Who the Druze are
The Druze are a religious community whose faith dates to the 11th century. About 300,000 live in Lebanon, where they are one of the four main communities, and others live in Syria, Jordan and Israel and as emigrants elsewhere. The faith is usually treated as an offshoot of Islam, though some regard it as independent, and it differs from mainstream Islam in its scriptures and in not observing the five pillars.2
The scriptures are kept from outsiders and from most Druze as well. Only around a tenth of the community, the uqqal, are initiated into the religion, usually later in life. They take the title sheikh or sheikha, give up alcohol and tobacco, and often wear distinctive dress; the rest are the juhhal, the uninitiated. The Druze scriptures hold Plato, for whom reincarnation was an important idea, in high esteem.2 Devout women dress in long black garments with a white scarf over the head and mouth.3
What the Druze believe
Reincarnation is a central tenet of the faith.2 Druze teaching holds that a soul passes at the moment of death directly into a baby being born, with no time between lives.17 Unlike the Indian religions, the Druze faith has no law of karma. God assigns each person a series of lives in varied circumstances, though a kind act in one life may be rewarded with good circumstances in the next. The whole series of lives is weighed on a final day of judgment.1
The Druze also hold that a person cannot change sex between lives.5
Belief and the cases
The belief in immediate rebirth shapes how families read the cases. When a child’s memories point to someone who died years before the child was born, Druze families assume that the person lived another, forgotten life in between. In the case of Imad Elawar, the person he was identified with had died in 1949 and Imad was born in 1958; Imad’s informants told Stevenson that three names he had mentioned, which nobody could place, must come from that intermediate life. They regarded it as a certainty, not a hypothesis.4
The cases do not fit the belief exactly. The median interval between death and rebirth in Druze cases is about eight months, shorter than in most cultures but not zero.67 Announcing dreams, common in Myanmar and among the Alevi of Turkey, are rarely reported by the Druze, and the few Stevenson heard of came after the birth, which fits the belief that the soul arrives at birth.15 On the other hand, no Druze sex-change cases have been found. Stevenson suggested that a child who remembered being the other sex might keep quiet, having learned that this is thought impossible.5
Belief brings with it a readiness to accept a child’s claims. Haraldsson and Abu-Izzeddin note that this may lead families to interpret what a child says in a way that supports reincarnation. In the Nazih Al-Danaf case, however, the previous person’s widow and brother questioned the boy closely about the dead man’s life before they accepted him.2
Research among the Druze
Cases are abundant among the Lebanese Druze, unlike other Lebanese communities, and their incidence may be higher than anywhere else, though no survey has measured it.1 Ian Stevenson began studying Druze cases in 1964 with Imad Elawar and reported several more, including Süleyman Andary’s, in the third volume of Cases of the Reincarnation Type.41 Imad’s case also shows how little contact many Druze villages had with each other: people from another village usually came only for funerals, to which Druze families sent out invitations, or for the occasional marriage.4
Between 1988 and 2001 Erlendur Haraldsson made six trips to Lebanon and found 30 Druze children, 19 boys and 11 girls, said to remember previous lives.2 He studied some in depth, such as Nazih Al-Danaf, and investigated three chosen at random, including Wael Kiwan.23 His and Stevenson’s Druze series, studied independently years apart, turned out closely similar.11
Haraldsson also compared 30 Druze children, aged 6 to 14, with matched classmates who made no such claims. The children with memories were reported to have more psychological and social difficulties than the controls.8 Phobias related to the remembered death were reported in 51% of solved Druze cases, the highest rate among the cultures compared.10 When Haraldsson and Abu-Izzeddin re-interviewed 28 adults whose cases had been studied in the 1970s and 1980s, 24 said they still had some memories of the previous life.9