to mean that prayer is knowing their secrets, fasting is concealing their secrets, and pilgrimage is travelling to their sanctified shaykhs. Although some of them know that they are deliberately lying about this, many of their ordinary followers have accepted it as true, believing it to be part of the hidden, esoteric knowledge known only to the select few, and to belong to what is clear and unambiguous.

Yet it is well known that Allah’s words,

“Pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to Allah by those who are able to undertake it” [Āl ‘Imrān 97],

and His words,

“Whoever performs pilgrimage to the House or ‘umrah incurs no blame by going between them both. And whoever voluntarily does good” [al-Baqarah 158],

refer to the House in Mecca, and that pilgrimage is the familiar pilgrimage. Likewise, He has explained that fasting means fasting the month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the month between Sha‘bān and Shawwāl, and fasting it means the familiar fast. Yet a large group among the Nusayrīs hold that Ramadan is the name of a number of their shaykhs, and they believe this.

Another group supposed that Allah’s words,

“If they were to see a fragment of the sky falling, they would say, ‘A mass of clouds’” (44) [al-Tūr 44],

refer to an individual among the extremists who claimed that he