Henri Lammens' Essay on the Alawites (1899)

While the Alawites have most recently attracted outside interest because of the Syrian civil war, they nonetheless attracted the interest of Western scholars well before the modern formation of the Syrian nation-state. One of the most notable serious contributions to the study of the Alawites from prior to the 20th century came from the Belgian orientalist and Jesuit Henri Lammens. While scholarship on the Alawites has considerably evolved since those days, Lammens’ article- penned in 1899- is very much worth reading as a ‘classic’ essay on the study of the Alawites, and in this post I have translated the article in full from the original French, complete with its footnotes.