Iyon Stream Nature Reserve in the very north of the country hosts the most spectacular waterfall in Israel. Even in summer, the park is rich in riparian vegetation and the water is replete with fish.
Druze Women – Juggling Tradition and Moderna
Druze Women and the Religion - Between Tradition and Moderna
Intro in the way of a disclaimer
I have no presumptions to know and describe the lives of Druze women. This post is based on handed-down info, a few personal impressions, and some words from two tour guides on two separate trips, one to the Druze villages in the Galilee, the other to the Golan Heights. I also quote from one interesting Ha’Aretz article.
The following is anecdotal with bits and pieces from the above sources.
My first encounter with Druze women was in my university biology studies. A Christian woman, a Druze woman and two Jewish religious women were the top best students in my class of more than a 100, and in that order. Notably, all four studied in all-girl secondary schools. Stats show Druze women are high achievers academically and highly motivated. 70% of them have academic degrees. The stats are less good with regard to the workplace, where men still take most of the profitable, prestigious positions. But this is generally true to women in Israel, not just Druze.
Women in the context of Druze religion and patriarchy
In principle, the Druze religion prescribes equal status to men and women in matters of personal status, like the right to divorce and inheritance and the right to education, yet in practice patriarchy is still dominant. This is truer in some villages more than in others, as we see below.
Nir Keinan, our tour guide for the Druze villages of the Galilee, emphasized that Druze women are more devout than the men, visit the Hilwes and pilgrimage sites more frequently, and even gain high status in the religious hierarchy. Dress code for religious Druze women is very chaste. The colors have to be black or blue, they must have a head cover and even cover their faces partially. They are not supposed to talk with men outside their families.
On the tour to the Golan Heights, we visited Nabi Ya’afuri pilgrimage site near Majdal Shams. And, indeed, we saw more women than men there, some dressed religiously, some not, all obviously enjoying a good time having a mangal (BBQ). Interestingly, in Jewish Israeli society mangals are almost exclusively male territory.The women waved at us joyously. We were explained that the mangal is actually a substitution for the historical animal sacrifices which used to be carried out at such sites.
Druze women: Driving and Devotion
"People observing from the outside aren’t aware of the severity of the situation, ...Some say, ‘Our women are queens and we won’t let them drive.’ That’s ridiculous. We aren’t queens. We’re women who work and study and mothers who care about their children."
Tradition, devotion and driving
Sounds like Druze women are having great progress in both the secular and the religious worlds,
YET….
When our Arabic teacher, a respectable former school principal from Shfar’am, a town with a mixed Muslim-Christian-Druze population, told us that Druze women don’t drive, I thought he was joking. This, I believed, could happen only in Saudi Arabia, and other backwards, patriarchal countries, not in enlightened Israel.
I see Arab women driving everywhere – taking their kids to school, going to the shopping centers, which they love, to work, or to visit family. This is true both in the city of Jerusalem with decent public transportation, and here in the Galilee, where you can barely function without a car. I cannot tell if a woman behind a wheel is Muslim, Druze or Christian. Driving teachers have their hands full, though, with Arab women learning to drive. The State of Israel gives our citizens, men and women, full rights, at least in principle.
The Fatwa
But then I discovered that sometime in the beginning of last century, the much-beloved and admired Sheikh Amin Tarif, made a fatwa, a religious ruling, forbidding women and religious men (Uqqal) to drive. This was based on the view that those who have taken upon themselves to become religious, should cut themselves off from the material world, and devote their time and lives to the spiritual. Nonetheless, religious men managed to forgo this decree, but the women were, and are still, bound by it.
According to the current high leader of the Druze community, Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, “These rules are based on the provisions of religious law that express the need and obligation to only be with members of the same sex, in the community where they live, without any need to be outside the family and community framework,” he said, referring to men and women alike.
A little search revealed that things are starting to change, but only slowly..
Change on the horizon?
An Ha’aretz article from 2021 reported that at a Druze conference in the University of Haifa, Sheikh Imad Abu Rish, a judge on the Druze religious court, surprised attendees when he said, “Personally, I don’t oppose women getting a driver’s license.”
Druze Knesset member Ali Salalha (Meretz) also expressed opposition to the driving ban: “A driver’s license isn’t meant to constitute a barrier to a Druze woman who wants to be religious. According to the Druze religion, only someone who has carried out an intentional killing or had sexual relations outside of marriage is barred from being accepted as religious,” he said. “The time has come to move forward, to allow our excellent women to blossom and fulfill themselves and not to place barriers in their way. Using a vehicle won’t make women less moral.”
"In many cases, women beg a man to drive them. That’s the height of humiliation and pain,.Many women don’t have the ability to go to a doctor on their own, so they do without medical treatment, because they also can’t take public transportation together with male strangers.r
Many religious Druze women have the ability to get ahead,, but because of their lack of mobility, they can’t develop themselves, and remain trapped.
The issue of female driving is pertinent also to Druze women in Syria and Lebanon, since Sheikh Amin Tarif had the authority over all Druze communities.
I hope you found interest in this post and my other posts on the Druze, and again, don’t hesitate to comment, especially if you see any glaring mistakes or errors, or if you want to add something interesting. Use the comment section below. Thanks.
Men and women who are newly religious take the ban on driving upon themselves, as well as additional prohibitions, solely out of their own choice to be religious. The rulings on this issue are constantly being examined, including consultations with adjudicators [of religious law] and serious religious figures, while taking note of the changes taking place in the world. It’s worth noting that the Druze religion provides for equality between men and women in matters of personal status, as well as the right to an education and inheritance, and that the woman is conferred with special status in the religion and in the community in general,”
Nasiba - The Druze Woman who Broke Through
This pic, from 2020, shows how beautiful and young this amazing lady looks (source: Facebook).
