Epstein Secrets

ot subject to change. Nor did they ever need to be, since they were derived from the highest and most successful model ever -- that of the prophet Muhammad, his companions and successors. Following this model, the Brotherhood had created individual members who were "a walking Qur'an; whose faith, worsh

unities in the cities. Between 1943 and 1957, Alawite migration tripled the population of Hama, and between 1957 and 1979 it quadrupled the size of Latakia. Many Alawites also joined the military. Since Ottoman times, Sunni Arabs had largely spurned army careers, but Alawites welcomed the opportunity

first Arab kingdom, the first stop the desert warriors from the Hejaz made when they came out of the Arabian Peninsula. In the telling, the Prophet Muhammad favored this realm. He had seen Damascus from the hills above it, and the fabled Ghouta, the gardens and orchards that once circled this city. The

n my eyes, worth all the palaces in this world." He had pined to leave that poverty; he had come down from his mountain village to the port town of Latakia, on the Mediterranean, to get a secondary-school education; he had made it to the military academy, and the uniform had given him all that was now

ly occasions on which large numbers of people are permitted to assemble-have spread from Deraa to at least a dozen other cities including Baniyas and Latakia on the Mediterranean coast, as well as to the northern city of Homs and some suburbs of Damascus. * With the Alawi-dominated regime under threat, the

stian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian elements. Their leading theologian, Abdullah al- Khasibi, who died in 957, proclaimed the divinity of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, whom other Shiites revere but do not worship. Like many Shiites influenced by ancient Gnostic teachings that predate Islam,