Who are the Yezidis?

Besides being kind of unfortunate to be in the way of ISIS / ISIS?

Reshared post from +Andreas Schou

So, I hear that ISIS / ISIL / The Islamic State is attempting to commit genocide against the Yezidi. What's a Yezidi?

Uh, that's a good question. The short answer: they're a Kurdish religious minority. Probably.

What sort of religious minority?

Uh. That depends on who you ask. They're either (a) adherents to the Kurds' ancestral religion, (b) a weird sort of Ismaili Shi'a, or (c) holdovers from Zoroastrianism.

Or they're not even Kurds. (This probably isn't true, but some Yezidi believe this, so I probably ought to mention it.)

Wait, what? Why don't we know something so simple?

So, this area of the world  — northern Mesopotamia, southern Iran, parts of Syria, and eastern Anatolia — has historically been a refuge for religious minorities. Under the Parthians and Sassanids, it played host to dissident Zoroastrianism. Until the Mongol invasion, it was the homeland of the Sabians of Harran. The strongholds of the Assassins were built here. And other syncretic faiths like the Druze and Ahl-e-Haqq were founded in the same region.

In short, if mainstream Islam didn't approve of it, it was probably invented somewhere around here. And there's been a lot of cross-pollination since. For more about that, see here: http://goo.gl/Ct2lCI.

Can't we just ask them?

Sure! We could do that. For a relatively small, persecuted religious minority, they're surprisingly open about their religion. It's just that… well… asking them doesn't make it clear.

Why not?

From one perspective, Yezidis look a lot like Sufis. They worship at the tombs of Sufi saints. They even maintain some of them. They use Sufi religious terminology (Murids, Sheikhs) to describe their caste system. They have a round of obligatory daily prayers. They claim that their name comes from the Caliph Yazid, who officially sanctioned their religion.

And periodically, the ruling authorities have decided that they're Ismaili Shi'a and decided not to persecute them. 

So, they're a kind of Muslim?

From another perspective, they're … uh … the exact opposite of Muslim.

They venerate Satan in the form of a peacock. Their most valuable religious artifacts are brass peacock idols. They tend to pray toward those (or the sun) rather than toward the Kaaba. And they certainly aren't religions of the book: if they actually have a book (and this is unclear), it's in Armenia and no one living has actually read it. 

And they've periodically had prohibitions on literacy, although this — like most other religious rules — are not particularly common. 

So, they're Satanists?

Uh. No, not that either. 

You see, after refusing to bow down to mankind, Melek Tawus reconciled with God. He and the other angels are back to being agents of God on earth and in Heaven.Because God eventually wrote off this one little sin, it's not fair to call Melek Tawus "Satan" in the normal sense.

In fact, the angels in Yezidism are really more like the Yazatas of Zoroastrianism — which is a much more sensible origin than the name of a very unpopular (but perfectly orthodox) Caliph. 

So, they're, what, Zoroastrians?

Uh.

They're nothing like modern Zoroastrians, at least. After going through a very long phase where it was a lot like Hinduism, and a somewhat shorter phase where it picked up Platonist ideas, modern Zoroastrianism ended up with fairly strict dualism and fire temples. In other words, if Yezidism is anything like Zoroastrianism, it's like a type of Zoroastrianism which is very poorly documented.

Then, of course, there's that thing with peacocks.

What thing with peacocks?

In Zoroastrianism, they're a symbol of transcendent evil. After Ahura Mazda creates every living thing, Ahirman creates the peacock — just to demonstrate that evil can create things of beauty, but that it refuses to. 

It seems pretty unlikely that Yezidi would have gotten another thing about the most common local religion exactly backwards. If their religious dissent dates all the way back to the era where Zoroastrianism was the most common religion, they were likely dissidents back then, too. 

Jesus. They could not have engineered their religion any better to make their neighbors uneasy. At least they're part of the broader Kurdish community, though, right?

Yezidi usually believe they're Kurds. 

Unfortunately, relations between the Yezidi of Sinjar (who were recently stuck on top of a mountain with no water) and the rest of the Kurds are tense. Because Sinjar Yezidi do not by any means believe they're Kurds, and want to remain separate from them. This means a number of things.

First, there weren't many Sinjar Yezidi in the peshmerga. That meant that rescuing Sinjar was a relatively low priority. Second, that meant that Sinjar Kurds had, until recently, been raising a huge political ruckus about getting parliamentary representation separate from the larger Kurdish block.

What can the rest of the world do about it?

Fortunately for everyone (except the Yezidi still in Iraq), there has been a large Yezidi diaspora to more friendly countries. Most of the world's Yezidi population lives in Iraq, but an increasing number are immigrating to Germany and the United States. 

Lincoln, Nebraska has a large Yezidi population, and they seem to be doing fine. In fact, it seems like — in general — the Yezidi do fine everywhere but home. And there are only half a million Yezidi worldwide: enough for the West to happily take on as a diasporic population.

Which we kind of owe them.

When the US moved in and conquered the country they live in — in the process, making it completely unsafe — a huge number of our translators were ethnic Yezidi. We may not be able to adhere to we break it, we bought it with respect to the catastrophic, immoral war that shattered their tenuous peace, but we can at least adhere to it in bringing them to a safer place. We've done it before, with the Hmong, and we can do it again.