The Yezidis
John S Guest
KPI Limited
The 150,000 members of the Yezidi religious group are spread out over Iraq, Turkey, Syria and the USSR - and have, despite persecutions and discrimination, retained their identity for over 500 years. The author of this first proper history of the Yezidis traces the origin of their religion, describes the discovery of the people by Western travellers in the early 19th century and details the Yezidi community’s traumatic recent history and its present status. The Yezidis believe that Lucifer, the fallen angel, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as chief angel: their history is, like their faith, characterised by dignity and survival in the face of great odds — and fascinating to the Western reader.
The discovery of the Yezidis by Western travellers and missionaries led to close friendships in the 1840s between Yezidi leaders and the British archaeologist Sir Henry Layard. The British ambassador Stratford Canning helped them obtain civil rights: a hitherto unpublished letter of thanks from the Yezidi leaders appears as an appendix.
Chapters also cover Sultan Abdul Hamid’s cruel but vain efforts to force the Yezidis to embrace Islam, leading to the emergence of Mayan Khatun, a strong-willed Yezidi princess who ruled the community from 1913 to 1958. They include a vivid account, based pardy on interviews with living witnesses, of her rivalry with her brother Ismail and the ill-fated marriage between her son and his daughter culminating in a shooting incident in 1939. The narrative ends in 1958 and a supplement reviews the present status of the Yezidi community. The final chapter describes the Yezidi community in Soviet Armenia and Georgia which has survived the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath.
John S. Guest was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and the Harvard Business School. He was born an Englishman but later took American citizenship. From 1941 to 1946 he served in the British army in the Middle East, Italy and Germany. He has been since 1946 a merchant banker in New York. He has visited the Yezidi communities in Eastern Turkey and West Germany on frequent occasions and has spent many years researching this first ever history of the Yezidis.
PREFACE
A few years ago my family and I visited a village in Turkey inhabited by Yezidis. The Yezidis are a community of about 150,000 people who possess their own religion, quite distinct from their Moslem and Christian neighbours. They live in the northern parts of Iraq and Syria, in eastern
Turkey and in the Armenian and Georgian republics of the USSR.
About half of the Yezidis live in northern Iraq, where the principal shrine of the community is located. Regrettably, I have not been able to visit the Yezidis in Iraq. My main contact has been with villagers in eastern Turkey, some of whom live and work in West Germany.
This book stems from a conversation with the Yezidi priest of the village where I stayed on my second visit. Pointing to the newly constructed schoolhouse, he remarked that now the children were learning to read and write they were asking him questions about the Yezidi scriptures and the history of the community. Lacking any written material, he could only repeat to them the oral traditions he had himself learned as a child.
Studies of the Yezidi religion have been written by Christians and Moslems from time to time. Perhaps only a Yezidi can write a definitive book about it. The third chapter of this book gives a general outline of the Yezidi religion; English translations of their two sacred books and their principal prayer are appended at the end of the book.
The history of this community, which goes back 900 years — even longer if its antecedents are taken into account — represents an extraordinary record of survival in a harsh environment. This narrative, pieced together from the testimony of those who knew or dealt with the Yezidis from their earliest days through 1957, is designed to fill a niche in Near Eastern history. I hope that it may be useful to my friend in Kurukavak.
The composition of this book has been eased and enriched by the help and advice I have received from many quarters.
I am most grateful for the access to official documents granted by the Public Record Office and the India Office Library and Records. Transcripts/ translations of Crown-copyright records in the Public Record Office and unpublished Crown-copyright material in the India Office Records reproduced in this book appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. I am also grateful for similar permission from the French Ministere des Relations Exterieures, Division Historique des Archives Diplomatiques, and the Sacra Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazionc dei Popoli o ‘De Propaganda Fide’. In addition, Dr Ertugrul Zekai Oktc obtained for me copies of a number of relevant documents from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul.
Dr Abd el-Salam el-Awadly, General Inspector of Antiquities, and Dr Henri A. Arrad kindly accompanied me on my visit to the mausoleum of Sheikh Zein ed-Din Yusuf in Cairo at a time when it was not generally open to the public and enabled me to photograph the inscriptions.
