The Yazidis

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In the autumn the roads above Mosul fill with families walking up toward a narrow green valley folded into the hills, where two fluted stone spires rise over a spring and a cave. The pilgrims wash their hands at the water, kiss the doorframes, tie and untie knots of colored cloth at a pillar, and sleep in the courtyards of the shrine. The valley is Lalish, and the people who climb to it are the Yazidis — a Kurdish-speaking community of perhaps a million souls, scattered now from the Sinjar mountains of northern Iraq to the suburbs of Hannover and Stuttgart, who have kept for a thousand years a religion that has no missionaries, no converts, and no peace.

A people of the mountains and the valley

The Yazidis — Êzîdî in their own tongue — are an ethnoreligious people whose historic heartland lies in two regions of what is now northern Iraq. To the west, the long whaleback of the Sinjar massif, called Shingal in Kurdish, rises out of the plain near the Syrian border; its villages have for centuries been the most concentrated Yazidi population on earth. To the east, north of Mosul in the Sheikhan district, lies the valley of Lalish, the spiritual center of the whole community, set among older Yazidi villages and the twin towns of Baʿshiqa and Baḥzane. Beyond Iraq there were communities in Syria, in southeastern Turkey, and in the Caucasus — Armenia and Georgia — carried there by waves of flight, and now a diaspora of a hundred and fifty thousand or more in Germany alone.

They speak Kurmanji Kurdish, the northern dialect, and their sacred poetry is composed in it; in this they are kin to the wider Kurdish world, though many Yazidis hold their identity to be a distinct people and not merely Kurds of a different faith. The question of who is a Yazidi has only one answer their religion will accept: one is born so, of two Yazidi parents, or one is nothing. The faith does not receive converts and never has. A child born outside it cannot enter; a Yazidi who marries out, or is even rumored to have loved out, is lost to the community. This closure is not a recent defensiveness but a first principle, and it shapes everything — the smallness of the people, the intensity of their cohesion, and the absoluteness of the catastrophe when a generation is killed or scattered, for there is no way to replace the dead from outside.

Within that closed body the order is hereditary and threefold. Every Yazidi belongs by birth to one of three endogamous castes, which do not intermarry: the sheikhs (şêx) and the pirs, who together form the religious classes and carry the sacred knowledge, and the great majority, the murids, the lay disciples. Each murid family is bound for life to a particular sheikh lineage and a particular pir lineage, who serve as its spiritual guides across the generations, and to a brother or sister of the hereafter, a birê axiretê, a member sworn to accompany the soul at death. The vocabulary — şêx, pir, murîd — is borrowed from the Sufi orders, and the borrowing is a clue to where the religion took its classical shape.

Sheikh Adi and the making of a religion

That shape gathered around a man who was not, himself, a Yazidi at all. Sheikh ʿAdī ibn Musāfir al-Hakkārī, born around 1073 in the Bekaa of Lebanon, was a Sufi master trained in Baghdad in the great age of Islamic mysticism, in the circle that produced ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī and that revered al-Ghazālī. Sometime in the early twelfth century he withdrew into the Hakkari mountains and settled in the valley of Lalish, where he founded an ascetic order, the ʿAdawiyya, and where he died around 1162. The Arabic chroniclers who noticed him — Ibn Khallikān, Ibn al-Athīr — record an unimpeachably orthodox Sunni saint, a worker of miracles, a teacher whose own surviving writings betray no heresy. His tomb in the valley became, and remains, the holiest place in the world to the Yazidis.

What happened after his death is the genealogical hinge of the whole tradition. Under his successors — above all his great-nephew Sheikh Ḥasan, killed in the thirteenth century — the ʿAdawiyya planted in the mountains met something already there: an older Kurdish religious world, archaic, oriented to the sun and the elements, that the Sufi order did not so much convert as fuse with. The result, by the fourteenth century, was no longer a branch of Islam. It was a distinct religion with its own cosmology, its own hereditary priesthood, its own calendar tied to the old Iranian solar year, and its own scripture — and around the name of Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya, the Umayyad caliph whom most Muslims revile, a figure the Yazidis transfigured into the holy Sulṭān Êzî. Scholars who study the tradition — Philip Kreyenbroek, Eszter Spät, Birgül Açıkyıldız — trace in it a thick stratum of pre-Islamic Iranian material beneath the Sufi vocabulary: reverence for sunrise, for fire, for flowing water, and a cosmogony in which two great agents work in concert rather than at war. The order entered the valley a Muslim brotherhood; generations later, something else walked out.

