Nobody is more Lebanese than the Joumblatt clan. They could not have grown out of any other environment, and perhaps Lebanon as we know it wouldn't exist without them. Before I can explain who these people are, first I have to explain what a Druze is.
Don't worry, I'll be quick. Little can be known for certain about the Druze religion so I can't take too long anyway. It is highly secretive, passed down through the generations to select initiates so even most Druze don't fully know what it's about. At various times they have pretended to be Christian or Muslim to escape persecution which muddies the waters even more. Their most famous belief known by outsiders is reincarnation. They believe that their souls will be reborn in Druze of the next generation and so on. Like so many other ethnoreligious groups in the Middle East, they do not intermarry with outsiders so they have remained distinct for a thousand years or more. Their origins are debated and that's a story for another time.
The Druze were already here when the Crusaders arrived and built Beaufort castle overlooking their lands.
The Druze mostly settled in the Jabal Druze region of modern Syria and the southern part of Mount Lebanon, where they were mixed with Christians. They were ruled by a few dominant families. The Joumblatts are believed to have migrated from Kurdistan in the 1600s and somehow become one of them. Since then they have competed with other clans like the Arslans and Shehabs, but by the mid 20th Century at least they have been undisputed kings of the Druze more or less. They also had power as feudal landowners like those who ruled over the other sects. Their control of the Druze people and territory is so complete that when another faction leader said "Walid Joumblatt could move to Brazil tomorrow and he would still be leader of the Druze" he was not exaggerating.
Mukhtara Palace, far up in the heights of the Chouf, the ancestral home of the Joumblatts.
1975
This very medieval community adapted well to modern times. Kamal Joumblatt emerged as one of the most powerful political figures in Lebanon when it gained independence. He founded what is called the Progressive Socialist Party, but it is not really a political party, just a front for the Druze so they can engage in modern parliamentary politics. His abilities were recognized in the nation as a whole, and as civil war approached he became leader of the Lebanese National Movement, an alliance of groups that were Muslim or leftist opposing the Christian-only Lebanese Forces alliance on the other side. They demanded that the Christian elites give up their stranglehold on power and give equality to Muslims. The LNM's military forces, including a fairly disciplined Druze militia, were not that impressive but politically it represented the Sunnis, Druze, and many Shi'a and Christians as well. This broad base of domestic support let him rely on the Palestinians to provide most of the firepower backing him up.
Kamal's daughter Linda el-Atrash lived in East Beirut. A few of Chamoun's goons didn't want non-Christians living there so they murdered her.
The LNM was also supported to some extent by Syria. Hafez Assad, himself a leftist Muslim revolutionary in his younger days, sympathized with them and wanted to see them carve away some power from the Christians. He imported weapons from the Soviet bloc and then passed them on to the groups in the LNM and the Palestinians. But Assad and Joumblatt did not see eye to eye on everything. Joumblatt wanted to break the back of the Maronite elite that had dominated Lebanon since the French occupation and make sure it never could rise again. Assad only wanted to weaken them, not to win a total victory. He tried to explain that in a country like Lebanon you could not win through brute military force, no matter how strong.
1980
Kamal Joumblatt was dead. He came so close to victory that he refused to compromise. Finally, with East Beirut in danger of being surrounded, the Syrians invaded to stop him and took over most of the country. In 1977 his car was ambushed on a narrow mountain road in his native Chouf region and he was gunned down. There have been many suggestions thrown out of who pulled the trigger and what exactly their motive was, but we can assume that Assad approved of the hit because Joumblatt basically was not being a team player.
Walid Joumblatt, 1978.
His son Walid succeeded him. Walid has been described as "eccentric". He was a young playboy who enjoyed the status that his father's position had given him but hardly seemed capable of filling his shoes. But he was more shrewd than he was given credit for. As soon as his formal mourning period had ended, he immediately went to Damascus to show his fealty to the man who had just killed his father. As long as Assad was the most powerful man in Lebanon, Joumblatt would be on his side.
