The Configuration of the Druze Tradition

The Druze religious tradition has its origins in Ismaili Shi'ism,² with which it shares an esoteric approach to Islamic sacred texts, doctrines and rituals. Ismailism was the official religion in the Fatimid Caliphate, which ruled over Egypt and parts of Palestine and Syria between 969 and 1171.³ Building on Ismaili esoteric conceptions, a group of religious thinkers in Cairo led by Hamza bin ’Ali (985–1021) elaborated the doctrine of God's unicity (tawhid) and the possibility of its manifestation. The Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (985–1021) accepted Hamza's message, and in 1017 he sent emissaries to preach the message (da'wa) across the kingdom.

The correspondence between Hamza and the missionaries and decrees of al-Hakim were compiled in the Rasa'il al-Hikma (Epistles of Wisdom), constituting the canonic codification of the doctrine. The da'wa successfully converted populations to the new message in the Wadi al-Taym in southern Lebanon, in northern Palestine and in southern Syria. After the disappearance of al-Hakim in 1021 the adepts of Hamza's religious message were persecuted and eradicated in Egypt. The da'wa was definitively interrupted in 1043, and no more conversions were accepted into the community (Khuri 2004: 22–26).

In the following centuries the Druze constructed the boundaries of their religious community through contrastive differentiation in relation to other religious traditions, particularly Sunni Islam. Many Sunnis considered the doctrinal secrecy and ritual privacy of the Druze to be signs of deviation from their normative understandings of Islam. Nevertheless, throughout their history the relations of the Druze with their wider Sunni environment were more often marked by accommodation and cooperation than by conflict and persecution.⁴ This was the case during the Ottoman period (1516–1918) when Druze leaders served as local authorities and provided military force to the empire. The most important of the Druze leaders in this period was Fakhr al-Din al-Ma'n II (1572–1635), who managed to establish an autonomous emirate in Lebanon, northern Palestine and parts of Syria until being defeated and executed by the Ottomans. Even after Fakhr al-Din II, Druze landlords held considerable political and economic power over the Lebanese mountains.

In 1860 a revolt of Christian peasants against the Druze landlords was fiercely repressed, escalating into a massacre of Christian populations in Mount Lebanon that spread to Damascus. The subsequent French military intervention led to the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyya (Governorate) of Mount Lebanon by the Ottoman government in 1861, changing the balance of power in favour of the Christians. The European colonial occupation and the establishment of the modern states in the twentieth century led to the division of the Druze into distinct national entities with different histories and political contexts.

The organisation of the Druze as a religious community derives from the restricted circulation of religious knowledge, which in its advanced form is only available to those who are initiated into the mystical⁵ aspects of the religious tradition. Its members are divided into ʻuqal (sages), those who have been initiated into the esoteric teachings of the religious tradition, and juhal (ignorants), the uninitiated (Assrauy 1967: 41; Khuri 2004: 12–13). It is expected that those who are initiated behave according to the rules of morality and modesty defined by the Druze tradition.

Among the initiated there are those who devote themselves to the study and interpretation of sacred texts, fast, regularly do retreats (khalwa) and preside over religious rituals. They constitute religious authorities known as shuyukh al-din (sing. shaykh al-din).⁶ Besides their religious activities, these shaykhs⁷ mediate conflicts and dispense justice, thus inscribing moral and legal principles of the Druze tradition into the everyday lives of their followers. Some shaykhs are known for their piety and religious knowledge, constituting a group known as ajawid (sing. Juwaiyd, the diminutive form of jaiyd, ‘good’) who are seen as religious references and moral and ethical examples to the believers, and after their death as sources of blessings and divine power (baraka).

The shaykhs are organised in a fluid hierarchy, in which lesser known shaykhs are affiliated with those of higher reputation. The shaykhs on the upper level of the hierarchy are known by the title of shaykh al-ʻaql (shaykh of knowledge) or shaykh al-mashaykh (shaykh of the shaykhs) (Assrauy 1967: 45; Khuri 2004: 13–31). State efforts at incorporating this religious structure into its institutional apparatus, such as in Lebanon, where the Mashyakhat al-ʻAql judges affairs pertaining to personal law among the Druze, have raised controversy, as bureaucratic criteria of recruitment into office are often in disagreement with ideals of religious authority (Khuri 2004: 119).

