{"collection":"asia","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/asia/odpr/odpr06.htm","path":"asia/odpr/odpr06.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/asia/odpr/odpr06.htm","text":"Origins of the Druze People and Religion, by Philip K. Hitti, [1924]\nFeudal Organization:\u2014When we catch our first clear glimpse of the Druze people we find them living\u2014as they are still living today\u2014in small village communities at W\u0101di-al-Taym and southern Lebanon, organized into a feudal state of society. These village communities were under the control of local sheikhs, themselves subordinate to one or more am\u012brs (princes), and the whole system bound together under a singular form of theocracy. This is still a distinguishing feature of Druze national life.\nThe early Druze communities flourished at the foot of Mt. Hermon, and in the southern part of Western Lebanon overlooking Beir\u016bt and Sidon. They were in every case agricultural, and subsisted wholly on the produce of the land. Commerce and industry had no attraction to them. These same conditions prevail almost unchanged among the Druzes until the present day. In the lists of the leading merchants of Aleppo, Damascus, Beir\u016bt and Sidon, one would search in vain for a Druze name. Perhaps the greatest merchants that the Druze nation ever produced are Druze immigrants in the United States.\nPart Played during the Crusades:\u2014In the early period of the Crusading era, the Druze feudal power was in the hands of two families: the Tan\u016bkhs and the Arisl\u0101ns. From their fortresses in the Gharb district 1 of southern Lebanon, the Tan\u016bkhs led their incursions into the Phoenician coast and finally succeeded in holding Beir\u016bt and the maritime plain against the Franks.\nAfter the middle of the twelfth century, the Ma\u2018n family superseded the Tan\u016bkhs in Druze leadership. The origin of the\nfamily goes back to a prince Ma\u2018n who made his appearance in the Lebanon in the days of the \u2018Abb\u0101sid Caliph al-Mustarshid (1118-1135 A.D.), and died in 1149 in the days of Sultan N\u016br-al-D\u012bn of Damascus. The Mains chose for their abode the Sh\u016bf district in the southern part of Western Lebanon, overlooking the maritime plain between Beir\u016bt and Sidon, and made their headquarters in Ba\u2018aql\u012bn, which is still to the present day the leading Druze village. They were invested with feudal jurisdiction by Sultan N\u016br-al-D\u012bn and furnished respectable contingents to the Moslem ranks in their struggle against the Crusaders.\nHaving cleared Syria from the Franks, the Maml\u016bk Sultans of Egypt turned their attention to the schismatic Moslems of Syria; and in the year 1305, al-Malik al-N\u0101\u1e63ir inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Druzes at Kasraw\u0101n 1 and forced outward compliance on their part to orthodox (Sunni) Islam. Later under the Ottoman Turks they were again chastised severely at \u2018Ayn-\u1e62awfar, in 1585, for having attacked and robbed near Tripoli a body of Janizaries on their way to Constantinople carrying to the imperial treasury taxes collected from Egypt and Syria.\nThe Druze Power at its Height:\u2014With the advent of the Ottoman Turks and the conquest of Syria by Sultan Sel\u012bm I, in 1516, the Ma\u2018ns threw in their lot with the conquering invaders and were immediately acknowledged by the new suzerain as the feudal lords of southern Lebanon. Druze villages spread and prospered in that region, which under Min leadership so flourished that it acquired the generic appellation of Jabal Bayt-Ma\u2018n (the mountain of the Ma\u2018n family) or Jabal al-Dur\u016bz. The latter title, however, has since been usurped by the \u1e24awr\u0101n region which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, has proven a haven of refuge to Druze emigrants from Lebanon and has become the headquarters of Druze power.\nUnder Fakhr-al-D\u012bn ibn-Ma\u2018n II (1585-1635) the Druze dominion increased until it included almost all Syria extending from the edge of the Antioch plain in the north to \u1e62afad in the south\nwith a part of the Syrian desert dominated by Fakhr-al-D\u012bn's castle at Tadmur (Palmyra), the ancient capital of Zenobia. The ruins of this castle still stand on a steep hill overlooking the town and greet the eye of the passer-by.\nFakhr-al-D\u012bn became too strong for his Turkish sovereign in Constantinople. He went so far in 1608 as to sign a commercial treaty with Duke Ferdinand I of Tuscany containing secret military clauses. The Sultan then sent a force against him, and he was compelled, in 1614, to flee the land and seek refuge in the courts of Tuscany and Naples. 1\nFakhr-al-D\u012bn was the first ruler in modern Lebanon to open the doors of his country to foreign Western influences. Under his auspices the French established a kh\u0101n (hostel) in Sidon, the Florentines a consulate, and the Christian missionaries were admitted into the country. Beir\u016bt and Sidon, which Fakhr-al-D\u012bn beautified, still bear traces of his benign rule.