AUB President Fadlo R. Khuri The Druze: Celebrating 1,000 years of Diversity October 30, 2018

When I was asked by the organizers to speak today at this important academic endeavor I was delighted to accept, not just because of the excellence of the scholarship that will be on show over the next two days, but because of the underlying concept of the conference, which brings these scholars together.

Diversity and pluralism are terms that people tend to use without really reflecting on their importance or their ability to address some of the key challenges which face the region and the world. Voices of extremism have been pushing the narrative to convince us that our golden age of Islam was one of purity and homogeneity while in reality a simple investigation of the facts shows that our past in this region was composed of a mosaic of ideas and communities that lived in harmony rather than conflict for much of the time.

The Druze: Celebrating 1,000 years of Diversity and the presentations and research which will be presented are an affirmation how the long and illustrious history of the Druze, one of the historic communities of the Levant, have added to the legacies of their respective countries.

While my own professional life has focused on medicine rather than history, before I came to AUB, I am in a position to draw on my own personal experiences and upbringing which has brought me into close contact with people of the Druze faith.

Being a native of both and Ras , and spending my summers in Souk El Gharb as a boy, I was surrounded by the Druze community and am proud to be able to call many of them as friends and neighbors. It is a community, which despite the historic 12th century closure of the opening to initiation into the faith, still has an unfathomable generosity and ability to make you as one of their own, with their hospitality and accommodating temperament.

The relationship of the Druze and the Protestant educational project in the Levant goes back to before the founding of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in Beirut, the forerunner of AUB. It goes back to the villages of al-Gharb in Mount , where the antecedent of the SPC, the Abey Seminary, was established.

In fact, the Druze were extremely helpful and generous in helping the local Lebanese Protestant community, which educated my relatives and ancestors, to set up a wide network of schools for both boys and girls, where education was indiscriminately offered to all the communities. These Salibi schools, as they were known, were established by Sulayman and Elais Salibi, who went against the wishes of the Syria Protestant Mission and set up 21 schools all across , a network which the Druze encouraged by sending their sons and daughters to.

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It was on this basis that many of the first graduates of the newly-founded SPC were Druze, who went on to become prominent figures in their community and far beyond, names like physician Amin Muhammad Halabi, Khalil Hallak and Salim Muhammad Hallak, all from B'aklin, Dawud Hasan Slim of Jbal al-Chouf, physician Sayed Nasreddine of 'Abayh, judge Muhammad Abu Izzeddine of Abadiyyah, and physician Mahmoud Assaf of Moukhtarah. These are just a few names of the early Druze graduates, many of whose children and grandchildren followed their path to SPC and AUB.

It is a pity that AUB and Lebanon’s great historian the late Kamal Salibi is not alive to witness this conference. He wrote extensively, on the Druze and the Maronites. Dr. Salibi would have been proud of the organization, scope and content of this wonderful meeting, and of the work so lovingly put in by two of his great professors, Professors Abdul Rahim Abu-Husayn and Makram Rabeh. To them we owe thanks in abundance. Just as Salibi saw Lebanon as a house of many mansions—with each community occupying its own room—we see AUB through its diverse array of scholars, staff, and students, as a mansion of free thought and a haven of academic freedom, which all individuals and groups can engage in any topic or theme they choose; a mansion whose only house rules are mutual respect and the primacy of reason, or as the Druze might say “ al- ‘Aql”.

Thank you

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