Druze
A living tradition within Isma'ilism. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Druze is a living tradition within Isma'ilism. Also written al-Muwahhidun (self-designation, 'Unitarians'), Duruz.
Origin
Founders named in the sources: Hamza b. 'Ali, al-Hasan b. Haydara al-Farghani al-Akhram, Muhammad b. Isma'il al-Darazi (Nashtakin al-Darazi). Founding date given as 1017. Scholarship in the Brill Handbook chapter on the Druze states that the faith emerged in 1017 CE when the Fatimid ruler al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (r. 996-1021) instructed missionaries to propagate a new era of tawhid. Abbas Halabi attributes the foundation to three figures: al-Akhram, Hamza b. 'Ali and al-Darazi. 'Druze' derives from al-Darazi and is an exonym; the community calls itself al-muwahhidun.
Continue reading this article
Sign in free to read in full. Become a member to join the discussion without limits.
Sign in free to read- ✓Read every article
- ✓Comment and reply (up to 100 words, 10/month)
- ✓Browse the community
- ✓Reader badge
- ✓
Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Druze.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-druze.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-druze-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Druze},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-druze},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.