14 DAY TRIAL // As the wedding day draws near, more and more uncertainty looms over the upcoming marriage between George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin, his beautiful and smart lawyer girlfriend. It turns out that not everyone in Amal's family is crazy about her actor fiancé.
In a report by the Daily Mail it's mentioned that Amal's mother has been making her low opinion of George Clooney public through the entire city of Beirut, her hometown. Whereas most mothers in the world would be thrilled if their daughters brought home George Clooney for a husband, Baria Alamuddin is not so easily won over.
The problem is that the Alamuddin family belongs to the Druze sect, which is a medieval offshoot of Islam, which strictly forbids its followers to marry outside of their religion. Close family friends reveal that the mother lamented for a long while that the marriage to the famous Hollywood actor was going to result in an excommunication from the sect and even social boycott of the family in the long run.
Another family friend, this time from London, mirrors Baria's views when he discloses, “She thinks Amal can do better. She has been telling half of Beirut, in fact anyone that will listen, there are five hundred thousand Druze. Are none of them good enough for her?”
In fact, there are a lot more members of the Druze sect around, about a million worldwide, most of them in Beirut, where they make up about 5 percent of the total population. But that number is slowly shrinking since you can't convert to the sect, you have to be born into it, and are considered a member if both your parents belong to the faith.
Those who marry outside the religion are cast out from the tight community and can't return, no matter the circumstances. It sounds a bit harsh, but it's the truth. Once you've been excommunicated, the Druze sheikhs will no longer allow you access into church and won't pray over your grave when you die.
As you can imagine, the wedding that is going to take place this September, presumably at Clooney's Italian villa on Lake Como, isn't going to be following the Druze customs. It's believed that Amal is going to take on the religion of her husband in order to be able to complete the matrimony.
From the looks of things, this is exactly what is going to happen to Amal's family once she marries to George Clooney. Let's just hope that he understands the sacrifice and he's worth it in the long run.