"One of the finest,
most accessible books on this beautiful country in a long time. After myriad
tomes on Hezbollah and the civil war, Alex Klaushofer finally gives us a
balanced, traveller’s view of
I had long heard references to the Druze of the
Middle East without really knowing who, or what, they were. From the
battlefield of Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jews and Muslims
screamed their identities at the world, identities perhaps clouded by religious
or ideological fervour, but at least they had a brand. So, too, did the
region’s Christians. They might be a diminishing minority, but their membership
of a religion claiming over a quarter of the world’s population meant that you
certainly knew who they were.
The Druze, by contrast, were a shadowy, unknown sect
whose true religious identity was a mystery. They kept the details of their
faith hidden, worshipping in private and keeping their sacred texts—the hikma, or books of wisdom—for the eyes
of a religious elite only. The uqqal
or ‘learned’ were distinguished by their black clothes and white headwear and
met in closed meetings. They conveyed little of the religion to ordinary Druze
beyond, telling them to do good deeds and be truthful. With outsiders they
practised taqiyya, an ancient form of
concealment designed to protect a minority from religious persecution. In times
of trouble, taqiyya involved outward
conformity to the dominant religion, following its lead in prayer times and
festivals. Even in a tolerant climate, they believed that a Druze should not
reveal anything at odds with the beliefs of those around them. As a result,
curious guests would find their questions answered in courteous generalities.
Often these would be expressed in the terms of their own faith, a deft
reflection of the questioner’s beliefs back to him. Since the Druze only
married among themselves, there was no chance of entry to this closed
community. And to make matters even more complicated, some people maintained
they should not be called Druze at all, but muwahhidun,
the people of wisdom.
Leafing through some of the few books that had been
published about them in the British Library, I found that this secrecy had
contributed to some florid myth-making about the sect. They indulged in incest,
some said, held orgies for religious festivals and worshipped a golden calf.
Their fearsome qualities as warriors—they defended their mountain territories
well—were attributed to a demonic alliance: some combatants (presumably the ones
who had come off worst) claimed to have seen Druze equipped with horns and
tails. Even the moderate account by one of the first travellers to encounter
them, the Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, sounds bemused. In 1167 he wrote of
‘a people called Darazyan… They have no religion, and live in the big mountains
and the crevices of the rocks; no king or minister is a judge over them… And
they are loving of the Jews, and they are light of foot on the mountains and
hills, and no one can battle with them.’
In today’s Lebanon their position is somewhat different. The
country is home to the greatest concentration of the million Druze scattered
across the world, where it is the one of the four main sects. While its members
are excluded from the highest offices by the constitution, they have political representation
in the form of MPs and a vocal dynastic leader, Walid Jumblatt, who inherited
the role when his father Kamal was murdered in 1977. Despite their lack of
natural allies in the wider world, the Druze won their part of the civil war,
chasing the Maronites from their villages in the Chouf. Now, with more of them
leaving the mountains for work or education, the younger Druze were clamouring
for greater openness about their faith.
But despite their growing participation in modern society, I could find little consensus about the sect’s religious identity. The official view, put about by many Druze themselves, was that they were Muslims, an offshoot of Islam that had grown out of the sect’s beginnings in the Shiite caliphate of eleventh-century Egypt. The Lebanese I consulted in London all had different things to say on the subject. Eyad Abu Chakra, editor of Asharq Al Awsat and the first Druze I ever met, seemed to confirm the official view, adding the intriguing caveat that Drusism was a faith rather than a religion. A week later, the Lebanese academic the Reverend Zaid Abu Shafik dismissed this over a pasta lunch. ‘Of course they are not Muslims!’ he said, waving his fork around. ‘They are just pretending to be, for protection!’ Then, in a café on a rainy April afternoon near his perch in the think-tank Chatham House, Nadim Shehadi flipped open his laptop and showed me some unpublished documents, his eyes glowing with excitement. The Druze religion, the papers suggested, had nothing to do with Islam but in fact stemmed from Eastern religions such as Hinduism. One suggested its roots lay in India, and shared the same spiritual heritage as the Hare Krishna. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Maybe you could write your whole book about the Druze!’ Other scholars suggested that the roots of Drusism lay with Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian faith that saw the world locked into a cosmic struggle between good and evil. With all these experts offering conflicting perspectives, what chance did I have of finding out the truth?
EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER SEVEN, 'Unfreedom'
Our domestic intimacy
meant that I was also becoming a mother-confessor for the young men’s’
frustrations in other areas. Apart from the girlfriend of the only fellow in
their circle lucky enough to have one, no women appeared to relieve the male
monotony of life on the balcony. ‘There is no sex!’ was their perennial cry,
whenever a potential sweetheart came up in the conversation. Syrian society’s
traditional values meant that opportunities to meet women were limited and,
when the two sexes did meet, young women tended to be very guarded.
Shivan’s frustration with the situation had led to an
early engagement to a young cousin in his hometown. Their arrangement had
satisfied his libido but now, several years on, he realized that he and his
fiancée had little in common. He wanted to extricate himself, but feared being
dishonourable. One night, he clicked his phone shut after a long conversation
with her, and turned to me, tears pricking his eyes. ‘Alex, I don’t know how
old you are, but I think you are older, so you know more. What shall I do? She
and I, we are on different planets.’
Earlier that week, after a long, softly spoken
conversation the look on his face was unmistakeable as he restored his phone to
its usual place on the balcony ledge. ‘Was that your girlfriend?’ I asked
nosily.
‘I love her, but no, not really,’ he admitted
reluctantly.
‘There is no sex!’ yelled Gabi from the controls of the
computer inside, by way of explanation.
Shivan’s true love was an Iraqi, who was also expected to
marry someone else. Her parents would not accept him, a mere Syrian, as a
suitor. As a result, the pair met only occasionally and chastely.
‘Yes, and you do this.’ I batted my eyelashes in rapid
fire.
‘Oh, you noticed that.’ Shivan smiled, slightly abashed.
But these meetings were invariably abortive. Often, back
in the bosom of their protective families, the young women subsequently rang to
cancel. One particularly promising prospect did turn up for coffee—but she
brought her brother along too.
For Gabi, less adept at negotiating his way through this
minefield of social-sexual complexity, there was nothing. One day, I find him
in the kitchen looking at his exam timetable, frowning and tutting. ‘What, have
you missed an exam?’ I ask, concerned and a little surprised. ‘No, it’s about
girls,’ he replies without looking up. The time following an exam was a
precious opportunity for male-female interaction, he explains, when students
relieved to be at the end of their ordeal would naturally turn to each other
for support.
I sit down at the kitchen table with him. ‘How do you get
a girlfriend here?’
Gabi pulls a long face. ‘It’s difficult, very difficult.
I meet girls, especially at the university, but there is no sex! It never comes
to anything. They are so afraid. We meet, we talk, and then at a certain point,
you feel like a tension, a charge, inside them.’ He taps his chest with a
clenched fist. ‘There are a few open-minded ones, but they are rare. It’s not
that sex is so important, especially for me. I have to love the girl, and it
has to be right with her doing other things, like watching films and going for
walks. But if there is no sex, it cannot be normal! There is always this
block.’ He taps his chest again, to indicate the locus of the tension, a knot
of psychological and physical frustration, tangled up with the hopes and fears
of the first stages of romance.
‘Of course, there is sex, if you pay for it. But if you
refuse to go to whores, there is nothing. And then, after a while’—he looks
away in only the faintest embarrassment—‘there are sex problems.’
I talk for a bit about life in the West, telling him a
Bridget Jones-esq story of tens of thousands of British singles sitting alone
at night in front of the television with their portions for one, of phone calls
never made, of men too confused by their role or frightened of commitment to
engage with women. Gabi manages a smile which is both wan and amused at that
same time. ‘So the situation is the same, and yet the reasons so different.
They are this’—he stretches his arms so wide that one almost leaves the kitchen
by the window—‘far apart!’
Somehow I find myself giving the same advice dispensed by
friends and self-help books back home about the importance of getting out to
Meet People. ‘Whatever the reasons, you have to get off the balcony, and go out
and meet some women,’ I hear myself say firmly.
‘I know,’ he replies. ‘Last year, I went out a lot with
friends, and met a lot of girls. But it came to nothing. It was always the
same. It is a question of finding the one, the few open-minded ones.’ His mind
turns to practicalities and strategies. ‘The university is not so good, the
girls there are too young and frightened. The best place is the culture and
arts, people are more open-minded in that sphere.’ His mood darkens again. ‘But
it is so pretentious. I hate it!
