Druses Sentence Examples

To this last class belong the Ismailites (Assassins), q.v., Metawali, Nosairis, Ansarieh, and especially the Druses.

The Ansarieh, for instance, and no doubt the Druses also, were originally survivals of the Syrian population.

It is inhabited by Druses.

The Hauran is one of the principal habitations of the sect of the Druses.

There are also about 300,000 Druses and about 200,000 Gipsies.

Activity in missionary work, especially in alleviating the distresses of the victims of the Druses, soon brought him prominently into notice; he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in October 1861, shortly after his return to Europe, was appointed French auditor at Rome.

There is consequently much emigration, the Christian surplus going mainly to Egypt, and to America, the Druses to the latter country and to the Hauran.

Feudalism is practically extinct among them and with the decline of the Druses, and the great stake they have acquired in agriculture, they have laid aside much of their warlike habit together with their arms. Even their instinct of nationality is being sensibly impaired by their gradual assimilation to the Papal Church, whose agents exercise from Beirut an increasing influence on their ecclesiastical elections and church government.

Their headquarters is Zahleh; but they are found also in strength in Metn and Jezzin, where they help to counterbalance Druses.

Lebanon during the Frank period of Antioch and Palestine, the Maronites being inclined to take the part of the crusading princes against the Druses and Moslems; but they were still regarded as heretic Monothelites by Abulfaragius (Bar-Hebraeus) at the end of the 13th century; nor is their effectual reconciliation to Rome much older than 1736, the date of the mission sent by the pope Clement XII., which fixed the actual status of their church.

An informal French protection had, however, been exercised over them for some time previously, and with it began the feud of Maronites and Druses, the latter incited and spasmodically supported by Ottoman pashas.

The Druses renounced their Shehab amirs when Beshir al-Kassim openly joined the Maronites in 1841, and the Maronites definitely revolted from the Khazin in 1858.

It should be added, however, that among the Druses of Shuf, feudalism has tended to re-establish itself, and the power is now divided between the Jumblat and Yezbeki families, a leading member of one of which is almost always Ottoman kaiynakam of the Druses, and locally called amir.

A central mejliss or Council of twelve members is composed of four Maronites, three Druses, one Turk, two Greeks (Orthodox), one Greek Uniate and one Metawali.

This was the original proportion, and it has not been altered in spite of the decline of the Druses and increase of the Maronites.

See DRUSES.

In the Lebanon both the Christian clans and the Druses are ruled by hereditary amirs.

Non-Turkish ethnical elements - Albanians, Macedonians, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Druses - were to be moulded as far as possible into uniformity with the dominant Turkish element.

A local quarrel in the Hawran was seized as a pretext in 1910 for dispatching thither some 30,000 men, with artillery, to crush the Druses.

The operations, however, did not result entirely to the advantage of the Turks, who suffered at least one serious reverse, and a compromise followed under which the Druses accepted conscription for the Ottoman army.

In July 1860, when the Moslems of that city, taking advantage of disturbances among the Druses of Lebanon, attacked the Christian quarter and killed over 3000 persons, Abd-el-Kader helped to repress the outbreak and saved large numbers of Christians.

The interval was in part devoted to the study of the religion of the Druses, which was the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Expose de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838).

His system of persecution was not abandoned till in the last year of his reign (1020) he thought fit to claim divinity, a doctrine which is perpetuated by the Druses, called after one DarazI, who preached the divinity of Ijakim at the time; the violent opposition which this aroused among the Moslems probably led him to adopt milder measures towards his other subjects, and those who had been forcibly converted were permitted to return to their former religion and rebuild their places of worship. Whether his disappearance at the beginning of the year 1021 was due to the resentment of his outraged subjects, or, as the historians say, to his sisters fear that he would bequeath the caliphate to a distant relative to the exclusion of his own son, will never be known.

This little community suffered much persecution at first from the Greek Church, and afterwards from the Druses, by whom in 1860 nearly 1000 Christians were massacred, while others escaped to Tyre or Sidon.

The Maronite population has greatly increased at the expense of the Druses, and is now obliged to emigrate in considerable numbers.

The second is now confined to the southern Lebanon, and even there is greatly outnumbered by Maronites, who, in the whole "Mountain," stand to Druses as 9 to 2.

The Hauran, therefore, has become the stronghold of the Druses, offering nowadays the best field for studying their peculiar customs and religion; and the group there still increases at the expense of the other groups, despite efforts on the part of the Ottoman government to check Druse migration by both conciliatory and repressive measures.

The actual distinction of the Druses, as a racial unity, despite their dispersion, depends so exclusively on the peculiarity of their common religion, that it will be well at once to give an account of Druse creed and practice as they are understood to stand at the present day.

The Muwahhidin (Unitarians), as the Druses call themselves, believe that there is one and only one God, indefinable, incomprehensible, ineffable, passionless.

Druses, believed to be dispersed in China, will return to Syria.

According to the Druses, this great conversion took place in A.D.

History, There is good reasonto regard the Druses as, racially, a mixture of refugee stocks, in which the Arab largely predominates, grafted on to an original mountain population of Aramaic blood and Incarnationist tendencies.

As soon as we begin to know anything of the Druses they were living in a feudal state of society, as village communities under sheikhs, themselves generally subordinate to one or more amirs.

He sought the courts of Tuscany and Naples and tried to enlist Frank sympathies, inventing (probably) the curious myth, so often credited since, that the Druses are of crusading origin and owe their name to the counts of Dreux.1 1 Sophisticated Druses still sometimes claim connexion with Rosicrucians, and a special relation to Scottish freemasons.