The Druze call themselves Ahl al-Tawhid (People/Followers of Unitarianism) or Muwahidun (Unitarians), due to their central doctrine of tawhid, meaning the absolute unicity of God. The name ‘Druze’ is not used by the Druze themselves, for it was coined by their opponents from the name of al-Darazi, an early leader and preacher of the sect who is considered deviant and heretical by the Druze. Besides divine unicity, the belief in reincarnation (taqamus) constitutes a central tenet in the Druze tradition, defining the religious identities and experiences of the faithful.

According to Druze doctrines the nafs, which is usually translated as ‘soul’,⁸ is an emanation or a particle of the divine light or truth that passes from one body to another. The cycle of reincarnations aims to fulfil the purification of the soul from its contact with the material world. This cycle will last until the day of judgement, when the soul will return to the divine reality. Druze souls are considered to be at a higher spiritual and moral level, as a result of which they only reincarnate into Druze bodies. The identity of the reincarnating soul is revealed to oneself and to others in the community through nutq (speech), when memories of past lives are expressed by the individual (Assrauy 1967: 71; Khuri 2004: 105–116).

The religious life of the Druze shares many features with that of other Muslim communities, including daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, pilgrimage to Mecca and having the Qur'an as the major normative sacred text. Nevertheless, all these elements are transformed and given other meanings by the emphasis that the Druze tradition puts on their personal and experiential aspects as personal and reflexive disciplinary practices,⁹ rather than their public and performative ones. This transforms the public character of Islamic religiosity into a matter of private personal devotion, which can be shrouded in secrecy in order to enhance its value (Khuri 2004: 1–3).

Besides these shared elements, there are others that are specific to Druze religiosity. Their sacred texts include the Rasa'il al-Hikma (Epistles of Wisdom), a compilation of letters and decrees by the founders of Druzism along with the Druze doctrinal tenets. In terms of collective ritual there is a gathering on Thursdays for the recitation of prayers and preaching. The solitary retreat (khalwa) for praying, meditation, memorising or reciting the Qur'an or fasting has a devotional value, and is sometimes performed in purpose-built structures (Assrauy 1967: 42–43; Khuri 2004: 45–53).

The visitation (ziyara) of the tombs (maqam) of prophetic or saintly figures that dot the landscape of the territories with a large concentration of Druze is a very important element in the religious life of the Druze communities throughout the Middle East, as is the case with other Islamic communities as well. While the prophetic figures come from the sacred history and cosmology shared with other Islamic traditions, the saints are often prestigious and famous deceased Druze shaykhs who are considered to have been endowed with sacred power (baraka) and the capacity to perform miracles (karamat) because of their religious knowledge, piety or exemplary life.

The tombs inscribe the collective memory of the Druze in the landscape, sacralising the territory through the holy men who delimit its boundaries and protect the community across generations¹⁰ (Khuri 2004: 35–43). While the centrality of this sacred territory in the social and religious life of the Druze helps to give a tangible experiential character to the religious tradition, enhancing group cohesion, it also poses challenges to those who are not in direct contact with it, as is the case of the Druze in Brazil. Their experience of the Druze tradition is very different to that of those born in the Middle East, as they lack the broader cultural environment that could connect the unevenly transmitted doctrinal and ritual fragments into a meaningful source of identity.

The Druze in Brazil: Transnational Politics and Cultural Adaptation

The Druze presence in Brazil results from the establishment of Arabic-speaking immigrants in the country since the late nineteenth century. Brazil received various waves of immigrants from the Middle East, mainly from the regions that nowadays comprise Lebanon, Syria and Israel/Palestine. Between 1871 and 2001 the country received a total of 162,355 immigrants from the Middle East¹¹ (Pinto 2010: 134), with the bulk of immigration occurring between 1884 and 1939, when 107,135 of those entered the country (Lesser 2001: 97). The immigrants created various institutions that fostered discrete ethnic and national identities, which were shaped by the various forms of diasporic belonging, national imaginations and political projects that circulated both in Brazil and the Middle East. While there were several attempts to foster overarching identities, such as Arab or Syrian-Lebanese, they were limited by national, political and religious divisions (Pinto 2010, 2018).

