I consider myself someone who’s learned a lot about the middle-east and world religions
over the years, so when I heard about the brutal oppression of the Yazidis, I had several
questions.
First of all, who were these Yazidis?
The idea of a non-Abrahamic religion with roots all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia
was, to say the least intriguing, I had to find out more.
The first I heard of them was when the UN declared ISIS was committing genocide against
this religion due to their belief the Yazidis worshipped the Devil.
I knew there was a story here of a people who had experienced so much pain and suffering
because of ignorance.
Quickly, I found out about peacock angels, fire worship, and strict bans on marrying
outside of the faith.
I could already sense this was a syncretic religion.
We talked about syncretism before on Step Back, long long ago when I spoke about Voodoo.
It’s when religions develop as a mix of various traditions.
Now, every religion is to some extent syncretic, but the Yazidis did seem like a unique combination.
TO THE INTERNET!
Yazidis are under the umbrella of an ethnic group in the middle-east called the Kurdish
people.
There’s some debate on this, but they live in the region of Kurdistan which straddles
Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and they speak a form of the Kurdish language.
However, their genetic lineage seems to connect this group all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia,
seriously old fertile crescent stuff.
The name Yazidi comes from the old Umayyad Caliph Yazid I.
The Umayyads were a powerful line of rulers at the beginning of the Islamic empire.
One of the significant figures in Yazidi history traces his origins to this house.
The Yazidi religion is a blended mix of all sorts of Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic faiths.
That being said, they’re distinctly not an Abrahamic religion, or at least, they haven’t
been treated as such by their neighbours.
There’s a lot of Islamic influence in their language, especially their more esoteric thinking,
which seems to borrow heavily from Sufi thought, a movement of Islamic mysticism.
However, that is where the similarities end.
Their myths about the foundations of the universe seem to have more links with the religious
beliefs of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran as well as Zoroastrianism.
They seem to have borrowed the Zoroastrian reverence for fire, but if you are lost as
to what Zoroastrianism is about you’re in luck.
I made a video exploring them which you can watch here.
So really, it’s a locally focused religion endemic to a specific group of people.
You can’t convert, you must be born into it.
That group of people have then absorbed religious ideas and traditions from the various religions
which moved through the region of Northern Iraq they originate from since… well as
long as people have been farming.
The roots of this region are preposterously old, perhaps one of the oldest on earth.
It’s a hierarchical religion, led both by a secular prince or Emir, and a religious
Sheikh authority.
They also follow a strict caste system.
Yazidis are not only strictly forbidden from marrying outside of their religion but even
their caste under penalty of death.
This comes from the Yazidi obsession with purity.
They have internalised a bit of Zoroastrianism about the elements of fire, water, air and
earth, and have strong taboos about mixing elements.
Actions like spitting on the ground or into a fire are considered very off limits.
They have also considered even association with non-Yazidis a form of pollution, so until
relatively recently, they didn’t join the military.
It comes from a part of their creation myth in which they believe the world is populated
by descendants of Adam and Eve, but that the Yazidis were made of only the… reproductive
fluids of Adam.
Also, because of an outdated conception about the use of human waste as fertiliser, they
can’t eat lettuce.
This is all a fascinating find, but it sounds as if these are a people who more or less
keep to themselves.
It doesn’t explain why they have experienced such targeted hatred over the years, and especially
from the Islamic State.
Then, I began to look into their beliefs and found out what was going on.
Like Christians, Muslims, and even Zoroastrians, the Yazidis are monotheists, believing in
a distant God, who had delegated the tasks of goding up to a pantheon of seven angels.
The most prominent amongst these angels is… uh, this name.
He also goes by the cool nickname of the peacock angel.
It comes from an ancient belief that peacock meat doesn’t decompose.
Tawûsê Melek in the mythology of the Yazidis at a point defied the creator god but later
attained redemption.
He’s not a source of evil to them and is even one of the holiest of holy figures in
their faith, but one of the other names they’ve used for him is Shaytan, which is the name
in the Qur’an for the devil.
It’s because of this similar name the Yazidis have spent centuries accused as being devil
worshippers.
That’s right, because of a similar name, these people have experienced by their own
accounts 73 genocides.
Damn, that’s fucked up!
The Yazidis experienced multiple attempts to persecute and force convert them.
They used to have a prominent place in Syria, until the Ottoman empire led several campaigns
to try and force the Yazidis to convert to Islam, driving them into Northern Iraq where
the vast majority of them live today.
And every so often, some sort of event would flare up and cause violent mobs to attack
Yazidi communities.
Such as in 2007 when a Yazidi honour killing sparked violence.
The Muslim public suspected that the Yazidis killed this girl because of their conversion
to Islam.
This sparked a series of suicide bombings against the Yazidi communities in Mosul, killing
about 500.
There are only about 700,000 Yazidis in the world.
But that doesn’t come close to the untold horrors inflicted upon them by ISIS.
Under their occupation, thousands of Yazidis have either died or been forced into sex slavery,
to the point the UN has declared it a genocide.
Many thousands even today, after ISIS has been defeated in the region, are internally
displaced, or living all over the world as refugees.
And they have been the targets of Islamophobic hatred anywhere they go in the west.
Because, Islam isn’t a race, but Islamophobia sure seems racist.
This is doubly compounded by the fact that because of these long-standing misunderstandings,
often Yazidi refugees need to be given special protection, and because of their cloistered
culture, much more resources and training once they arrive.
It’s been a humanitarian disaster, and only when some of the worst people in history tried
to eliminate them from the earth did ignorant old me ever find out about them.
Just thinking about the deep roots of the Yazidi people makes me really appreciate the
gravity of what the chain of dominos set off by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to.
Here are people who have ties all the way back to the time of Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon,
disappearing from the earth, and finding themselves without help.
The Yazidis are also part of the larger issue of the greater injustice done to the Kurdish
people.
They’ve been persecuted, displaced, and torn apart because of a bunch of old men in
1919 who drew this part of the map.
We really need to find a way to build a space for the Kurdish people.
The misunderstanding about the Peacock Angel shows ignorance can be deadly.
Curiosity and education have real impacts on how we get along.
You sometimes hear when people go off to get an education they come back all lefty and
stuff.
Maybe it's because reading about other people, and trying to understand those different from
you changes you in a way.
I’d argue for the better, and to make my case I’d point to the tragedy of the Yazidis.
Anytime we’re all convinced a group of people are evil, think of them, and as the Green
brothers would say, see people complexly.
Thank you to 12tone for the Step Back theme as well as patrons Don and Kerry Johnson,
Michael Kirschner, Martin King, Scott Smith, Luis Eneas Guarita, Mary D'Onofrio, James
McNeice, and Garrick Kwan.
Like, Share, Subscribe, and come back next time for more Step Back.