Haidar Shehab, third of the line, inflicted a notable defeat on the pasha of Saida (capital of an Ottoman eyalet since 1688) and the Yemenite Druses at Ain Dara, near Zahleh, in 1711, and proceeded to consolidate Shehab power, breaking up the old feudal society and substituting for the sheikhs mukatajis (tax-contractors), who had penal jurisdiction.

The Yemenite Druses thereupon emigrated in large numbers to the Hauran, and laid the foundation of Druse power there.

The invasion of Syria by Mehemet Ali in 1831 caused Beshir to desert Abdallah and throw in his lot with Ibrahim Pasha; but he was not cordially followed by the Druses in general, and had good excuse for revolt in 1839, and intrigue with the British admiral in 1840.

The state of the Lebanon went from bad to worse, and at last, in January 1842, the Turkish government appointed Omar Pasha as administrator of the Druses and Maronites, with a council of four chiefs from each party; but the pasha, attempting to effect a disarming, was besieged in November in the castle of Beit ed-Din by the Druses under Shibli el-Arrian.

At the instigation of the European powers he was recalled in December, and the Druses and Maronites were placed under separate kaimakams (governors), who, it was stipulated, were not to be of the family of Shehab.

Forty of the chiefs were seized, the people was nominally disarmed, and in 1846 a new constitution was inaugurated, by which the kaimakam was to be assisted by two Druses, two Maronites, four Greeks, two Turks and one Metawali.

The privileged province of Lebanon was finally constituted by the Organic Statute of the 6th of September 1864, and the subsequent history of the Lebanon Druses is one of gradual withdrawal from the jurisdiction of that state, in which they see their ancient independence irretrievably compromised, and their religion subordinated to Christian supremacy.

The Hauran Druses increased by the middle of the 19th century to 7000 souls.

But the Druses still refused to pay taxes, to serve in the Ottoman army, or to recognize the kaimakam, and maintained their contumacy under the lead of the Jumblat, till 1896; when, as the result of a military expedition under Tahir Pasha and a great defeat at Ijun, a compromise was arrived at, under which the Druses agreed to pay taxes, but to serve in their own territory only as a frontier guard.

Since that epoch there has been comparative peace between the Druses and the government, largely because the latter, having learned wisdom, leaves the people very much to itself, maintaining only a small garrison of regular troops, and enlisting Druse police for service in Jebel Druz itself.

The Jews are engaged in trade, and the Christians, Druses and Moslems in agriculture; and the Arabs are an entirely pastoral people.

During the succeeding epoch of rebellion at Acre under Jezzar and Abdullah pashas, Beirut declined to a small town of about 10,000 souls, in dispute between the Druses, the Turks and the pashas, - a state of things which lasted till Ibrahim Pasha captured Acre in 1832.

When the powers moved against the Egyptians in 1840, Beirut had recently been occupied in force by Ibrahim as a menace to the Druses; but he was easily driven out after a destructive bombardment by Admiral Sir Robert Stopford (1768-1847).

In its more recent history the only incidents that need be mentioned are its capture by Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian general, in 1832, when the city was first opened to the representatives of foreign powers; its revolt against Ibrahim's tyranny in 1834, which he crushed with the aid of the Druses; the return of the city to Turkish domination, when the Egyptians were driven out of Syria in 1840 by the allied powers; and the massacre of July 1860, when the Moslem population rose against the Christians, burnt their quarter, and slaughtered about 3000 adult males.

In the surrounding plain are one hundred and forty villages, occupied in all by about 50,000 persons (1000 Christians, 2000 Druses).

Mid-Syria shows a medley of populations of more or less mixed origin, in large part alien, for which see Druses; Maronites and Lebanon.

Lebanon, chiefly by the immigration of various more or less heretical elements, Kurd, Turkoman, Persian and especially Arab, the latter largely after the break-up of the kingdom of Hira; and early in the i ith century these coalesced into a nationality (see Druses) under the congenial influence of the Incarnationist creed brought from Cairo by Ismael Darazi and other emissaries of the caliph Hakim and his vizier Hamza.

The old feudal and mukataji (see DRusEs) jurisdictions are abolished, i.e.

The castle in Hasbeya was held by the crusaders under Count Oran; but in 1171 the Druse emirs of the great Shehab`family (see Druses) recaptured it.

Formerly they were wholly organized on a clan system under feudal chiefs, of whom those of the house of Khazin were the most powerful; and these fought among themselves rather than with the Druses or other denominations down to the 18th century, when the Arab family of Shehab for its own purposes began to stir up strife between Maronites and Druses (see Druses).

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion as well as of superstition; and accordingly the Christian inhabitants of the Lebanon have long been persuaded that the Druses in their secret assemblies are guilty of the most nefarious practices.

It is possible, even probable, that the segregation of the Druses as a people dates only from the adoption of Hamza's creed.

Meanwhile, the Hauran, the old seat of the Shehab family and Hermon Druses, had been steadily receiving a Druse influx, since the day of Ain Dara (see above).

The Hauran Druses are a vigorous, independent folk, with a well-deserved reputation for courage, very astute, and hospitable to Europeans, especially the British, with whom they have an old tradition of friendship. But, like most persecuted but semiindependent peoples, they are both cruel, and, by our standards, treacherous.

Saladin retook it in 1187, and thenceforward, for six centuries and a half, whoever its nominal lords may have been, Saracen, Crusader, Mameluke or (from the 16th century) Turk, the Druse emirs of Lebanon dominated it (see DRUSES).