Dorouz
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a politico-religious sect of Mohammedan origin, but deemed by orthodox Moslems heretical. El-Hakim Biamr-Allah, the sixth Fatimite Caliph amph of Egypt, a cruel and fanatical man, who lived in the 11th century, proclaimed himself an incarnation of God, and established a secret society. When walking in the vicinity of Cairo, his capital, he disappeared from his subjects' view, the most natural explanation being that he was assassinated and his body hidden somewhere. His followers believed in his return to this earth to reign over it, and propagated their faith in the adjacent lands. Two of the most notable missionaries were the Persian messengers, Hamzah and Mohammed ben Ismail ed Derazi. The latter proclaimed the Druse tenets with such zeal in Lebanon that the converts to belief in El-Hakim were called not Hakimites but Druses. The Druses believe in the unity of God, who they think was manifest in the person of several individuals, the last of them Hakim. They believe in the constant existence of five superior spiritual ministers, the greatest of them being Hamzah and Jesus, and hold the transmigration of souls. They are divided into the 'Okkal or Initiated, and the Juhhâl, or Ignorant. Their day of worship is Thursday. Ethnologically they are Arabs who came from the E. parts of Syria and settled in Lebanon and Antilebanon in the 11th century. Their territory on the Lebanon is S. of the Maronites. They extend thence to the Hauran and to Damascus. In 1860 they attacked the Maronites, about 12,000 of whom they cruelly massacred, not sparing even women or male children in their fury. The arrival of Turkish and French troops, in August and September, 1860, and the execution of 167 Druses, restored at least the semblance of tranquillity.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 the Druze were subjects of a collapsing Ottoman order just placed under French mandate; within four years Sultan al-Atrash led the Jabal al-Druze into the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–27, and the community has since become a political actor in three states rather than a mountain curiosity. In Lebanon they are a constitutionally recognised confessional community, long led by the Jumblatt family of Kamal (assassinated 1977) and Walid; in Israel, Druze citizens have been conscripted into the army since the 1950s, while those on the Golan Heights, occupied since 1967, have largely refused Israeli citizenship; in Syria the Suwayda heartland has been repeatedly convulsed by the civil war since 2011. Scholarship has also moved: the sect's own scriptures, the Epistles of Wisdom, are now studied in print, and the Druze themselves reject the derivation of their name from al-Darazi, whom Hamza denounced as a heretic, calling themselves muwahhidun, "unitarians." The blunt account of 1860 as unprovoked Druze fury has likewise given way to readings that set the massacres inside the 1858 peasant risings, Ottoman policy and European great-power meddling in Lebanon.
Written for this edition, 2026.