I should also thank the following institutions for their kind permission to consult and, in the case of certain extracts, quote from documents in their archives: Church Missionary Society and the University of Birmingham Library, where the CMS archives are located; Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia; Royal Geographical Society; The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (through the kind offices of the late Miss Teresa Child); United Church Board for World Ministries (successor to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) and the Houghton Library; Harvard University, where the ABCFM archives are located; and the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. I am also obliged to the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, for permission to consult the Layard papers; to St. Antony’s College, Middle East Centre, for permission to consult the C. J. Edmonds papers in their possession; and to the University ofNewcastle upon Tyne, Department of Archaeology, for providing me with material from the Gertrude Bell Collection.
This book could not have been written if I had not been able to draw on the resources of some fifty public, private and university libraries in Britain, Continental Europe, the Middle East and North America which have allowed me to consult their collections or have sent me copies (often without charge) of material I had requested. In particular I should express my deep gratitude to the New York Public Library, especially to the staffs of the Oriental and Slavonic Divisions and to Mr Domenick Pilla and his colleagues in the Photographic Service of the library.
The author’s venture into the Middle Eastern literary field owes much to the encouragement and advice received over the past six years from academic and lay friends (none of whom bears any responsibility for the contents of this book). Among them I am honoured to cite Dr Adriano Alpago-Novello; Fakhri N. Bakir and his brother Tahsin Bakr; Dr R. D. Barnett; Br Robert A. Bellows II OCD; Dr Erika S. Bleibtreu; Dr Sebastian Brock; Dr J. F. Coakley; Dr Dominique Collon; Dr Erica Cruikshank Dodd; Dr Nuri Eren; Dr Ahmet Evin; Prof F. M. Fales; David H. Finnie; Mrs Dorothea Seelye Franck; Prof Cyrus H. Gordon; my cousin Evan Guest; Chorepiscopus H. Aziz Giinel; Dr Talat Halman; Prof R. Stephen Humphreys; Walter G. Korntheuer; Mrs Frances N. Lyman; Ms Eileen Mcllvaine; ProfDavid MacKenzie; John MacPhee; Prof Dr Rudolf Macuch; Ali H. Neyzi; Edgar O’Ballance; Fethi Pirin^coglu; Clive Rassam; Dr Julian E. Reade; J. M. Rogers; Rodney Searight; A. Joshua Sherman; Rev William A. Taylor; David Townes; Gordon Waterfield; Victor Winstone; Dr M. J. L. Young and Prof Constantine K. Zurayk. I have also been kindly permitted to consult the unpublished manuscripts written by Mrs l ranck (now at the Amherst College Library) and by Father Aziz Giinel (in his possession).
I should like to acknowledge a specially heartfelt debt to two extraordinary men, Pere J. M. Fiey OP., and the late Dr Henry Field; I wish that circumstances had permitted me to spend more time with each of them.
I need hardly state how pleased I was, at a critical point in my effort, when Prof Cunningham agreed to write a foreword to this book.
I have been exceptionally lortunate in having the opportunity to meet two living participants in twentieth-century Yezidi history — Major-General H. P. W. Hutson, RE, and Princess Wansa Ismail el-Amawy. I have been privileged to spend several hours with each of them and have reviewed with them the portions of my book that touch on their lives. In both cases, however, the author is solely responsible for the narrative of the events in which they took part.
I am grateful for the loan of photographs from General Hutson and his grandson Charles Walker; Princess Wansa and her brother Prince Mua’wia Ismail Al-Yazidi; Dr Dominique Collon; Rew Dr Edwin C. Coon; Pere J. M. Fiev, OP; John MacPhee and Major J. R. C. Riley. Two photographers, Tim Gidal and Elsie Trask Wheeler, kindly supplied prints for inclusion in this book.
I am immeasurably obliged to those kind friends who have enabled me to utilize source materials available only in Arabic, 1 urkish and other oriental languages — not only by translating for me certain key passages, but also by reviewing the contents of several major publications.
In first place I should acknowledge the contribution of Ms Rend al-Rahim, who led me through the principal Arabic source materials and has been a much-needed editorial assistant.
I should also thank my other Arabic translators, Prof Mona Mikhail, Prof Douglas Crow and an unnamed student of Prof Aptullah Kuran; my Turkish helpers, Ms Canan Usman, Giinhan Demiralp, Dr Metin Kunt and Sefer Ozdemir; my guide through Armenian sources, Dr James Russell; and Dr Sidney H. Griffith, who translated for me some puzzling Syriac texts.