In terms of religious affiliation, the vast majority of immigrants from the Middle East until the 1970s was composed of Christians. While there are no reliable numbers to determine the exact demographics of each Christian community, it is accepted that the largest group were the Maronites, followed by the Melkites and Orthodox. Similarly, there are only rough estimates about the number of Muslims among the immigrants, ranging from 10 to 15 per cent of their total (Lesser 2001: 97). The differences in sectarian affiliation within this group are impossible to determine, but in the first decades of immigration, the Sunnis were probably the most numerous, followed by the Druze and the ‘Alawis, and finally the Shi'is. After the 1970s the Shi'is gained importance, constituting the largest group after the Sunnis, while the proportion of Druze and ‘Alawi immigrants declined.

Until the 1950s, Minas Gerais had received the third largest contingent of Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Middle East, after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Being a land-locked province, Minas Gerais was not the first destination of these immigrants, who arrived at the ports of Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro or Santos, and later established themselves in the province. These immigrants were attracted by the economic opportunities of the province, for Minas Gerais was an important producer of coffee, cattle and minerals.

The first documented Druze immigrant in Minas Gerais was Abbas Hussein Ghanem, who arrived in Campos, a city in the north of the province of Rio de Janeiro, in 1895, moving later to the town of Teófilo Otoni, in the north-east of Minas Gerais, where he settled permanently (Safady 1966: 311). By the 1920s Minas Gerais was the centre of the Druze presence in Brazil. Throughout the twentieth century Druze communities were created in São Paulo, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Pará and Rio Grande do Sul, and after 1960 in Brasília and Foz do Iguaçu, in Paraná. Nowadays there are three Druze institutions in Brazil: the Lar Druzo-Brasileiro (the Druze-Brazilian Home), founded in 1969 in São Paulo; the Lar Beneficente Druzo Brasileiro (the Druze Brazilian Charitable Home), founded in 1981 in Belo Horizonte; and the Lar Druzo Brasileiro (the Druze Brazilian Home), founded in 1994 in Foz do Iguaçu.

Teófilo Otoni and Oliveira, a town in the south of the province, were the places where the Druze immigrants clustered in the early decades of the twentieth century, organising their communities around ethnic and religious institutions. Teófilo Otoni was a mid-size town that had its development linked to the mining of precious stones and minerals, while Oliveira was a small town with a surrounding agricultural region of coffee plantations and vegetable farms. The rural setting of the early settlement of the Druze immigrants in Minas Gerais is quite unique, for Muslim immigrants in Brazil tended to gather as a community and create institutions in cities.¹²

The institutional organisation of the Druze community in Minas Gerais was connected to the efforts of Nagib Assrauy,¹³ an intellectual and political figure who settled in Oliveira after immigrating to Brazil, to enhance religiosity and foster transnational politics among his fellow immigrants. Nagib Assrauy was born in Btatir, in Mount Lebanon, in 1891. In 1893 his family moved to Beirut where he studied at an Islamic school. He was initiated into the Druze religious tradition, and later went to study Law in Constantinople.

Assrauy's enthusiastic adherence to the ideals of Arab nationalism led him to join the Arab Revolt sparked in 1915 by Sherif Husayn in the Arabian Peninsula. During the First World War he fought with the Arab forces against the Ottomans, getting to know the Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash. After the war he became secretary of Emir Faysal between 1918 and 1920 when an independent kingdom of Syria was established. When French forces invaded Syria in 1920, deposing the recently crowned King Faysal and establishing the French Mandate over its territory, Assrauy emigrated to Brazil (Khodr 1987; Safady 1994: 325–326).

After settling in Oliveira, in Minas Gerais, Assrauy became the religious authority of the community. In 1921 he and another Druze from Oliveira, Said Mattar, bought the Arabic newspaper Al-ʻAsima (The Capital) in Rio de Janeiro, renaming it Al-Islah (The Reform). The newspaper dealt with several themes, including Islam, from a perspective of social reform. It was a way to reach even those individuals dispersed in small towns across the vast province, mobilising them around the idea of a Druze identity that was an integral part of Islam, which was Assrauy's position.

