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aloneness that is most special. The solitude of the bar is so absolute, so gutting that you wonder why Edward Hopper didn’t paint it more often. It is a place where social leprosy is normal; Islam, whose traditional cities are communitarian and domestic, sees no need for such isolation at the altar of Johnnie Walker. But there are sects within Islam, like the Druze, where alcohol is permitted—what of them?
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    I had lunch one of those days of Beirut spring with the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt in the Shuf Mountains. I remembered Jumblatt from my school days during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s, with his ruthless militia, his love of motorbikes, and his leather jackets. He was a legendary figure, a chilling figure. A killer, an ethnic cleanser, a man whose own father had been assassinated by the Syrians; but at the same time a man of the world, a sophisticate, a playboy familiar with Antibes and BMW bikes.
    The idea of meeting him in the flesh thirty-five years on was startling. It was on a press visit offered by Saad Hariri, prime-minister-to-be at that moment, and leader of the March 14th reform movement. It was going to be a lunch full of bonhomie and political sympathy, with Jumblatt frail in his corduroys, the aristocratic grandson of the great pan-Arabist Prince Shakib Arslan, his famous bald pate ringed with white hair: a deceptive, soft-spoken mignon who knew how to charm.
    In his dining room decorated with scabbarded swords and bucklers, the questions put to Jumblatt were about Hezbollah and Syria, his future relations with them. He is the leader of the PSP Socialist party, and he is expected to hold positions of interest to American scribes. He listened and talked, holding forth. The conversation was enjoyable. The windows were open, and we could smell the snow. On the table was a bottle of Château Kefraya, the wine that Jumblatt invests in. As I was seated next to him, he politely poured me a glass. The politics died down, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear what a drinker would think of his production. Jumblatt has owned the winery since the late 1980s, and for some fifteen years now his wine has beenone of the most popular in Lebanon. It’s a thick, juicy Americanized wine, more or less revolting, and I said it was wonderful—it didn’t seem wise to brandish conflictual tasting notes with a vigneron warlord. The warlord and winemaker seemed like two incompatible personalities converged by fate into a single human frame that might barely be able to hold them together.
    “Good,” he said. “I’ll send a magnum to your hotel room.”
    My heart sank. My goose was cooked because however bad it was, I knew that, once locked in my room, I would drink the whole thing in an afternoon. Walid himself did not drink, however. I asked him how it was that the Druze, who are Muslims of a sort, do so.
    “It’s because we do not follow sharia. We pray three times a day and not five. When we say ‘jihad,’ we mean something very different from war against outsiders. A war against oneself.”
    The Druze are mysterious to others. The writer Benjamin of Tudela described them in 1165 as “mountain people, monotheists, who believe in the eternity of the soul and in reincarnation.” They are derived from a sect of Ismaili Shiites who founded the sect in Cairo under the Shia Fatimids. Al-Darzi, the preacher for whom they are named, was Persian. They advocated the abolition of slavery and a more mystical, depoliticized Islam that borrowed much from Greek and Persian traditions. Estranged even from other Shiites, they are denounced outright by Sunnis. They drink, but they are forbidden to eat watercress.
    I wanted to ask him not about Israel or Hezbollah but about Al-Hakim, the mad imam and ruler of the Fatimids from 996 to 1021, who the early Druze of Cairo thought was an incarnationof God. I wanted to ask him if any scholar knows what Al-Hakim’s policy on alcohol was. But the question seemed