‘Maybe in the West, I would have success.’ He brightens
at the thought. ‘For a while, I had this written on my computer screen: ‘Some
One, Some Day.’
The destruction seems more arbitrary in the village of Aitaroun where the Awada family live. Most houses are intact, but every so often there are strange gaps in the street as if a house has unexpectedly been whisked off somewhere. Ali Saad leads us up a garden path and into a solid-looking building. Inside, half a dozen adults are sitting around a high-ceiled, tiled room lined with sofas. There is an elderly woman swathed in black and her two grown-up children, a daughter and a son who lives in Australia, plus an elderly couple who are cousins. The old women clutch Herdis and me as if we are long-lost relatives, smacking kisses on our cheeks, while the bearded brother announces: ‘I welcome any press to show the facts. Without the press, no one could see us.’
The daughter Kamila is sitting silently on a chair in
blue tracksuit bottoms and a black sweatshirt, a patterned headscarf woven
tightly round a face with huge, sparkling hazel eyes. I smile tentatively at
her, but get a blank. Then I realize why: her eyes carry that indefinable
expression of someone so immersed in grief that they are not fully present. But
when asked, she begins to quietly recount the family’s story.
‘It was Monday 17 July, about midnight,’ she begins, with
Ali Saad translating. ‘The family were sitting down having a chat at home’—she points
up the road. ‘At 12.20, we felt the house collapse on top of us. There were
twenty-two people in the house. When I went to go out, I couldn’t, because
another bomb hit. We heard little voices calling out from the ground. We
managed to clear some stones from the house, and we saw hands and legs. We got
the first girl out—Jana, who is seven years old. When we got Jana from the
ground we saw her sister Katryn, who is fourteen. She was still alive, but she
was hurt in her back and her shoulders. The neighbours gathered round the
house. One of them got my brother Hussan out, but we realized he was dead.’
A few questions establish who died—Kamila’s brother and
nephew, her sister, brother-in-law and their five children. She, her mother,
sister in law and two nieces were only hurt.
I’m wondering, hazily, how to elicit some sort of
emotional response, but Herdis does it for me. ‘It may be a difficult question
to answer, but how do you feel?’
‘I’m still shocked,’ replies Kamila simply. ‘I can’t
believe it happened.’
‘Do you see this as a victory for Hezbollah?’ asks
Herdis.
This time, it is Kamila’s brother who replies. ‘Even though
this happened, it is still a victory for Lebanon and for the resistance,’ he
says firmly. ‘We blame Israel and we blame the international community, because
the international community did not do anything to stop it for thirty-three
days.’
I look to see his sister’s reaction, but can’t fathom
anything from the hazel eyes. Then another, less direct way to see what is
going on for her occurs to me. ‘Now, during the holy month of Ramadan, what is
your main prayer?’
Again, it is the brother who answers in her place. ‘In
this holy month, we hope and we pray that we will always win against our enemy,
who destroys our families, houses and villages.’
I’m still wondering about the effects on the person
behind the hazel eyes, the emotional life behind the slogans, once all the fuss
has died down. Her brother, presumably, will have a partial escape to his life
as an émigré halfway across the world. ‘Are you going back to Australia?’ I ask
him.
‘Yes, I will stay here for six weeks, and then I will go
back,’ he replies.
‘And you will stay here?’ I address Kamila directly.
‘Yes.’
As we start to take our leave, Herdis is crying. It is
her first time in the Middle East. But I, now in the grip of a full-blown blood
sugar crash, feel empty. The older women of the house kiss us fervently again
and we troop out. As we make a final tour of the destruction, visiting the pile
of rubble that had been the family’s former home up the road, I realize there’s
another reason for my lack of emotion: it’s also because this glimpse into this
latest misery of Lebanon’s Shia is almost wearyingly familiar, despite the fact
it represents a new chapter in their history. I cast around in my mind for the
provenance of these now-familiar elements: the sudden deaths of civilians,
families sitting around in mourning, rubble dotted with the debris of domestic
life, the sense of an ever-present enemy, all under a blazing Eastern sun.
Where had I seen all this before?
Ah yes, that’s it: Palestine.