he origins of the religion is unclear. It is possible that the faith is rooted in pre-Islamic, Gnostic religion. According to Gisela Procházka-Eisl and Stephan Procházka (The Plain of Saints and Prophets: The Nusayri-Alawi Community of Cilicia (Southern Turkey) and its Sacred Places), “The Alawis are one of the last surviving Gnostic communities in the Middle East,” and has Islamic, neo-Platonic and Christian “features.”
That the Alawi faith has drawn in elements of other religions local to the region is beyond dispute. Alawites are, for example, believed to visit the shrines of Christian saints, and to celebrate certain Christian holidays, as well as the Zoroastrian New Year’s festival of Nowruz, and, unsurprisingly, Shi’a holidays. Incense, derived from Christian ritualism, is also used in Alawite ceremonies. Nevertheless, if the Alawite faith does originate in pre-Islamic Gnosticism, its absorbing of Islam effectively transformed it into a minor, if eclectic and highly esoteric form of Shi’ism.