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Syria (21) zerosugar from private IP, post #18802683 - Sat, 07 Dec 2024 23:54:31 -0800
./posts/all/1733644471-116.txt:Reply #16874773 I became extremely interested in Syria during my time in Lebanon. My host who was Sunni and from Tripoli (Northern Lebanon) was driving me through an area called Jabal Mohsen. I was just a young girl and basically knew almost nothing about Lebanon or Syria aside from the singer Haifa. There were all these big billboards and posters of this old white looking man. The old man didn't look Arab or Levantine at all, well what my idea of what Arabs and Levantines should look like. In my head, I assumed maybe he was some French or British ambassador who had been charitable to the people! lol. I asked my host who was this old man. He responded that the old man was Hafez al Assad, the old president of Syria. I responded that the old man looked so western. He told me its because he was from an ethno religious group called the Alawite. He started to tell me how the Alawite and the Druze are secret religions that you have to be born into and with the Alawite, even amongst themselves, only a select few of the men are taught the religion. I found his so fascinating. That night on my phone, all I did was google about them and try to learn as much as possible and really there is not much! They were not accepted as Muslim until the 1970s when the liberal Shia cleric Musa al Sadr who was later kidnapped in Libya declared them Muslim. The Belgian Jesuit old orientalist Henri Lammens considered them a crypto Christian group. Some anthropologists have noted they appear to have Kartvelian origins and there are like elements of Greek mythology in their religion. The only thing that is known about them which they are public about is they believe in reincarnation and are not supposed to eat female animals. A man who tried to publish some of their secrets in the 1950s and escaped into Lebanon was assassinated. There was even an offshoot group of the Alawite started by a guy named Salman al Murshid. Their religion is called the Murshidis. When I was in Lebanon, the Sunni guy told me the Alawite have a holiday called hiding day where everybody gets into a closet and who touches who first has to have sex with that person regardless of age or if related. When I asked some Alawite this years later, they laughed and told me it's the Murshidi who do that. Who knows the truth? lol.