Now that London human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin has been taken off the market by some middle-aged actor called George Clooney, there’s great excitement back in Beirut, where she was born into a Druze family.
“Tell me when George Clooney will be coming to Lebanon so I can greet him in Moukhtara,” says Walid Jumblatt, long-standing Lebanese leader of the Middle Eastern sect. He’s not unfamiliar with the Clooney lifestyle himself — he is something of a London flâneur and was once a regular at Annabel’s nightclub.
“I will bring a delegation of Druze sheikhs,” Jumblatt wrote to Lee Smith of The Weekly Standard. “As for Amal Alamuddin, well, she is lucky.”
Other Druze are keen to have Clooney in their set, if only to move on from Lebanon’s troubled recent history. “Instead of being on the front page of the news section when we’re killing and dying, we’re now featured in entertainment magazines,” says Makram Rabah, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
Luckily, Clooney’s party-hopping ways can continue. “The essence of Druze tradition is tribal,” Rabah says. “So visiting with the Druze at weddings and funerals are duties. And then he should drink arak (a local Levantine spirit).”
Non-Druze journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain, husband of a follower of the faith, has some comforting words.
“If George is worried about having to learn a new religion, he shouldn’t. Most of the Druze themselves know nothing about their faith.”
Unfortunately, there are a few naysayers, not least Alamuddin’s grandmother, Safa. When asked for her thoughts by Lebanese press, she questioned if Clooney was Druze and was told no. “So what happened?” she asked. “There are no more young Druze left?”