That something is transmitted not in books but in the mouth. The living scripture of the Yazidis is oral: the qewls, sacred hymns in Kurmanji, dense with allusion and deliberately obscure, recited by a special class of reciters, the qewwals of Baʿshiqa and Baḥzane, who travel among the communities carrying the sacred objects and the words. Alongside the qewls run the beyt, the prayers, and the religious tales, the çîrok. For a long while outsiders assumed every religion must have a holy book, and two short Arabic texts duly appeared in the late nineteenth century in Mosul, the Kitêba Cilwe, the Book of Revelation, and the Meshefa Reş, the Black Book, presented as the Yazidi scriptures. The current consensus among scholars is that these are late compilations — very probably the work of Christian intermediaries in Mosul, partly in answer to European demand for a “holy book” — though their compiler had real access to oral tradition and so they preserve genuine material even where they are not themselves the faith’s living word. The standard critical edition of the authentic core, the hymns, is Kreyenbroek and Rashow’s God and Sheikh Adi are Perfect, published in 2005; the title is a Yazidi line.

The shrine complex at Lalish, the spiritual center of the Yazidi people, with the fluted conical spires that mark the tombs of the saints. — Levi Clancy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Peacock Angel and the slander

At the center of the Yazidi world stands a being in the form of a peacock. God — Xwedê — made the world and then withdrew above its workings, distant and largely unengaged, entrusting the world’s governance to seven holy beings, the Heft Sirr, the Seven Mysteries. Chief among them, God’s deputy over the whole creation, is Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel. He is not a messenger or a servant of lower rank; he is the regent through whom the absent creator administers what he has made, and the Yazidis honor him above all the other angels, with a reverence that the elements of the world — sun, fire, water, earth — share as the channels of his care.

The story the tradition tells of him is the story that has cost the Yazidis everything. When God created Adam, the telling goes, he commanded the seven angels to bow before the new creature — but he had also commanded them, before all else, to bow to none but himself. Tawûsî Melek refused to bow to Adam, holding to God’s prior word, and for that fidelity he was not condemned but exalted, raised to the headship of the angels and the deputyship of the world. A reader who knows the Qur’an will hear an echo at once, for the Qur’an tells of an angel — Iblīs, who becomes Shaytan, the Satan — who likewise refused to bow to Adam, and who fell for it into damnation. The two stories run along the same line and then divide at the last instant: where the Muslim Iblīs disobeys and is cursed, the Yazidi Tawûsî Melek obeys a deeper command and is honored. In the proper Yazidi reading there is no fall at all.

It is on this exact resemblance that the long slander rests. To Muslim and Christian neighbors, reading the Peacock Angel as their own fallen Satan, the Yazidis became “devil-worshippers,” ʿabadat Iblīs, and the charge — sharpened by a Yazidi taboo against ever uttering the word Shaytan — has marked them since the medieval period as licit targets, people whose blood and property were forfeit. The label is a hostile misreading and nothing more. The scholars who have spent their lives inside the tradition — Kreyenbroek, Spät, Açıkyıldız, Christine Allison, John Guest — are unanimous that the equation of Tawûsî Melek with the devil is alien to Yazidi self-understanding, a thing projected onto the faith from outside and then used to justify its destruction. The being the Yazidis revere is God’s brightest and most faithful angel; the devil of the slander is a creature of their persecutors’ scriptures, not their own.

Around this center the religion arranges a dense order of observance. The soul does not perish but passes from body to body — kiras guhorîn, “changing the shirt,” reincarnation imagined as a soul putting on garment after garment until it is purified. The elements are holy and must not be defiled; certain foods and certain words are forbidden; the color blue is by old custom avoided. The year turns on a festival calendar of Iranian shape, with the New Year, Sersal, falling on a Wednesday in spring, when lamps are lit and eggs are dyed and the graves are visited. And once a year, in the autumn, comes the great pilgrimage to Lalish, the Feast of the Assembly, the Cejna Cemaʿiyê, when the community gathers in the valley for seven days of procession and washing and the carrying of the sacred standards, and the sacred objects of the Peacock Angel are borne through the crowd. The reverence for water, the white spring of Kaniya Spî below the shrine, the immersion of infants — all of it makes Lalish less a building than the body of the religion itself.

A peacock — an image of Tawûsî Melek, God’s deputy over the world — at the shrine of Sharaf al-Din in the Sinjar mountains, near the village of Sinune. — Levi Clancy, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The seventy-three firmans

The Yazidis count their own near-destructions. The community keeps a running tally of the massacres it has suffered, called firmans — the word is an Ottoman one, a royal decree, here turned to mean a campaign of extermination — and by their reckoning there have been seventy-three of them across the centuries, before the seventy-fourth came in living memory. The number is not a precise chronicle so much as a way of holding the whole history of persecution in a single figure, a memory of having been, again and again, the people it was permissible to kill.

