Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

One of the last vestiges of Orientalist scholarship, the Druze community in the Middle East is still generally presented as an enigma, highlighted for the secrecy and mysterious rituals its scriptures seem to warrant. This, of course, is an essentialist reading that remains stuck on the text and, even when it (re)discovers them as people, turns the Druzes into witnesses of that text. Probably the most refreshing aspect of Isabelle Rivoal's fascinating new study is that, by reversing that order, she succeeds not only in debunking the fancies of the Orientalists but also in giving us an inside view of contemporary Druze society as lived in the village of Isfiya (in today's Israel). The author's extensive fieldwork has led to an interpretation of culture that offers us "real" people within their social and political contexts. Thus, when she describes the Druze faith as reflected in the community's traditional customs and its religious rituals, ceremonies, and hierarchy, her understanding proves at once more comprehensive but also clearer than that of most other scholars who have written on the Druzes. What is more, her ethnographic observations on the social and political life of the village enable her to paint a broader picture of the entire Druze community in the Middle East.

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Rivoal's approach pays dividends from the start, as she gives us in chapter one a survey of Druze faith and history that is rare for its clarity of exposition, even though the written sources she relies on are largely secondary ones. For the history and geography of Isfiya in chapter two, she uses both written and oral history. Here her anthropological insights succeed not only in laying bare the counternarratives the inhabitants tell about their past but also in offering a wholly convincing interpretation of the internal political motivations that underlie these controversies. She writes: "The new interest the Druzes showed in studying their traditions [was not] the result of an internal demand . .  [but] of an external demand that came to the fore particularly in Israel" (author's translation, p. 56). What she refers to is the longstanding Israeli government policy of encouraging a separate Druze identity separates them from the other Arab communities in Israel.

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