In 1925 the Great Syrian Revolt began in a rapid escalation of events that transformed a local revolt of the Druze into a nationalistic uprising against the French Mandate over Syria under the leadership of Sultan al-Atrash (Provence 2005). This combination of Druze identity and Arab nationalism led to the mobilisation of the Druze community in Minas Gerais around both religious identity and transnational politics. In the same year the Druze community in Teófilo Otoni founded the Sociedade Beneficente Sírio-Libanesa (Syrian-Lebanese Charitable Society), aiming to gather funds in order to aid Sultan al-Atrash in his fight for the independence of Syria (Safady 1966: 312).

Also in 1925, the Liga Beneficente Drusa (Druze Charitable League) was founded in Oliveira with the aim to provide a ‘social and moral union of the Druze and help those Druze in need wherever they be’.¹⁴ The foundation of the Liga provided an institutional framework for the religious community, enhancing its cohesion and presenting Druzism as part of the local religious landscape. The Liga Beneficente Drusa was the first Islamic institution in Brazil.¹⁵ Nagib Assrauy emphasised the Islamic character of Druzism by publishing a book in Arabic called Islam in the Americas in São Paulo, also in 1925.

In 1928 the community in Oliveira created a cemetery, the Cemitério da Colonia Druza (Cemetery of the Druze ‘Colony’¹⁶), as the marble plaque at the entrance says in Portuguese and Arabic.¹⁷ The cemetery inscribed into the territory the temporal continuity of the Druze community in Minas Gerais, which is defined by both its contemporary existence and the collective memories of the immigrant trajectories, paralleling thus the reincarnating souls who exist through both their current experiences and the memories of their past lives.

The religious authority of Nagib Assrauy together with their institutional organisation allowed the Druze in Minas Gerais to maintain their identity and cohesion as a religious community throughout the first half of the twentieth century. However, the changes that Brazilian society underwent in the 1950s changed this picture. The process of industrialisation, urbanisation and the decline of rural towns affected the Druze community directly, for its institutional core was established in this rural and semi-rural universe.

Gradually the members of the community started to migrate to the capital of the province and the institutions lost their vitality, becoming spaces for social events or simply closing. Assrauy moved to Belo Horizonte, and the Liga Beneficente Drusa, then renamed the Sociedade Beneficente Druziense (Druze Charitable Society), was also transferred to the capital in 1956 (Safady 1966: 312). In 1953 the Sociedade Beneficente Sírio-Libanesa in Teófilo Otoni was closed in order to allow its members to join the Clube Libanês (Lebanese Club) founded in the same year.

This decline of the institutions did not mean the end of the community or of its capacity for mobilisation, which reappeared in full strength after the assassination of Adib Shishakli, the leading figure in Syria's political life from 1949 to 1954, in Ceres in the province of Goiás. During his authoritarian rule of Syria, Shishakli brutally repressed his opponents, for example in the military action that he launched against a revolt in the Jabal al-Duruz (Seale 1965: 134–135).

After being deposed, Shishakli immigrated to Brazil in 1960, becoming a farmer in Ceres, Goiás. In 1964 he was murdered by a Druze immigrant, Nawaf Ghazale, in revenge for the killing of his relatives in the military repression in the Jabal al-Duruz more than a decade before. Ghazale was arrested and the Druze community in Minas Gerais mobilised around him, paying a lawyer to defend him in court. Ghazale was freed, as the court accepted his lawyer's argument that he acted under strong emotional distress.

Conversely, the rest of the Arab and Syrian-Lebanese community mobilised around Shishakli's death, as he was seen as a symbol of Syrian and Arab nationalism. His body was taken to the Orthodox church of Saint Nicholas in Rio de Janeiro where a funeral took place, with an ‘Alawi shaykh saying the funerary prayer, before being taken to be buried in Syria. Shishakli's funeral became a performative affirmation by the community of the ideals of Arab nationalism beyond any sectarian divisions, for Shishakli, a Sunni Muslim, had his funeral presided over by an ‘Alawi shaykh in an Orthodox church (Pinto 2010: 130–131). Shishakli's assassination was also a moment of rupture between the Druze community in Minas Gerais and the rest of the Arab and Syrian-Lebanese communities in Brazil, isolating it from broader arenas of transnational politics.

