Fakhr al-Din, the Druze Ma’ni Princes of the Mountain, & Their Ancient Biblical Hebrew Kin Through Marriage…

by Gerald a. Honigman

I recently rewatched “Exodus:Gods and Kings” starring Christian Bale, Sigourney Weaver, & Joel Edgerton in some of the starring roles.

After Moses,  Egyptian Prince and brother of Prince Ramses, discovers the truth of his Hebrew origins, and all the confusion and torment that accompanied this forever personal and global life changing event, he is exiled into the desert wilderness since enslaved Hebrews found out and hoped that their long prayed for human deliverer sent from G_d had at last arrived.

Upon the death of the Pharaoh Seti, and the succession of Ramses to the throne, he realized the potential trouble such a perceived deliverer would cause among the increasing number of Hebrew slaves. Moses was then exiled from Egypt.

After wandering through the desert, Moses/Moshe arrived in the land of the Kenite high priest of Midian in the wilderness below Mt. Sinai, Jethro.

He had left his mother, sister Miriam, and brother Aaron behind, along with the important Hebrew family of Nun, whose son, Joshua/Yehoshua, would become Moses’s chief general, the next leader of the Hebrew tribes who would eventually make their way into the Land of Promise to Abraham and his descendants some eight hundred years earlier. Moses would not make it into the land.

Moses fights off rival tribesmen threatening Jethro’s daughters at the precious water well, and thereby becomes a welcome stranger to the Kenite high priest.

He sojourns in his camp and eventually marries one of Jethro/Yitro’s beautiful daughters, Zipporah.

The Druze revere Jethro, the Kenite high priest of Midian, as the founder of their monotheistic faith, most important prophet, and patriarch of their people—thus uniting Jews and Druze together through both faith and peoplehood to this very day,.

At this time of continuous oppression and slaughter of Druze and Christians in Syria, Israel is the only nation to heed their pleas for rescue from Jihadi Arab Islamist butchers, similar to the same genocidal maniacs in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban, the Houthis, and other mass slaughterers of innocents.

https://share.google/zB53AybXmBDunpdrw

Back in the 1970s, I did most of my graduate work at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of Princeton, Columbia, and New York Universities based at the latter’s West Greenwich Village campus.

Those were the days between the June 1967 Six Day and the October 1973  wars when, in the latter, Israel was almost destroyed by a massive surprise attack on the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar, Yom Kippur, by a coalition of Arab militaries led by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.

Over confident, it was caught off guard as Arabs knew most Israelis would be in synagogue with their families. Israel lost the equivalent of about 100,000 American military personnel, and the country was left reeling in collective pain and mourning.

Almost fifty years to the day later, not by accident, it would again be viciously attacked by Arab genocidal butchers on another sacred holy day commemorating the giving of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah and  its Ten Commandments, to the Druzes’s Patriarch, Jethro’s,  son-in-law, Moses on Simchat Torah—October 7, 2023.

Unfortunately, in the vast majority of most Arab mindsets, the entire region is simply “purely Arab patrimony,” and to hell regarding anyone else’s rights or aspirations—whether they’re Druze, Jews, Kurds, black Africans in the Sudan, Amazigh “Berbers” in North Africa, etc.

See here for some of Hamas and other just “ordinary” Gaza Arabs’s October 7th handiwork:

https://theinsightinternational.com/thinking-palestine-2024-06-05

During my time at the Kevorkian, I noticed that while some subjects never left center stage, others were never discussed—and not by accident…

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/berber-autumn

As is the case right now, while Druze and Christians are being slaughtered and humiliated in Syria by the same breed of jihadis massacring Hindus in India, black Africans in Nigeria and elsewhere, and who  always have their favorite kilab yahud  “Jew dogs” on their butcher’s lists, if the subject wasn’t about justice for Arabs—and Arabs only—obtaining an additional state to the almost two dozen they already possessed (including one lopped off of almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine in 1922 and known as Jordan today), the plight and rights of any other indigenous peoples in the region of MENA were simply ignored.

This prompted my decision to focus a good portion of my attention on those other deliberately neglected folks mentioned above.

My research on the struggle of some forty million truly stateless Kurds wound up on the recommended reference list of Paris’s renown Institut d’etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) and other universities as well: “British Petroleum Politics, Arab Nationalism, and the Kurdish Struggle for Independence”.

During this same period and later at OSU and its Mershon Center for International Security Policy Studies, I continued my intensive investigation on these topics.

The subject of the fascinating and unique people, the Druze, came about as a result of the huge amount of time spent on studying the Ottoman Turkish Empire which ruled most of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for some 6 centuries

It conquered the Arabs, who earlier had burst out of a fast desiccating Arabian Peninsula, in the 7th century C.E., spreading their supremacist, imperialist, colonizing, and setting jihad holy war in all directions—slaughtering millions in the process of acquiring other native peoples’s lands in Judaea, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan black Africa, Kurdistan, native Semitic but non-Arab Lebanon (Phoenicia)  and elsewhere as well.

The Turks next moved into Christian Europe and threatened to conquer as much land as possible.

They had been “Arabized” and had adopted the Arabs’s script, religion, and zeal for the conquest of the lands of the kafir infidels on behalf of the only “true faith” and the spread of the Dar ul-Islam at the expense of the various subjugated kafirs who had the choice of conversion or death.

The exception was for those conquered peoples who possessed a recognized Holy Book which was related to the Arabs’s and  later Turks’s own Muslim religion: Jews, Christians, and later Zoroastrians in Persia.

These folks became “protected” peoples, “dhimmis,” who, as long as they accepted assorted humiliations  and paid the expected tax, were permitted to live a very tenuous life which could drastically come  to a violent end at any time depending upon the mood of the current Islamic  ruler and the religious authorities.

At times, the Druze were also given dhimmi status, and faced persecution over the centuries from the dominant Sunni Muslim authorities.

Especially due to the faith of their foremost Prophet and  Biblical Patriarch, Jethro, and his son in law, Moses, while what later became a more intricate Druse religion which began as an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, central to it remained a strict belief in the absolute oneness and unity of G_d. They thus call themselves “muhwahiddun”—Unitarians—and, as in Moses and Zipporah’s day, very similar to that of the Jewish people.

A good background regarding the Druze can be found here:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Druze

Within the Ottoman Empire, various lands were governed by loyal local representatives.

In Lebanon, the premier Ottoman administrative ruler was the powerful Druze leader, Faikr al-Din al-Ma’ni.

He managed to unite the dominant Maronite Christian and Druze communities into a unified and significant alliance, and is known in many circles as the Father of modern Lebanon today.

Now if today’s Lebanon can only follow through and take advantage of what Israel achieved for it—greatly weakening Shi’a Iran’s Hizbullah proxies—Lebanon may very well be another candidate for the Abraham Accords.

My hope is that an alliance can be forged between an autonomous Druze entity in southern Syria (itself an artificial nation to begin with, composed of eternal enemies only held together by one autocratic despot or another), Israel, and Syrian Kurdistan to begin with, and, hopefully, adding Iraqi Kurdistan later on down the road….And perhaps further icing on the cake, adding India as well to confront the genocidal Islamists which have been brutally terrorizing all of these different peoples.

See here for what’s happening in Syria now regarding the Druze…

“Syria: The Druze Struggle | ARTE.tv Documentary”

https://share.google/mQHP4OpzICXZrb7k2