Word: druze
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...number of heretical offshoots. One is the Alawi sect, a Shi'ite minority group to which most of Syria's leaders belong. The Alawis believe in the transmigration of souls and a kind of trinity in which 'Ali is Allah incarnate. Another is the secretive Druze sect of Israel, Lebanon and Syria, which split away from Islam in the 11th century. America's so-called Black Muslims were once generally regarded by Sunni Muslims as followers of a new heresy. By adopting orthodox beliefs and discarding a rule that limited membership to black Americans, the World...
...mountain road, gunfire and death. This time, however, the victim was not a hapless villager caught in the middle of sectarian strife. He was Kamal Jumblatt, 59, leader of Lebanon's Muslim left and feudal landlord whose power base was rooted among the 150,000 members of the Druze sect. His assassination last week threatened to reopen the bloody civil war in Lebanon, which since November has been living under a "peace" enforced by three divisions of Syrian troops...
...assassination fitted the pattern of Jumblatt's life, as well as that of recent Lebanese history. His father, a Druze chieftain, was assassinated in a sectarian squabble in the 1920s, and his sister was gunned down ten months ago in her Beirut apartment. Jumblatt himself was as paradoxical as his fractured society. Educated in law at the Sorbonne in Paris and at a Roman Catholic university in Beirut, he fought throughout his career to revise the antiquated sectarian political system whereby Lebanese Christians automatically held the balance of power in the government. Although Jumblatt was a Socialist...
...RECENT assassination of Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt in Lebanon, deliberations of the Palestine National Council, and heated reactions on all sides to President Carter's recent pronouncements on a Middle East settlement are the latest reminders of the complexity and frustration of Middle Eastern politics. But despite the fact that the battle lines have always been complex and have become increasingly fragmented and radicalized over time, Americans still tend to regard the ongoing stalemate in the Middle East simplistically as a conflict between "the Jews" and "the Arabs...
...keep it that way. The Palestinian guerrillas who once launched sporadic terrorist attacks on Israel border settlements have left "Fatahland" to fight against Christians and Syrians in the north. In effect, the southern half of Lebanon has been left without any government, and its 360,000 Moslem, Christian and Druze inhabitants-mostly poor and scrambling farmers-have been abandoned to fend for themselves. Israel is moving determinedly into the vacuum. TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff last week toured the mountainous 80-mile Israeli-Lebanese border and sent this report...