Peasant life in the Holy Land . icrious ffatherinosafter the latter are about a year old. These gather-ings are held in a building called Khalwa/i (a wordmeaning isolated or retired), a plain, unadornedstructure in some lonely spot, far from any humanhabitation. The only thing that to an outsiderdistinguishes the Initiated from the Uninitiated is that, while in common A^ith INIoslems botliabstain from the use of alcohol, the former alsonever drink coffee nor smoke tobacco, whereas thelatter are allowed to do both. Little or nothing is known with certainty about 34 RELIGION the doctrines or pra
Peasant life in the Holy Land . icrious ffatherinosafter the latter are about a year old. These gather-ings are held in a building called Khalwa/i (a wordmeaning isolated or retired), a plain, unadornedstructure in some lonely spot, far from any humanhabitation. The only thing that to an outsiderdistinguishes the Initiated from the Uninitiated is that, while in common A^ith INIoslems botliabstain from the use of alcohol, the former alsonever drink coffee nor smoke tobacco, whereas thelatter are allowed to do both. Little or nothing is known with certainty about 34 RELIGION the doctrines or practices of the Druze rehgion. Itis generall)^ said, and I beheve correctly, that theyhold the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,but that is about the most that can be at all con-fidently affirmed.* * One or two things I have quite accidentally ascertainedpoint to the possibility of the Druze worship being a survivalof the Israelitish calf cult. I mention this with great diffi-dence, and only as a possible hint to CHAPTER II RELIGION {continued) The Christians, who, next to the JNIoslems, are themost numerous of the reHgious bodies found inSyria at the present day, are the successors ofthose who hved in Palestine at the time of theMohammedan conquest at the close of the seventhcentury When the Holy Land fell before thesword of Khalid and the other Moslem generals, aconsiderable section of the population sooner orlater embraced Islam; but a by no means in-significant number refused to give up the faith oftheir fathers. Their descendants for generationafter generation, spite of almost every conceivableinducement to renounce Christianity, notwith-standing nearly every indignity, civil, social, andreligious, which a fanatical ingenuity could devise,although treated as scarcely human, and their livesheld to be worth less than those of the cattle, yetclung with an intense, if often blind and ignorant,tenacity to what they believed to be the religionof Jesus Christ
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