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Druze: Villages
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The most important factor in Druze family life is a woman's honor (ird). For this reason, women are very restricted socially, even though they have equal rights politically and religiously. Marriages are almost always arranged by the family. Marriage partners usually come from the same village and often from the same extended family (including first cousins). The groom pays the bride's family a dowry. Polygamy (having more than one spouse) is forbidden, as is marriage to a non-Druze.
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As employment opportunities for Druze improved, there were unforeseen consequences as many left primitive farming and even sold their land in order to use the money to improve the quality of life for their families. In this way hundreds of Druze families in various villages "lost" their land. Ironically, this same land is being provided today by the state at very high cost to young Druze who served in the IDF in order to allow them to build homes.
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Druze living in small villages still wear traditional clothing. Women wear a blue or black peasant dress with a gauzy white head covering called a mandil. They wear red slipperlike shoes. The ùqqal (initiated) wear baggy pants that are tight at the ankle. Juhhal (uninitiated) men wear the common Arab head scarf, the keffiyeh. The ùqqal wear heavy white turbans.
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The Druze themselves remained in their villages and on their land and did not become refugees or leave the state or were forced to leave. Thus, they represented a national value of the first rank in loyalty to their land and their homes, and they did not forsake their historic tradition of belonging to the land that their fathers had worked so long to develop and own.
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The Druze are village and mountain dwellers, attached to their individual plots of land and property, while harboring no separatist national aspirations. They are completely loyal to the states in which they reside, including service in the army. This basic principle, within the context of the Arab-Israel conflict, has meant that Druze frequently find themselves serving in armies which are in open confrontation with one and other.
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South of Kafr Sumei', Kisra was the smallest Druze village in the country in the nineteenth century. The village now has about 3,500 residents. The nearby village of Yanuah is mentioned in the Bible (as Janoah), the Talmud, and Crusader documents. Next to the village is the shrine of the Muslim prophet Shams.
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