There are times when I feel inclined to blame Abraham. According to my 1896 Dictionary of the Christian Church the original inhabitants of Canaan worshipped the Baalim. These came in male and female counterparts, and were celebrated with “rites of the grossest forms of sensuality” which, whatever that actually means in late Victorian terms, sounds more fun than being washed, however figuratively in lamb's blood. Abraham teamed up with a jealous nomad warrior god who said to him “your descendants can go down and bash those people up, slay all the males and enslave the rest and then steal their land”. If it is true that an honest god is the noblest work of man, there are criticisms that can be made of this one, but ever since then, those proto Jewish‐Christian‐Muslims and their descendants have been following his initial instructions, all over the Middle East, and now all over the world.
Interested outsiders like me sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between the branches of the original Abrahamic religion. How they manage to find slivers of doctrinal difference to create such a lot of bloodshed and misery over sometimes baffles me. This is not helped by the fact that none of them are monolithic. Christianity is particularly riven with peculiar sects, but both Judaism and Islam by no means represent solid blocks of opinion sharply differentiated from each other. This book is number three in its series. If Scarecrow Press are really going to produce a historical dictionary for every sect in all three of these religions, theological libraries will have to clear a good few shelves to make room, and, at over £40 a throw will have to increase their book funds.
The Druzes form a very interesting example of this splitting. They are, technically, a splinter group of the Ismaeli Shi'ite Muslims so, broadly speaking, belong in the Islamic fold, but they have absorbed much more from Christianity, Judaism and Gnosticism than most Muslim sects. One of the things I especially like about them is that they do not proselytize. They did so up until 1043, but since then the only way to become one is to be born one. If you find a bunch of people in shiny suits knocking on your door with beaming smiles and handfuls of tracts you can, at least, be sure that they are not Druzes. Another difference is their attitude to women, which is much more balanced than that in much of Islam. Druzes are, following Gnostic ideas, divided into the ordinary mass of worshippers practicing the exoteric teachings of their religion, and the initiates who are allowed to study the esoteric teachings. Druze custom actually makes it slightly easier for women to become initiates than men, on the grounds that women are intrinsically more spiritual. I am not sure that this is really true, but it makes an interesting contrast to attitudes found elsewhere.
Druzes are found throughout the Levant, with small concentrations in Israel (where they have the unique distinction of being the only non‐Jewish people who are legally liable for call‐up to the Israeli army) and around Mount Lebanon, so they have been involved in fighting on both sides in the recent unpleasantness. The history of fighting goes back to their earliest days, exacerbated by incessant outside interference. Just for example, when the European powers were picking over the remains of the decaying Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century, the French decided to arm and support the Maronite Christians (another interesting sect) in Syria, so the British, to counterbalance them, supplied guns and military assistance to the Druzes – a modest contribution towards making the Middle East the happy fun‐loving place it is today. Still the Druzes keep going, farming, trading, fighting and worshipping. There is remarkably little printed information in English about them. The most recent book in the theological library of Kings College London is Parfit's account of his travels in the Lebanon, published in 1917. This being the case, any new account should be welcomed.
My main criticism of this book is the decision to produce it in dictionary form. There are some subjects that naturally lend themselves to being broken into short chunks of definition, distributed in English alphabetical order. There are not nearly as many of these as some publishers seem to think, and an account of the lives, beliefs, history, culture and geographical distribution of a group of people such as the Druzes is most definitely not one of them. If this book had been written with the introduction expanded to, say, four times its present length as a main text, with a separate glossary, an annotated gazetteer, an annotated index of names, a list of diaspora addresses, and an abbreviated version of the author's previously published annotated bibliography (Swayd, 1998) it would have been more useful and much more readable. As it is, the only way to find out about the Druzes is to read all through it, skipping backwards and forwards, and, inevitably, getting a vast amount of repetition for such a small book.
There are lots of entries for subjects that really are of little relevance, or for subjects for which I would not use this book as a reference source. Opening the book at random, in the middle of P, you find an entry for the Syrian People's Party, but a reference from Phalanges to the Lebanese Phalanges Party (both important historically, and both could be together in a short chapter on the Druzes in twentieth‐century Levantine politics). An entry on the Philippines, noting a tiny group of emigrants there, could have gone into a chapter on the Druze diaspora, and an entry on The Pilgrimage, cross‐referred from Hajj, which I would not have looked for in this book, includes a sentence noting that the title of Prince of Pilgrimage (Amir al‐Hajj) was given in the seventeenth century to the son of Fakhr al‐Din al‐Ma'ni. This sentence is repeated on the next page under the heading Prince of Pilgrimage, immediately under the reference Pope see Vatican and then is repeated again, under Ma'ani, Fakhr al‐Din, once you have found your way past the reference Fakhr al‐Din see Ma'ani, but, suprisingly, no cross‐reference from Amir al‐Hajj, though there are cross‐references to and from other Amirs and Emirs. The absence of any clear policy on whether to use an Arabic or English form, and on the transliteration of Arabic, exacerbates this problem. Thus, for example, both the prophet Job and Saint John play considerable roles in Druze theology. It would be reasonable, therefore, to expect their entries to be side‐by‐side. Job is there under J, referenced from Ayyub, but John is referred to Yahya. This is merely shoddy. A good publisher's editor should not have let the author get away with this.
This book is on an interesting topic, and there is not much else available on the subject, so libraries catering for readers in comparative theology or for people concerned with the history and politics of the Levant should consider acquiring copies. Really however, there is the material in here for a much shorter and much better book, so I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly.