In religious terms the 1960s would also pose challenges to the Druze community in Minas Gerais. By the mid-decade there was a general perception that the generations born in Brazil were moving away from their Druze identities. At this time, Nagib Assrauy, who had been recognised in 1966 as the leader of the Druze community in Brazil by the Mashyakhat al-ʻAql in Lebanon, decided to do something to stop and, hopefully, revert this process. He wrote and published a book in Portuguese aiming to make religious knowledge more accessible to the descendants of Druze immigrants.

The book was called O Druzismo (Druzism) and was published in Belo Horizonte in 1967.¹⁸ At the end of the first chapter the author contrasted the mobile universe of the immigrants with the stability of religious convictions, saying that ‘Any man can accept to move from a place to another, from a house, from a position, from a country, from everything in the end, but does not change or switch his belief, his religion’ (Assrauy 1967: 16–17). Then he stated that ‘we decided to publish this book, hoping to save our offspring from the dangers that threaten them in religious and social terms, bringing to them and to curious others knowledge, albeit a basic one, about the Druze religion’ (ibid.: 17).

The main aim of the book was to bring back to the religious community the generations of ‘descendants of Druze in countries of Portuguese speech’¹⁹ (Assrauy 1967: 17). The author does so in a succession of short chapters in which he presents the history of the religious tradition; its main doctrinal features, basically tawhid and reincarnation; its rituals and religious festivities, with emphasis on the khalwa (retreat) and the prayer gatherings on Thursdays; the organisation of the community, with the distinction between ʻuqal and juhal; the religious hierarchy; the Druze communities in the Middle East and in the lands of immigration; and the religious provisions on personal law (marriage, divorce and succession).

Throughout the book the author affirms the Islamic character of the Druze tradition while also indicating its claim to be a universalistic form of religiosity. According to him ‘The Druze unitarian sect is Islamic, but it is also enriched by the philosophies of great world masters, including the Muslim ones, which made it the essence of all religious sects’ (Assrauy 1967: 73). The religious character of the book is emphasised in the last part, in which there is a succession of prayers. The prayers are presented as reflexive disciplinary devices that can be mobilised in order to structure a regular religious practice, inscribing Druze religiosity into one's life.

There are prayers to be recited at specific moments of the day, such as morning and night, while others can be recited at any time. Some prayers are destined to protect, comfort or create meaning in moments of life crisis, while others give thanks for the graces received. There is a prayer for religious gatherings, and others for life events such as travel, marriage or death. The book ends with a chapter with passages from the writings of Emir Attanukhi, a fifteenth-century Druze theologian, on emotions and the moral dimensions of the human body, and a closing chapter with wisdom and maxims from the Prophet Muhammad.

Nagib Assrauy's book combined a didactic presentation of the history, the collective organisation and the religious tradition of the Druze with a devotional manual, containing prayers and religious wisdom that can be used to inscribe Druze religiosity into one's everyday life.²⁰ The book had great success, with most of my interlocutors in Belo Horizonte, Oliveira and São Paulo reporting having read the book when they were adolescents or young adults. Many copies were also in the libraries of the Druze institutions in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, showing its recognition as a canonical text for the community. While the maintenance of Druze identity can be seen as an accomplishment of these efforts to make the religious tradition more accessible, the religious dynamics of the Druze community in Minas Gerais were very different from those imagined in the book.

Transformations of the Druze Identity in Minas Gerais

While the widespread circulation and consumption of Nagib Assrauy's book did make many descendants of the Druze immigrants more interested in their religious heritage and identity, there were still many factors that made a complete engagement with Druze religiosity difficult. Most descendants lacked any knowledge of Arabic, so it was difficult for them to understand the content of prayers or the religious concepts that defined the doctrinal contents of the Druze tradition. The combination of restricted circulation of doctrinal truths and low intensity of collective religious life led to an imperfect and fragmented transmission of religious knowledge across generations.

