ABSTRACT
The people known as Druze form a renowned religious minority in the Near and Middle East. The Druze see themselves as followers of the path of divine Unity, and trace their origin to late tenth-century Egypt, accepting that they branched out from the larger grouping called the Ismailis to become an independent faith. The work of the Druze Hudud, however, is there to remove the obscurations of the literal messages layer by layer to arrive at the "Gnosis" hidden in their essence, leaving the follower of the Druze branch of Tawhid with a vision of the sacred Truth. In Druze cosmology, the universal manifestation of the divine Word forms a septenary series that repeats itself over cycles of veiling and unveiling of the divine Truth. Druze metaphysics envisages the All-encompassing Intellect as the principle of manifestation before the projection of the physical universe in the form of space, time, number, and matter, and its differentiated corporeal contents.