In his later days he looked a lot like Radnor, the mentat of House Harkonnen in Dune 2.
1985
Joumblatt had gotten through the Israeli invasion practically unscathed. Recognizing that overnight the Israelis had become the dominant power, he reached out to them through the Druze community in Israel and offered free passage through his strategically vital territory. But now they were evacuating troops from his homeland, the Chouf. The Lebanese Forces were coming to massacre the Druze population until they fled, leaving the district to the Christians alone. Walid sent his own troops to reverse this process.
As soon as the Israelis pulled out of the Chouf, fighting broke out.
Joumblatt was a big player in Beirut as well. With a loyal militia and control of strategic heights overlooking the city, he proved a useful ally to the bigger factions. When the US-backed government collapsed, the PSP rushed into West Beirut along with Amal and Syria's other allies. As Amal began the War of the Camps against Fatah, these allies began to pursue their own ends in a bewildering series of betrayals and surprise attacks. Joumblatt did not rely as much on Syria as Amal did. He managed to maintain good relations with many of Syria's enemies, including Fatah, and even distant powers like the Soviet Union. This gave him some wiggle room when dealing with Assad.
The Druze tore down a Lebanese flag in Beirut and replaced it with theirs, provoking a war with Amal. West Beirut was devastated yet again. I'm not sure anybody knew what the heck they were fighting for in this one.
1990
The chaotic battles over West Beirut were now calming down as General Aoun emerged as a real threat to the entire system the militias operated in. One of his key aims early on was take control of or blockade the many small ports controlled by militias. Most of their income came from smuggling through these, and the Druze were no exception. Joumblatt now joined with the other faction leaders and Syria to face this new threat.
Jounieh in better times. This was one of the small ports used by the militias, in this case the Lebanese Forces.
The Druze did well in the Taif negotiations. The Christians, Sunnis, and Shi'a took the three most important offices in the government, but Joumblatt ended up in a position to steer large amounts of graft to the Druze and his cronies in the form of jobs and government investments. In a country where power is exerted through patronage not violence, Joumblatt was in his element.
Walid made it to the end of the war without being assassinated but there were attempts, like this one in 1982 that nearly killed him.
Epilogue
Joumblatt had a great deal of power in the new Syrian-dominated government. He was able to stretch his tentacles into bureaucracies, businesses, and real estate far from his mountain stronghold. In what can only be called a sick joke, he was made Minister for Refugees even though he had made many of them refugees in the first place by ethnically cleansing Christians from the Chouf.
If Kamal Joumblatt died because he was too rigid in his beliefs, Walid has survived because he's the ultimate pragmatist. No ordinary person could ever hope to follow all the machinations of the warlords-turned-politicans in dark smoke-filled rooms, but you could be pretty sure that whatever side he was on was winning. Partly this was because of the political and economic power he wielded, but it was mostly just because he always flipped to whatever side was stronger. He can swing back and forth like a pendulum in a matter of weeks.
Meeting with Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah during one of the many periods when he was temporarily Walid's bestie.
Joumblatt made one big gamble after the war, one which committed him to a certain path he couldn't back out of. In 2005, the Cedar Revolution broke out and Syria finally pulled its troops out of Lebanon. He believed that this was part of a great upheaval across the region, with the US invasion of Iraq and the growing assertiveness of its Gulf allies. In an uncharacteristic mistake, he drank the neocons' koolaid. He switched over to the anti-Syrian side and vocally denounced the Assad regime. Now, after 28 years, most of them spent allied with Syria, he suddenly was angry over his father's murder. But he had miscalculated. Far from spreading American influence across the region, the superpower was so tied up in Iraq that it lost power throughout the region, with Iran filling in part of the void. The next year Israel blundered its way into a major war with Hezbollah that it was not prepared for and suffered a humiliating defeat. In 2008 Joumblatt made a bold attempt to seize the fiber optic network that Hezbollah used to communicate with its troops. He didn't have the force to back it up. Hezbollah hardly even needed to fight as its allies trounced the PSP and Sunni militias in a few days. Later on the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War seemed to offer opportunities but in the end the alliance of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran remains in a dominant position over Lebanon.