The impact of these factors was enhanced by the absence of a cultural environment that could fill the gaps in religious knowledge with shared understandings and practices of vernacular religiosity. One element that all my interlocutors in Belo Horizonte and Oliveira said was transmitted to them at a very early age was the belief in reincarnation. N.,²¹ a 60-year-old teacher in Oliveira, told me that ‘I knew almost nothing about our religion. There were a few prayers and the belief in God. But one thing that my father insisted to teach us was about reincarnation. I knew that I was Druze because I had a Druze soul in me.’

The behaviour of children or youngsters was often observed and analysed in order to perceive signs that could indicate whose soul had incarnated in a person. Odd memories were scrutinised as possible ‘speech’ (nuqt) of the reincarnated soul, which could reveal its previous identity. R., a university professor from Belo Horizonte in his forties, said, ‘people were always talking about how certain behaviours indicated memories from the previous lives’.

Beyond the family framing of behaviour and memories as evidence of the identity of a reincarnated soul, some interlocutors described how the experience of perceiving alterity within one's own consciousness was a decisive element in the configuration of their relation to Druze identity. J., a woman in her fifties who worked as accountant in Oliveira, told me that when she was a child,

I had flashes of events that could not have happened to me. First, I thought they were dreams, but they would repeat themselves and, sometimes, new details would come. They were memories, but not from this life. So, I was not just myself, I was another person as well … with another family, friends, all that. I was part of something larger. It was strange … [it] made me scared for a while. But then, it made all the talk about being Druze make sense.

N. said, ‘I had in my mind images of things from there, from Lebanon! I spoke with people in Arabic, but I don't know the language and I never travelled there.’

These narratives show how reincarnation is configured as an experiential arena in which the individual is confronted with memories that at first are perceived as elements of alterity within one's own self, but are then incorporated as a constitutive part of the self. The force of reincarnation is that it is not just a concept or a symbol, but also a powerful experiential device. Therefore, the sense of self constructed through this experiential universe is not one of a contained and well-bounded universe, but rather one that is open to cumulative experiences that flow through the multiple connections that constitute the Druze community.

In the first narrative, a sense of shared connections, interactions and affections that constitute the Druze community was embodied as an experiential dimension of the self. On the other hand, in the second narrative the experiential universe brought forth the ‘homeland’ as a tangible reality, embodying memories that conveyed a mix of strangeness and familiarity, the perceptive poles that structured the immigrants’ trajectory. Therefore, reincarnation among the Druze in Minas Gerais worked as a device that allowed the inscription of collective memories within the framework of biographic memories, blurring the boundaries between the individual and the community.

While within the family universe reincarnation was the main, sometimes the only, element of the Druze tradition to which my interlocutors would be exposed, they were in constant contact with other religious traditions in the public space. The main one was Catholicism, which was introduced into their lives through both institutional and informal channels. A large proportion of my interlocutors had studied in Catholic schools. J. from Oliveira summarised it, saying, ‘The only religion that was really taught to me was Catholicism’.

Therefore, as the links between Druze identity and Islam faded in most of those born in Brazil, Catholicism became a major religious and symbolic reference, leading to the reconstruction of their Druze identities in the process. As Catholicism did not provide a theological or symbolic accommodation with reincarnation, many Druze in Minas Gerais turned to Spiritism. A few even moved towards forms of New Age spirituality or Buddhism, also because of their accommodating and positive approach to reincarnation.

Many Druze adopted a blend of Catholicism and Spiritism that is widespread in Brazilian society. Despite their religious transition, they did not abandon their Druze identity, but rather recreated Druzism within the symbolic framework of both Catholicism and Spiritism, abandoning its connections to Islam. The president of the Lar Beneficente Druzo Brasileiro (Druze Brazilian Charitable Home) in Belo Horizonte summarised this by saying, ‘We are not Muslims, maybe our origin is Islamic, but this has no consequences nowadays’. R., also a member of the institution, commented, ‘We are all Spiritists’.

