For those not familiar with al-Hakim, John P. Durbin sums up the Western view of him: "not only eccentric, but impious, superstitious, and cruel. Twenty thousand persons, mostly Christians, perished by his hands or orders. When he appeared or his name was pronounced, everybody was required to prostrate themselves on the ground. At length he became intolerable even to his friends, and was assassinated by order of his sister as he walked alone at night in a retired part of Mount Mokattam, and his body was concealed. This gave rise to the report that he had fled the earth for its wickedness, but will return again. Yet this creature is the object of Druze worship."

The Druze faith sprang up in a time of great apocalyptic expectation. The Isma'ilis had just gained power in the Fatimid empire, but the Messianic kingdom they promised never materialized. The structure of the state changed little, and no Messiah emerged. But the expectation was still there, and soon Isma'ili religious leaders began publicly to consider the caliph al-Hakim as the deliverer they had been promising. We don't know if al-Hakim encouraged this propagation, but it seems likely he did not attempt to curb the speculation. In a single year, al-Hakim destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, placed restrictions on Hajj, and began persecuting local Christians and Jews; actions that would set him apart, to say the least. The next eleven years were marked by eccentric, erratic behavior that earned him the reputation he has today. But for those who believed he was their deliverer, his extreme behavior only seemed to confirm his divinity. Abu-Izzeddin wrote, "his astonishing independence of all established ways marked him as superhuman." His strange disappearance also served to reinforce the idea that he was divine.

Caligula and Vlad the Impaler were mere men. The Druze believe al-Hakim to have been the embodiment of the godhead, a divine social reformer concerned with justice who left this world and will one day return.

The Druze, Robert Brenton Betts