Joumblatt with Bashar al-Assad, 2010. You didn't think they'd stay mad, did you? They reconciled somewhat when it was clear that Hezbollah couldn't be defeated.
Joumblatt has now retired to smoke hashish and shitpost on Twitter from his mountain stronghold. There are different ways you could judge him. His scheming and backstabbing only made the civil war worse for the nation and his corruption in peacetime has kept it impoverished. But if you judge him as the leader of the Druze, it's hard to say anyone could have done better. He guided his tiny sect of a few hundred thousand people surrounded by dangerous enemies on all sides through a generation of war and crisis. In the end they were exactly where they started, still living in their ancestral homeland. Many other factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War can only wish they had broken even.
Walid and Oscar.
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The Druze have got to be one of the weirdest religions on Earth. The fact that they don't let new people in is bizarre.
Also it's one thing not to proselytize, but quite another to not even be willing to share God's truths with the non-Druze. Pretty based, when you think about it....
Plus there's probably lots of cousin-fricking, as with most insular societies, which is pretty hot, at least in theory.
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They aren't the only ones, with Yazidis, Indian parsis and jews kinda sorta
A remnant of the old national religions?
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Yeah, I linked to a list of examples. Just in the Levant we also have the Alawites.
And really in practice every sect in Lebanon is like this to a certain degree. Like there's nothing in Christianity or Islam against converting but the vast majority of the time they marry in their own community.
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Choosing the outgroup in those kind of situations is a terrible idea I think
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I think it's slowly starting to get easier as people work and live together on a daily basis. Two people living in Beirut might have more in common with each other than their sect back up in the hills.
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its hard enough dealing with your own women
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We missed the boat. I'm really pissed that my soul didn't decide to join them before 1043 when it was still allowed.
What I find most interesting is that they seem to have a lot of connections to other religions nearby. Like the reincarnation stuff seems to come from ancient Egyptians/Greeks. And they're right in the middle of this area with lots of small religious sects. There's the Jews, then the Matawali (a little pocket of Shi'a), then the Druze, the Maronites, the Nizari Ismailis (weird kind of Shi'a who definitely are related to Druze), and the Alawites (quasi-Muslim but do a lot of Christian stuff). It's basically 5 big mountains in a row that each have religious minority very distinct from the ordinary Sunnis and Christians around them.
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Shia Islam is fricking wild and always a treat to read about. In many ways it feels like the Protestantism of Islam, where the religion was able to be adapted super hard to fit the local customs and highly unorthodox beliefs. The Alawites are pretty much crypto-Christians who seem to have adopted certain Islamic beliefs to avoid persecution, and the Druze is a weird syncretic offshoot of Shia Islam with Gnostic elements that still exists today. And @haggis these groups are highly endogamous because they both have several esoteric teachings that aren't supposed to be revealed to outsiders.
The Nizaris are the actual Assassins from Assassin's Creed but unlike the Alawites and Druze they're much more in line with mainstream Islamic thought, at least in terms of Shia Islam. They're still very unique though, for example they pay a tenth of their income to the family of their spiritual leader, Aga Khan, who is a descendant of Persians that migrated to modern day Pakistan (although their current HQ is in Portugal). As a result this family has become billionaires that maintain close ties with the elites of the western and eastern worlds. The Aga Khans are basically white at this point with all the intermarrying they've done with western businesspeople, politicians, celebrities, and other notable individuals. As a South Asian this setup seems to have paid off well for the Nizaris, as they are typically some of the wealthiest and well-educated Muslims I've seen. Fairly progressive too, which earns them the ire of more orthodox Muslims.