The catalog of real events behind it is long. ʿAdī’s own tomb was desecrated in the thirteenth century; Yazidis were slaughtered under successive Muslim dynasties and Ottoman governors, hunted in the Sinjar and the Sheikhan, pressed to convert at the point of the sword. In the nineteenth century the Kurdish prince of Rawanduz, Mir Kor, the Blind Emir, fell on the Yazidi villages of the plain; later Ottoman campaigns drove the survivors deeper into the mountains, which is why Sinjar and the high places became refuges in the first place. Each assault is a firman in the count, and the count itself became a feature of the religion, recited as the qewls are recited, a liturgy of survival.

It was in this same nineteenth century that the West first learned the Yazidis existed, and learned them under the slander. The British traveler and excavator of Nineveh, Austen Henry Layard, rode up to Lalish in the 1840s as a guest at the autumn feast, watched the votive lamps and the music and the rites at the tomb, and wrote of it all with real sympathy — yet the book that carried his account to the world, published in 1849, called them on its very title page “the Yezidis, or devil-worshippers.” The missionaries who followed, and the orientalists who edited the supposed sacred books, repeated the framing; the American volume that first gathered the texts in English, in 1919, was titled flatly Devil Worship. The Yazidis entered Western knowledge as a curiosity and an exotic, their faith named by the very calumny that had been killing them. Composed fascination ran alongside a settled willingness to believe the worst.

The seventy-fourth

On the third of August, 2014, the seventy-fourth firman began. The self-styled Islamic State, having taken Mosul, turned west and fell on the Sinjar. To the militants the Yazidis were precisely what a thousand years of slander had made them — devil-worshippers, idolaters, people who could be killed or enslaved without sin — and the campaign was not collateral but deliberate, a stated intention to destroy them. The men and older boys were separated out and shot in pits; in the village of Kocho, on the fifteenth of August, the entire male population was murdered in a single day. Women and girls were carried off by the thousands into slavery, bought and sold and raped across the territory of the caliphate; children were taken to be raised as fighters. Around five thousand were killed; somewhere between six and eleven thousand women and children were abducted; several hundred thousand fled, many of them up onto the bare ridge of Mount Sinjar itself, where they were besieged without water under the August sun until corridors could be opened to bring them down.

The world, which had largely forgotten the Yazidis existed, learned their name again in horror. In 2016 a United Nations commission of inquiry issued the report “They came to destroy”: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis, the first body to find formally that a genocide had been committed, and government after government followed in recognizing it. A Sinjari survivor of the slavery, Nadia Murad, who had been captured and escaped, carried the testimony to the United Nations and the world’s parliaments and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. In 2021 a German court, exercising universal jurisdiction, convicted an Islamic State member of genocide against the Yazidis — the first such conviction anywhere. Thousands of the abducted women and children remained missing years afterward.

What the genocide did not do was end the people. The shrine at Lalish stands; the autumn pilgrimage is made again; the qewwals still carry the hymns. But the center of Yazidi life has shifted off the Tigris and into exile — Germany above all, with its great diaspora in Lower Saxony, and communities in Sweden, Canada, Australia, the United States. The Mîr, the hereditary prince, and the Baba Sheikh, the supreme religious authority, still preside over a faith into which one can only be born, which means that for a people so reduced and so scattered the arithmetic of survival is stark. In one extraordinary departure, the spiritual council at Lalish agreed after 2014 that the women and girls who had been enslaved should be received back into the community as Yazidis still, rebaptized in the white spring, their captivity treated as no stain on them — a mercy that, for a religion that admits no entry from outside, was itself a kind of revolution. The Peacock Angel keeps his watch over a people who have buried him seventy-four times and risen seventy-four times to light his lamps.

The sacred pool within the temple at Lalish, fed by the white spring of Kaniya Spî, in whose waters Yazidi children are washed into the faith. — Levi Clancy, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A note on kinship. The Yazidis are not alone among the old peoples of Mesopotamia who have kept a religion from before the age of empires and paid for it in blood. The Mandaeans of the southern marshes, baptizers who revere John and not Jesus, share with them an endogamous priesthood and a late-antique inheritance; the Druze of the Lebanese and Syrian mountains share the closed birthright and the doctrine of the soul reborn. Scholars who study the comparative file — the long survival of dualist and Gnostic currents through late antiquity — set the Yazidis within that family, beside the vanished worshippers of the stars at Harran and the doctrine of reincarnation wherever it has lodged in the region. The resemblances are matters for the historian. What the Yazidis themselves carry up the road to Lalish each autumn is older than any of the names outsiders have given it.

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