\nBanu-Shih\u0101b, the Last Feudal Chiefs:\u2014As early as the days of Saladin, and while the Ma\u2018ns were still in complete control over southern Lebanon, the Shih\u0101b tribe, originally \u1e24ij\u0101z Arabs but later domiciled in \u1e24awr\u0101n, advanced from \u1e24awr\u0101n, in 1172, and settled in W\u0101di-al-Taym at the foot of Mt. Hermon. They soon made an alliance with the Ma\u2018ns and were acknowledged the Druze chiefs in W\u0101di-al-Taym. At the end of the seventeenth century (1697), the Shih\u0101bs succeeded the Ma\u2018ns in the feudal leadership of Druze southern Lebanon, though, unlike them, they professed Sunni Islam. Secretly, they showed sympathy with Druzism, the religion of the majority of their subjects. Because of their blood relationship to the Quraysh, the family of the Prophet Mu\u1e25ammad, the Shih\u0101b, next to the Quraysh, is the noblest family in the Arabic world.\nThe Shih\u0101b leadership continued till the middle of the last century and culminated in the illustrious governorship of al-Am\u012br Bash\u012br (1788-1840) who, after Fakhr-al-D\u012bn, was the greatest\nfeudal lord Lebanon produced. Though governor of the Druze mountain, Bash\u012br was a crypto-Christian, and it was he whose aid Napoleon solicited in 1799 during his campaign against Syria.\nHaving consolidated his conquests in Syria (1831-1838), Ibr\u0101h\u012bm Pasha, son of the viceroy of Egypt, Mu\u1e25ammad \u2018Ali Pasha, made the fatal mistake of trying to disarm the Christians and Druzes of the Lebanon and to draft the latter into his army. This was contrary to the principles of the life of independence which these mountaineers had always lived, and resulted in a general uprising against the Egyptian rule. The uprising was encouraged, for political reasons, by the British. The Druzes of W\u0101di-al-Taym and \u1e24awr\u0101n, under the leadership of Shibli al-\u2018Ary\u0101n, distinguished themselves in their stubborn resistance at their inaccessible headquarters, al-Laja, lying southeast of Damascus. It is in this same place that the Druzes have for the last two years held out, against the French, under Sultan Pasha al-A\u1e6drash.\nDruzes and Christians Grouped in Political Rather than Religious Parties:\u2014The conquest of Syria by the Moslem Arabs in the middle of the seventh century introduced into the land two political factions later called the Qaysites and the Yemenites. The Qaysite party represented the \u1e24ij\u0101z and Bedouin Arabs who were regarded as inferior by the Yemenites who were earlier and more cultured emigrants into Syria from southern Arabia. The party lines in the Lebanon obliterated racial and religious lines and the people grouped themselves regardless of their religious affiliations, into one or the other of these two parties. The sanguinary feuds between these two factions depleted, in course of time, the manhood of the Lebanon and ended in the decisive battle of \u2018Ayn-D\u0101rah, in 1711, which resulted in the utter defeat of the Yemenite party. Many Yemenite Druzes thereupon emigrated to the \u1e24awr\u0101n region and thus laid the foundation of Druze power there.\nThe Civil War of 1860:\u2014The Druzes and their Christian Maronite neighbors, who had thus far lived as religious communities on amicable terms, entered a period of social disturbance\nin the year 1840 which culminated in the civil war of 1860. For this disturbance the Sublime Porte in Constantinople was, in a great measure, responsible. The Sultan, realizing that the only way to bring the semi-independent people of the Lebanon under his direct control was to sow the seeds of discord among the people themselves, inaugurated in the mountain a policy long tried and found successful in the Ottoman provinces\u2014the policy of \"divide and rule.\" The civil war of 1860 cost the Christians some ten thousand lives in Damascus, Za\u1e25lah, Dayr-al-Qamar, \u1e24\u0101\u1e63bayya and other towns of the Lebanon. The European powers then determined to interfere and authorized the landing in Beir\u016bt of a body of French troops under General Beaufort d\u2019Hautpoul whose inscription can still be seen on the historic rock at the mouth of the Dog River. Following the recommendations of the powers, the Porte granted Lebanon a local autonomy, guaranteed by the powers, under a Christian governor. This autonomy was maintained until the Great War.\nBesides W\u0101di-al-Taym, the southern part of Western Lebanon and \u1e24awr\u0101n, the Druzes today occupy a few villages in al Jabal al-A\u2018la, 1 Mt. Carmel in Palestine, and \u1e62afad. Their districts in southern Lebanon are al-Matn and al-Sh\u016bf, and their leading villages are: \u2018\u0100layh, Bay\u1e63\u016br, al-Shuwayf\u0101t, \u2018Abayh, Ba\u2018aql\u012bn, and al-Mukht\u0101rah. They number in all Syria and Palestine about 117,000.\n5:1 The district lying to the west of Beir\u016bt. The ruins of one of these fortresses still crown a little hill near Sara\u1e25m\u016bl.\n6:1 This region is today entirely occupied by Christians.\n7:1 For a biography of Fakhr-al-D\u012bn, see H. F. Wuestenfeld, Fachreddin, der Drusenf\u00fcrst, und seine Zeitgenossen (G\u00f6ttingen, 1866).\n9:1 In the vicinity of Aleppo.","title":"Origins of the Druze People and Religion: Chapter II. Social and Historical Development","type":"page"}