I also really like the Samaritans, who aren't Shia but rather an Israelite people who claim the current Jews got the wrong mountain and therefore aren't the real chosen people anymore. Shit is so fascinating.
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Despite the similarities and the location I think the consensus belief is that it comes from neoplatonism rather than crypto-christianity
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Agreed, I like to read about the differences between them and modern Jews, in doctrine and teachings. Fascinating indeed.
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Check the Alawite talk page for some classic Syrian Civil War sectarianism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Alawites
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Oh sweet, I'm only 5% of the way in and they're already arguing over whether it's okay to call them "ghulat".
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I'm just pissed that no one has leaked their secret beliefs yet
You can find all the freemason secrets and shit online but not this
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We need a long enough peacetime so a Druze failson can leak it here.
What are the Freemason secrets?
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If I got my facts right the Alawites only teach their most secret beliefs to married men over the age of 40. But it's so hard to find facts about them because they do a good fricking job of keeping all that shit on lock.
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The Manichaeans would probably accept you, but you will have to find one first.
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There's rumors of small remote communities still practicing the one true faith in rural China
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Mandaeans and samaritans too
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Oh yeah, I forgot. The Samaritans are on the next mountain right after the Jews.
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And when they've got a mountain they can retreat up to whenever they're in trouble, there's no way to force them to be normal. It's really incredible that the Druze have actually been in that same spot for 1000 years. The Nizari have been there just as long (like in the castle from Assassin's Creed), the Shi'a even longer, the Maronites for about 500.
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The Samaritan religions pretty cool too, an ancient judean religion that isn't Jewish (close cousins) surviving to the present day fricks with my head.
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Yazidis are weirder. Literal devil-worshippers.
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!ummah
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tru though they do worship satan
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It'd be one thing if they were trying to be evil and doing human sacrifices and shit. But instead they're just like "You know Satan really got a bad rap. He's not such a bad guy once you get to know him."
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I asked about this before because the wiki page doesn't mention satanism.
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It's because they worship a peapeepee archangel as an intermediary to God that Muslims identify with Iblis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taw%C3%BBs%C3%AE_Melek
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gotta say a peapeepee is a banger animal to choose.
I think @Sasanka_of_Gauda said they annoying as heck tho
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Here's some 2010 sectarianism(before the genocide) toward Yizidis, @everyone they talk about the refusal to bow part
https://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/234978896-yazidism/
https://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/235024546-yazidi-m-p-in-tears/
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You should have gone to a better encyclopedia.
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There's also the part where they accept the legend about how God ordered all angels to bow before the man, and Satan refused, and was put in Heck.
To which they add that it was actually a little misunderstanding, and after 7000 years Satan quenched the fires of heck with his tears and escaped (so it was God's will all along obviously) and now rules the earth.
Wikipedos scrubbed all this of course, but if you google it the sources are there.
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that actually look like a much better encyclopedia lol, thanks.
One thing that always makes reading about religion hard is how much syncretism that goes on that you need decode like multiple eras of philosophy.
From this passage alone you need to have passing familiarity with Islam as a whole, Sufi traditions specifically and Zoroastrian religious deities and themes
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It covers all kinds of stuff that's only partly related to Iran somehow so it's really useful.
Yeah, I at least kind of understand what a Sufi is, but there's no way I can guess what they believe.
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@Sasanka_of_Gauda don't think they have any coherent single strand of thought. Sufi is just a catch all for a type of Islamic missionary originating from Turan, the various schools disagree among themselves and all schools are founded on the thoughts of some individual. @Sasanka_of_Gauda say this as a feminist ally
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Yo, Ya comment got automatically removed cuz ya forgot ta include
i say this as a feminist ally
. Don't worry, we gotchu! We ain't gonna letcha post or comment nuttin' that don't express ya love and acceptance towards minorities. Feel free ta resubmit ya comment withi say this as a feminist ally
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