A Druse Seldom Has More Than One
Wife, But He Divorces Her Under The Slightest Pretext; And It Is A
Custom among them, that if a wife asks her husband's permission to go
out, and he says to her "Go;
" Without adding "and come back," she is
thereby divorced; nor can her husband recover her, even though it should
be their mutual wish, till she is married again according to the Turkish
forms, and divorced from her second husband. It is known that the
Druses, like all Levantines, are very jealous of their wives; adultery,
however, is rarely punished with death; if a wife is detected in it, she
is divorced; but the husband is afraid to kill her seducer, because his
death would be revenged, for the Druses are inexorable with respect to
the law of retaliation of blood; they know too that if the affair were
to become public, the governor would ruin both parties by his
extortions. Unnatural propensities are very common amongst them.
The Akal are those who are supposed to know the doctrines of the Druse
religion; they superintend divine worship in the chapels or, as they are
called, Khaloue [Arabic], and they instruct the children in a kind of
catechism. They are obliged to abstain from swearing, and all abusive
language, and dare not wear any article of gold or silk in their dress.
Many of them make it a rule never to eat of any food, nor to receive any
money, which they suspect to have been improperly acquired.
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