Today, the Druze, or the Muwahhidun, find themselves, wherever they live, prisoners of a situation they did not seek but that was imposed upon them by the circumstances of history, the complexities of geography, the baseness of intelligence agencies, and the savagery of advanced technology.
The Druze, that small community with a rich heritage, now find themselves victims of changing maps, collapsing identities, and the rampage of an occupation emboldened by an absolute mandate from the world's sole superpower.
When Benjamin Netanyahu rules over more than half the world's population through Israeli “lobbies,” active and widespread under various names in the major centers of global decision-making, the extent of the cultural, political, military, and economic siege encircling a small community becomes clear. Its population barely exceeds one million, yet fate has decreed that it stand anxious and unsteady on every seismic political fault line in the Arab Levant, wounded in its Arab identity, its Islam, its patriotism, and its loyalty to its land, the very land it has defended with blood for nearly a thousand years, from the frontiers of northern Syria during the countdown to the collapse of Abbasid rule, to the coasts of the Levant and Palestine during the wars of the Franks, or the Crusades.
It is trying, as best it can, to hold out to this day, as Israel and others lay waste to the region, amid a state of Arab helplessness rivaled only by the great calamities of history, such as the fall of Baghdad to Hulagu and the ravaging of Damascus at the hands of Timur.
Today, this small Muslim community, which emerged from the heart of Fatimid Ismaili Shiism, stands accused of treason and condemned as infidel, so that it can more easily be erased, its people uprooted, and its identity falsified.
This accelerating, cancerous falsification has two ugly faces: one exposed, the other concealed. Within this reality, one striking aspect of the Muwahhidun Druze is connected to the “esotericism” of their monotheism, dating back to the days of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.
The truth is that throughout Islamic history, differences in interpretation and narrative have existed. Contradictions in interests and priorities have also emerged throughout the remarkable journey of the true faith, which began in Mecca and Medina and spread throughout the Middle East and then to all corners of the world.
The fact is that the original Hijazi environment, with its limited components at the dawn of Islam, expanded in Umayyad Damascus, Abbasid Baghdad, and Fatimid Cairo to become an Islamic state that was richly diverse, stretching from China in the east to Spain in the west, and teeming with religions, cultures, languages, ethnicities, philosophical and intellectual movements, and, inevitably, major economic interests.
About a thousand years ago, a group of subjects of the Fatimid state experienced another doctrinal division in the history of Shiism, following the greater division that occurred after the death of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, which resulted in the emergence of the Twelver Shiite and Ismaili Shiite traditions.
In this division, which followed the death, or disappearance, of the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in 1021, those who would become the “Muwahhidun Druze” broke away from the Ismaili Shiites because they refused to recognize the imamate of al-Hakim's son, al-Zahir li-I'zaz Din Allah. The result was the elimination of their presence in Egypt and the closure of the door of proselytization to those who had joined it, before al-Hakim's death, in the Levant and Palestine, specifically northwestern Syria, including Aleppo and Jabal al-Summaq, or al-Jabal al-A'la; Damascus and its surrounding areas, including Wadi al-Ajam; the heights of Mount Hermon in southwestern Syria; Wadi al-Taym, on the western slopes of Mount Hermon; southern Mount Lebanon; and the Galilee mountains and the coast of Acre in Palestine. Later, the Druze presence grew in Jabal al-Arab, in Hauran, and northern Jordan.
Over the past thousand years, of course, states have fallen and states, even empires, have been born, while identities and loyalties have changed. Just as armies of occupation and domination came from the east, from the Turks and Persians, in the early part of that period, Western influence prevailed during the past three centuries, beginning with Europe and ending with the United States, which inherited the European ascendancy.
It is well known that the European ascendancy, particularly the British one, in the Arab Levant gave the region the Balfour Declaration, and consequently Israel, and did not end until Washington took the reins after the Suez War in 1956.
The names of the various entities and regions of the Arab Levant, naturally, did not originate with the Arab presence or the Islamic conquest. Rather, they are Canaanite, Aramaic, Assyrian, and Babylonian, and certainly not Hebrew, in order to justify Israel's occupations, Israel now preoccupied not only with obliterating all of the past of which it was not a part, but with inventing a future that would make it the custodian of the Arab Levant and its peoples.
And yet we see Israel, whether through its “occupations,” both political and actual, or through its advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, or through its “employees” and spies, working relentlessly to falsify the past and erase the present, paving the way to “fabricate” a future that suits its ambitions and narrative and justifies its existence.
We have begun to hear ancient Canaanite and Aramaic names that predate the Jewish presence, dug up from the depths of ancient history, polished up and sold to the ignorant, the parrots, and the fools, as well as the “agents,” as part of the process of “inventing” alternative convictions and fabricated cultures. Indeed, in times of decline, there is nothing easier to falsify than to buy consciences, encourage fascination and submission, portray subservience as wisdom, surrender as foresight, and treason as political “pragmatism” that claims to anticipate the future.
