AH Challenge: a Druze state in the American West

Your challenge is to get a predominately-Druze state somewhere in the Western United States with a POD anytime after 1800. I've seen a few threads involving a Jabal-el-Druze. So I had a thought: why not put it in the American West?

How probable is it to have, say, Wyoming or Montana be for the Druze what Utah became for the Mormons? The Mormons were one of many religious sects that fled to the frontier to escape persecution, they just happened to be the most numerous and successful. IMHO, the main challenge is getting the Druze to America. How you do that is entirely up to you.
 
Kind of hard considering you're suggesting to have the Druze immigrate en masse to the American West especially in the USA which is heavily Protestant. They complained about the Catholics, what would stop them from doing the same if not worse to adherents of a religion that's a complete unknown to them. Well have the Ottomans or locals persecute them more and there you have the answer.
 

Art

Monthly Donor
Very true that they might be persecuted, but the Druze are allowed to pretend to be another religion if it will save their lives. There's not many religions I know of that allow such a thing. So you might get a great amount of Druze disguised as Greek Orthodox or something like that, and then telling everyone once they were the majority in certain places.
 
Maybe the Russians manage to keep the British and French out of the Crimean War and beat up the Ottomans? Then the Ottomans start sulking and blame the Christians for their defeat; maybe they are foreign spies or something similar. The Ottomans persecute the Druze especially hard for some reason and the Druze flee en masse to the US. The East is already filled up, so they go West.

That's off the top of my head, so it may be ASB.
 

ninebucks

Banned
Maybe the Russians manage to keep the British and French out of the Crimean War and beat up the Ottomans? Then the Ottomans start sulking and blame the Christians for their defeat; maybe they are foreign spies or something similar. The Ottomans persecute the Druze especially hard for some reason and the Druze flee en masse to the US. The East is already filled up, so they go West.

That's off the top of my head, so it may be ASB.

Why would they persecute the Druze though? The whole point of the Druze is that they keep themselves to themselves, if things start going bad for them, they just go underground.

Pushing the Druze out of their lands probably won't be possible. There needs to be some sort of way to have them want to leave on their own. Which may not be too hard, there is a noted phenomenon during times of mass migration of entire communities, seemingly at random, migrating in their entirety.
 
Why would they persecute the Druze though? The whole point of the Druze is that they keep themselves to themselves, if things start going bad for them, they just go underground.

Pushing the Druze out of their lands probably won't be possible. There needs to be some sort of way to have them want to leave on their own. Which may not be too hard, there is a noted phenomenon during times of mass migration of entire communities, seemingly at random, migrating in their entirety.


yeah, and when you consider that communities like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York, exist in OTL, the idea of a large portion of an extremely insular ethno-religious group following a religious leader to a new home somewhere on the American frontier really isn't that far-fetched at all.
 
Top