In Syria's large Druze minority, a belief in reincarnation binds the community together.

A few years ago, I had an experience during meditation that I cannot put into words. I can try to describe it with weak metaphors and approximations, but suffice it to say, it was one of those astonishing, sublime, blow-your-doors-off experiences that mystics and many others have recounted for centuries. I had been in the middle of writing an article about proto-communist radicals who attempted to overthrow the government in late eighteenth-century France, just before Napoleon’s coup, and completely lost interest in the project.