For a while, I thought that our modern culture's relationship to science best resembled the Catholic Church during the middle ages. Priests delivering sermons in Latin, indulgences, poor families of believers praying one of their sons would be bright enough for the clergy... Then I discovered the Druze.
"But when I asked him about the Druze faith, he gave me an unexpected reply. 'I know nothing about the Druze', the pre-eminent leader of the Druze declared with a violent wave of his arm. From his piles of books he selected a couple by Tariq Ali and gave them to me as gifts. He invited me to visit him at his palace in the mountains. And then he said goodbye. Either the most powerful Druze man in Lebanon, an intellectual in his own right, had been excluded from the teachings of his own religion, or else he knew better than to pass them on to an outsider. I had every intention of taking up his invitation to spend time among the Druze communities, but first I would have to find someone more willing to talk