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Rh more the aspects of a religious fraternal order than those of a sect, and that despite the fact that the community itself is divided into two distinctly marked classes: the initiate and the uninitiate. The sacred writings, all hand-written, are accessible to the initiated few only and the meeting-places are secluded rooms on hills outside the villages, where Thursday evening sessions are held.

As they tried to gain a permanent footing in southern Lebanon, the Druzes found themselves in conflict with an already established Islamic heterodoxy, the Nusayriyah, whose followers were subsequently driven into northern Syria, their present habitat. The Druzes later spread into other rural districts, but were unable to thrive in any city. Some of them, as a result of Qaysite- Yemenite blood feuds, migrated in the early eighteenth century into Hawran in Syria. The influx was augmented by malcontents from Lebanon in the nineteenth century. In Hawran they now number about ninety thousand as against eighty thousand in Lebanon. Throughout their entire history they have shown remarkable vigour and exercised in Lebanese and Syrian national affairs influence quite disproportionate to their number.

The Nusayriyah were an Ismailite sect founded in the late ninth century. Not much is known about this religion, which is secretive in character, hierarchical in organization and esoteric in doctrine. Its sacred writings have not been exposed to the same extent as those of the Druzes, many of which came to light as a result of communal wars in the nineteenth century. Finding itself a small heterodoxy amidst a hostile majority, the cult chose to go underground. Like other extreme Shiites, the Nusayris deify Ali and are there- fore sometimes referred to as Alawites, a name which became current after the French organized the mandated region centring on Latakia into a separate state under that name. The cult represents an imposition of extreme Shiite ideas on a pagan Syrian base. Its adepts must have passed directly Rh