakim and their doctrine of transmigration put them outside Islam altogether, and he grouped them with the Nusayris in that verdict. His rulings outlived him by centuries. Groups hostile to the Druze quote them still, which is why a fourteenth-century legal opinion matters to a Syrian village.
Do the Druze accept Muhammad as a prophet?
Yes, as one figure in a line who carried the unity teaching, alongside Moses, Jesus and Jethro, with Jethro placed highest. The ritual law is the sticking point. Druze doctrine treats the outward law transmitted through Muhammad as a shell around an inner meaning that supersedes it, so it does not bind them. That distinction is the substance of the whole disagreement, and it is why the classification question keeps producing different answers from people arguing in good faith.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Druze are there and which countries do they live in?
Estimates put the worldwide Druze population at roughly one million, with published ranges running from about eight hundred thousand at the low end to two million at the high end, and no reliable global census exists. Syria holds the largest community, concentrated in Suwayda province in the south, historically called Jabal al-Druze. Lebanon's Druze live mainly in the Chouf and elsewhere in Mount Lebanon. Israel has something near one hundred and fifty thousand, chiefly in the Galilee and on Mount Carmel, with a further community in the Golan Heights. Sizeable diaspora populations exist in Venezuela, which received Lebanese Druze emigration from the late nineteenth century, and in the United States, Canada, Australia and West Africa.
Can a Druze marry someone who is not Druze?
Not within the faith. Druze religious law permits marriage only between two Druze, and a marriage outside the community is treated as departure from it: the person loses religious standing, the union is not recognized by Druze courts, and children are generally not counted as Druze. Families differ enormously in how harshly they respond, from full estrangement to quiet continued contact. Marrying out is far more common in the diaspora, where local Druze populations are small, and it is the community's most-discussed internal problem.
What does the five-colored Druze star stand for?
The five colors represent the five cosmic principles of Druze doctrine, the hudud, each tied to one of the founding figures. Green is al-Aql, the Universal Intellect, identified with Hamza ibn Ali. Red is al-Nafs, the Universal Soul. Yellow is al-Kalima, the Word. Blue is al-Sabiq, the Precedent or cause. White is al-Tali, the Follower or effect. The star as a graphic emblem is modern and no firm date for its adoption is on record, but the five principles behind it come straight from the eleventh-century epistles. The same five colors are also used as plain stripes, which suits a tradition that avoids imagery.
Do Druze children really remember their past lives?
Druze families widely report that young children describe a previous life, name a village and relatives, and occasionally lead adults to a household that matches. Whether that constitutes memory is the contested part. The reports themselves are real, they are socially expected in a community where the doctrine is universal and every adult grew up hearing such accounts, and the small geographic area makes a match easier to construct. Ian Stevenson and, after him, Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, who assembled the best-known collection of childhood past-life cases, drew heavily on Lebanese Druze families for exactly those reasons. Their methods have been disputed by other investigators throughout, and nothing in the collection has established the reports as memory to a standard those critics accept.
Do the Druze fast for Ramadan or pray in mosques?
No to both. The Druze do not observe the Ramadan fast, do not perform the five daily Islamic prayers and do not build or use mosques. Their place of assembly is the khalwa, a plain hall used chiefly on Thursday evenings. Initiated members keep year-round abstentions from alcohol, tobacco and pork, which is a different kind of discipline from a designated fasting month. Individual Druze living in mixed settings sometimes observe local customs socially, without any doctrinal obligation behind it.
Are the Druze the same as the Alawites?
No. Both are minority communities of Islamic origin in the Levant, both practice a form of initiatory secrecy, and both were declared heretical by the same medieval jurists, which is why outsiders confuse them. The doctrines are separate. Alawites emerged from Twelver Shi'ism in ninth-century Iraq around the figure of Ibn Nusayr and venerate Ali ibn Abi Talib, and they are concentrated in coastal Syria. The Druze come from Isma'ili Shi'ism in eleventh-century Egypt and center their history on al-Hakim. Neither community accepts converts, and neither regards the other as a version of itself.
Why do Druze men wear white caps and grow long moustaches?
The white cap marks an initiated man, an aqil, and is worn over a dark tarbush with plain clothing, with the head shaved beneath it. The moustache, grown long and left untrimmed while the beard is often shaved or kept short, is a traditional marker of the same status and of adult standing in the community. Neither is expected of uninitiated Druze men, who dress like their neighbors and are often indistinguishable from them. Initiated women wear a white veil that carries the same signal.
Try Our Free Tools
Related topics: druze religion, druze beliefs, druze faith explained, uqqal juhhal, druze reincarnation, who are the druze, druze practices