This process was not one of simple absorption of the Druze by Catholicism or Spiritism, but rather a complete reconfiguration of the Druze tradition within these religious systems, which transformed it as much as them. While the Druze adopted Spiritism enthusiastically because it had reincarnation as one of its central tenets, they still maintain that Druze souls can only reincarnate in Druze bodies. This goes against the doctrines of Spiritism, which affirm that souls are free to reincarnate in anyone, with the only criteria of distinction being those of spiritual and moral advancement.

Similarly, the Druze perform Catholic rituals while transforming them according to the logic of their religious world view. They baptise their children in the Catholic Church, but at least one of the godparents must be a Druze, creating a spiritual kinship with the child. The Druze godparent is also responsible for teaching the tenets of Druzism to the child, creating links that reinforce the cohesion of the community. Henrique, a university professor in his fifties who lives in Belo Horizonte, told me that ‘Through reincarnation we take care of souls coming from the past and through baptism we take care of souls going to the future’.

In addition, when someone dies the Druze perform all the Catholic funerary rituals, including the memorial mass, but add their own rituals. There is the recitation of specific Druze funeral prayers, sometimes together with the salat al-janaza (Islamic funeral prayer), over the body of the deceased. This reconfiguration of the Druze tradition was also expressed in the tombs of the Druze cemetery in Oliveira. Some tombs have no decoration or inscriptions; others mix ethnic, national and Islamic symbols, such as the one with a Lebanese cedar and the inscription in Portuguese ‘Na paz de Alá’ (In the Peace of Allah); others have Catholic symbols, such as crucifixes.

This process of deep reconfiguration of the Druze tradition happened despite the efforts of Nagib Assrauy to preserve its Islamic character. Nevertheless, his efforts to transmit the Druze identity and religious knowledge to the generations born in Brazil were fundamental to allowing this transformation to happen without the dissolution of the Druze community. After Assrauy's death in 1987, his nephew Khaled Amer Assrauy (b. 1938) succeeded him as shaykh of the Druze community in Minas Gerais. He had been initiated into the esoteric dimensions of the Druze tradition by Nagib Assrauy himself and, therefore, was seen as fit to guide the community.

Khaled had a strong commitment to his Druze identity. Nevertheless, he had also been ordained as a Buddhist monk after theological studies in Sri Lanka and Thailand in 1974. In 1980 he founded the Portal da Nova Era (New Age Gate), a New Age religious movement fusing Buddhist, Islamic and Christian doctrines with the aim of influencing world events through the power of the mind (Khodr 1987). He was the religious leader of the Druze community in Minas Gerais until his death in 2018. Since then the community has had no shaykh. Khaled's religious trajectory mirrored the transformations of the community in Minas Gerais, with a strong attachment to the Druze identity and the capacity to reinvent tradition such that its essence continues to act through ever-changing forms across time.

Conclusion

This analysis of the Druze in Minas Gerais has shown how the maintenance of the Druze religious identity in the context of Brazilian society was accompanied by the creation of institutions and the constitution of a cohesive religious community in the early twentieth century. This was followed by efforts on the part of the religious authority of the community to enhance the circulation of religious knowledge among youngsters born in Brazil in order to revive their identity and commitment to the Druze tradition. Nevertheless, in the late twentieth century there was a profound transformation of the Druze religious tradition, with its reconfiguration within the religious framework of Catholicism and Spiritism, while its connections to Islam faded away.

The religious authority of the shaykh and reincarnation, as both belief and experiential arena, were central to this process. The shaykh presided over the circulation of religious knowledge, enlarging its scope and reach, making the religious tradition and the collective memory of the community more accessible and mobilising the members of the community around their Druze identity. The belief in reincarnation created experiential arenas in which collective memories were embodied as part of one's self, enhancing the sense of belonging and the cohesion of the community.

Therefore, while the Druze born in Brazil were drawn into other religious affiliations, namely Catholicism and Spiritism, they remained attached to their Druze identity, inscribing it into their adopted religious systems. Thus, while the Druze tradition was deeply transformed by its association with other religious systems, it also reshaped their doctrines and rituals in ways that allowed the Druze to continue to exist as a distinct religious community. In this sense, while belief in reincarnation and the authority of the shaykhs were the main pillars of continuity of the Druze tradition in Minas Gerais, they were also the devices that triggered and shaped the dynamics of its transformation.