On that tour to the Golan, we also met and heard Nasiba Samara and ate at her place. This has actually been my second time to visit with her, hear her story and eat her delicacies, though this time it was a full meal, and the first time it was just a delicious sweet dessert and coffee. Our current visit happened to fall on Nasiba’s 53rd birthday (!), but I must say it is hard to believe she is more than 30!!! Her skin is flawless, her blue eyes light the room, and her energy is tantalizing. She still looks much like her pic above, taken five years ago.
Below: Our group enjoys eating at Nasiba’s
From riches to rags
Here is the basic story: she was born in Majdal Shams, the largest Druze village in the Golan, progressive and modern, to a loving family that, in her words, spoiled her a lot! At 17, she asked her beloved daddy to buy her a computer. He responded by saying she had to learn how to use one first, and sent her to a class in Buq’ata, another Druze village. It so happened that right upon her arrival there, she met with Ahmad, and a love story immediately developed.
Despite a large age difference, they married, and she moved to Buq’ata, a very conservative village. Here women not only could not drive, but had to be escorted by men, could not wear short clothes and had to have a head cover. To clarify the difference for us, she compared Majdal Shams to Tel Aviv, the most progressive city in Israel, and Buq’ata to Bnei Brak, the ultra orthodox backwards, medieval town at the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
In Buq’ata at that time, women were not allowed to talk to men. drive. or work outside the home.
But then Nasiba arrived, and a revolution eventuated.
The princess saves the prince
A few years into their marriage, her husband, a building contractor, got into financial difficulties. At the age of 23, Nasiba already had 3 children, but she was not a woman to sit idle and do nothing about a bad situation. She started working for a while for her father, managing a hundred workers, but they would not listen to her. She understood that to open her occupational horizons, she needed to be able to get out and about, in other words, she needed a driving license. She secretly sold the gold jewelry she received for her nuptials, and with the NIS2000 received, she paid a driving teacher away from the village. Far from the prying eyes of neighbors, she made sure he taught her as fast as possible and pass her the test in one week only. Once she got her license, the world opened up.
A religious ban was enacted against her, but she ignored it. Her father supported her throughout this process, understanding that the economical situation of the couple was very dire. Once she had the license, she did various things to bring bread to her family. That included selling cosmetics door to door, and then vacuum cleaners. For a woman to knock on strangers’ doors was an absolute no-no in that environment. For a while, she also worked as a cashier at the Hermon ski basin. Soon enough, with all these efforts, she succeeded to close the family’s debts, and with her husband bought a piece of land and started growing cherries.
Here comes the cherry on top of the story cake.:
In the pics below you can see the Golan cherry marvel. In the aftermath of the war with Hezbollah, I joined a group of volunteers to help a Druze family with picking the fruit.
Above: I am picking cherries in a plantation near Mas’adeh, Golan. In the aftermath of the war with Hezbollah, it was important to me and to many others to help with agricultural necessities across the North and the South.
The cherry police
The Golan is ideal fertile soil and perfect weather for the growth of apples, cherries and fruit that like a cold winter. At some point, Nasiba told us, so many people like her bought lands and grew cherries, that the prices dropped to the ground. It made no economical sense to pay people to pick the fruit. As a way to solve the problem, Nasiba, in her resourcefulness, created the “cherry police”- she would stop tour buses cruising up to the Golan and summoned the passengers to her orchard to pick the cherries themselves. The idea was they could pick as much as they wanted for free, and then paid half price for a crate.
Treating all the visitors with Druze pita, coffee and tea, she eventually fell in love with cooking as well, and thus started her new, and current, career as a chef. She established this amazing restaurant in an old basalt house on her land.
Her youngest son helps her with both cooking and serving. The three older ones have their own careers.
A world-famous chef
The food was delicious. She stormed from room to room, making sure everybody has everything, as she kept piling on our tables plates brimming with tasty, special, traditional, vegetarian dishes I can’t name, as well as rice, noodles, warm pita bread, hummus, stuffed cabbages and vine leaves. She brought meat dishes for those who asked for it.
In the end, we crowded in the parlor, as her son served us tea and sweets, and Nasiba told us her story. She showed us picture posters of Israeli and American celebrities shaking her hand. At one point she was invited to the USA as a “road breaking figure”, (glass ceiling shatterer, if you will), and talked at a Hillel meeting. I believe it was in Connecticut, but am not sure. Her son came along to help with translating.
But the bottom line, and most importantly, she emphasizes, is that now ALL the women in Buq’ata drive, some with, and some without a license…
For some of Nasiba’s recipes you can look here.
At the market of Mas’ade
Traditional Druze women work at home or in the orchards and fields, but they also sell at the markets. Like Muslim women, it is more acceptable if they passed the child-bearing years and are not considered a temptation or could not themselves be tempted…. I talked with some such ladies, but did not take their pictures. The merchandise, though, was a marvel to the eye.
Druze, Israel’s Quiet Allies – History, Current Events, Women, Religion and More
In this post series I attempt to cover several topics pertaining to this fascinating and little-known religious group and ethnic minority in Israel, now on the top of world’s news. Here you can scroll through the topics according to your interest:
Under the Oak Tree in Yanuh-Jat – Intro the the Druze; Israel’s Mountain Allies and Tactics of Survival; Druze Crisis in Syria – Horrors, Analysis and What Next; Druze Secret Religion – for the Chosen Few; Druze Cemeteries – State, Religion and the Soul; Yarka and Julis – Two Quaint Galilean Druze Villages; Druze Women Juggling Tradition and Moderna.
If you like what you see and you want more,
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