From: Joachim Martillo (martillo@jjmhome.UUCP)
Subject: Re: Dealings With Infidels
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic
Date: 1990-02-20 12:59:10 PST
[...]
This mentality is often encountered among uneducated Shi`i groups outside Persia. In villages in southern Lebanon, between Ballbek and Safad and eastward to Coelesyria and the Antilebanon, there are Shi`i peasants known by the name of metawile. The singular is Mitwali, for the standard Arabic mutawali, "a loyal adherent of the house of `Ali" -- an attribute of the Shi`i spirit that serves in this region to designate the sect. They number fifty to sixty thousand souls [when the book was written]. According to a report -- wholly unsubstantiated -- they are descended from Kurdish settler transplanted, in Saladin's time, from Iraq to Syria. They would then be of Iranian origin; but this seems a completely groundless assumption. Their largest communities are in Baalbek and the surrounding villages. The Harfush family of emirs came from among them. Toward people of other faiths, these peasants share with other Shi`is the feelings described above. Although they practice the virtue of hospitality toward everyone, they regard as polluted the dishes in which they have offered food and drink to outsiders. The American scholar Selah Merrill, who traveled a great deal in this region between the years 1875 and 1877, on commission from the American Palestine Exploration Society, reports that the "consider that they are poluted by the touch of Christians. Even a vessel from which a Christian has drunk, and anything from which he may have eaten or even handled while eating, they never use again but destroy at once."
[...] |
