The Secret Order of the Druze

“Sons of Abraham: The Secret Order of the Druze” is a relatively short documentary about the Druze, a peculiar religious minority in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The documentary was originally released in 1984 and seems to be French, but in this version the narrator speaks English.

Since the Druze are organized as a secret initiatory order, we don´t learn *that* much about their actual teachings. The Druze religion originated in Egypt during the 11^th century. Its prophet was a man named Hamza, who preached the divine nature of al-Hakim, a Shia Muslim Fatimid ruler of Egypt. Muslims, Christians and Jews seem united in condemning al-Hakim as literally insane, but in the documentary, his destruction of religious shrines is rather seen as a form of theologically motivated iconoclasm.

The Druze seem to have a Neo-Platonist view of God or the Divine, and venerate Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras as divine manifestations. Biblical characters also play a prominent role. The documentary shows Druze pilgrimages to the supposed tombs of Jethro and Job, the former being seen as the “initiator” of Moses. We also get to see a Druze marriage and a funeral. The Druze are most well known for their belief in reincarnation, explored more in detail in another documentary also available at YouTube, “To the ends of the Earth: Back from the dead”.  

A curious fact about the Druze is that their community in Israel supports the Jewish state, even to the point of doing military service in the Israeli Defense Forces, while the communities in Syria and Lebanon are pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian. “Sons of Abraham” claims that this is all a ruse – the Druze actually practice a higher-order form of taqiyya (the Shia tradition of protective dissimulation), all of them really being a single community mostly loyal to itself. The narrator claims that the supposedly pro-Israeli Druze mourned the death of Kamal Jumblatt, the prominent anti-Israeli Druze leader in Lebanon!

In passing, we also get to know the symbolism of the Druze flag. Its stripes symbolize the Universal Soul (red), the Logos (yellow), the cosmos (blue) and the material world (white), all united by a green triangle symbolizing Universal Reason (presumably God). I admit that the symbolism is pretty neat.

Since the Druze don´t accept converts, you will probably never learn the secrets of their religion. Nor will I. Nor, I suppose, did Soviet spy Stig Bergling. Unless, of course, we will be reincarnated as members of the Secret Order in some future life of ours…