Epistles of Wisdom

The Druze movement emerged in Fatimid Cairo in 1017 CE, in the reign of the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, whom the new teaching regarded as the locus of the divine. Historians of the community describe the following quarter century as the period of the call, the dawa, during which the movement's founding figures composed the letters, responses and doctrinal statements that became its scripture.

Hamza ibn Ali, the movement's chief theologian, is credited with the foundational epistles; the writings of al-Tamimi belong to the same first circle; and after the persecution that followed al-Hakim's disappearance in 1021, leadership of the correspondence passed to al-Muqtana Baha'uddin, who guided the scattered communities by letter for another two decades. When al-Muqtana withdrew in 1043, the call was closed, and with it the canon: no epistle written afterwards could enter it, and the community has held ever since that the door of enrolment into the faith closed at the same time. The collected corpus, 111 epistles arranged in six books, was copied and transmitted within the community from that point onward. Scholars studying manuscripts describe the epistles as varied in genre, doctrinal exposition, refutation, pastoral instruction and correspondence with named recipients, reflecting their origin as the working papers of a movement rather than a single composed book.

The Druze community is structured by initiation, and its scripture follows the structure. The uqqal, the wise or initiated, men and women admitted after examination of their conduct, gather in the khalwa, the plain house of seclusion, on Thursday evenings, and it is there, and only there, that the Epistles are read, studied and expounded; the juhhal, the uninitiated majority of Druze, live by the community's ethics and identity without direct access to the texts, and may seek initiation when prepared. This is not an accident of history but the community's own discipline, in place for nearly a millennium, and it extends outward without exception: the canon is not printed for circulation, not quoted in public worship, and not shared with outsiders.

Manuscript copies that left community hands over the centuries, some seized in conflicts, some sold, reached European libraries from the eighteenth century onward, and academic study of the faith's origins has drawn on them; the community has not authorised such use, and Druze religious authorities continue to regard the texts as theirs to guard. Scholarship respecting that boundary, including the standard modern histories, characterises the doctrine at the level of themes, the unity of God, the succession of cosmic principles, the transmigration of souls, honesty of tongue and protection of the brethren among the community's obligations, while declining to reproduce the texts. This entry follows the same rule: the Epistles are described here as a historical object, and their words remain where the community keeps them.