Alawite

The Alawites, historically commonly called Nusayris, are an Arabic-speaking ethnoreligious community of the Syrian coastal mountains, centered on Latakia and Tartus. Their creed grew from the ninth-century ghulat Shia teaching of Ibn Nusayr and was organized in Aleppo under Hamdanid rule after 947 by the missionary al-Khasibi; it venerates Ali as a divine incarnation, teaches reincarnation, and reserves its wine-centered rites to initiated men.

Crusaders entering Syria in 1097 killed many Alawites but later tolerated and even recruited them, while fourteenth-century Mamluk rulers pressed the mountain villages to accept Islam's outward observances. Ottoman conquest brought the massacre of the Telal at Aleppo in 1517, after which survivors withdrew into the coast ranges, where repeated revolts kept their autonomy alive.

In the eighteenth century some Alawite chiefs served as Ottoman tax farmers, and in 1834 and 1835 the community rose against the Egyptian occupation of Syria.