Last but far from least I thank my typist, Ms Carol Wilson of New York City for her patience and endurance in converting a scissors and paste manuscript into publishable form.
Foreword
John Guest has chosen to write about one of those tantalisingly elusive communities, often small in numbers, which one finds here and there embedded colloidally in the main strata of Middle East societies; in this case, the Yezidis, a people whose very antiquity invites consideration of an associated mystery, the mechanics of survival for a small group when confronted with the constant challenge and threat of cultural assimilation. The very few European travellers who crossed the comfortless and unmapped wastes of northern Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century occasionally encountered the name, but only uncertainly the reality, of the Yezidis, a community usually dismissed by the Ottoman pashas of Mosul, in whose province they were largely to be found, as a worthless set of devil-worshipping trouble makers. They only worsened the nomadic turbulence of Ottoman Kurdistan, exchanging the life of sedentarists for that of marauders whenever a sequence of dry seasons occurred, or rival Kurdish tribal confederations closed in on their temporary success as farmers.
Unclassiliablc with Muslims, Christians or Jews as Ahi al-Kitab, as people blessed with the divine revelation of a God-inspired book, the Yezidis found themselves consigned by their nominal rulers to the Dahr uI-Harb, that Domain of War where unguided mankind lived in theological darkness. Consequently, Yezidi land, lives and property were available to any pious folk able to prevail over them, and in effect they were outlaws, which was by no means the fate of most Kurds, however great their reputation for disloyalty at the Ottoman Porte. Extant eighteenth-century firmans admonish vezirs and pashas to be mindful of the Yezidis as an intractable law-and-order problem. While a few Europeans sensed that Ottoman knowledge of the Yezidi people and their religion was sketchy in the extreme, fewer still possessed the linguistic skills necessary to press more systematic enquiry to a fruitful conclusion. Just finding the Yezidis in their mountainous homelands was difficult enough. Thus for a long time they made only peripheral appearances in the scholarship of orientalists or the recollections of travellers.
In the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, completed in 1911, the Yezidis are summarized as
a sect of devil-worshippers... they regard the devil as creative agent of the Supreme God, a reinstated fallen angel who is the author of evil. They avoid mentioning his name and represent him by the peacock. They regard Christ as an angel in human form and recognize Mahomet as a prophet with Abraham and the patriarchs. They believe in a future life and practise both circumcision and baptism...Their sacred book is called Al-\aivah, and its chief exponent was Shaikh Adi (c. 1200).
This was an agglomeration of truth, half-truth, and untruth, and it would have been nearer reality to perceive the Yezidis as angel-worshippers, certainly not as subscribers to a satanic cult. How they would have intrigued and astonished the author of Paradise Lost!
The trickle of Yezidi studies never quite dried up. To the Britannica’s offering of Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains (1850) and Menant’s Les Yezidiz (1892), John Guest has been able to draw on the help of a fitful flow of occasionally quite noteworthy scholarship, not least in the translation and exegesis ofYezidi sacred texts. Over time, therefore, one might look for a more sustained and authoritative statement on this interesting people. The fifteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, completed in 1974, gives a brief, fairly accurate, description of the Yezidis. Fortunately, the now quite elderly Encyclopaedia of Islam, itself in process of revision, still offers over two columns of secondary references, and the last volume to appear will surely incorporate a good deal from the unusual diversity of primary materials on which Guest has drawn, as well as from his own, present contribution to the secondary sources.
The core community of the Yezidis has resided immemorially in what is today Kurdish Iraq. Its religious focus has been the Lalish valley, north of Mosul where the tomb ofSheikh Adi is surrounded by those of lesser holy men, and where for many generations past the valley has come to life in the autumn with lamps decorating the tombs, pilgrimages and processions, ritual ablutions, music and dancing. The physical centre ofYezidi survival in times of persecution, however, has long been the Jebel Sinjar, a great rock citadel west of Mosul in the fringes of the desert. From distant memories of conducting tribal reconnaissances in the area in a fabric-covered, vintage aircraft without a radio, the present writer can testify to the extraordinary isolation of this scorched plateau in the heat-haze of the northern Jazira. Small wonder the Ottomans lacked the will or means to subjugate the area, or that the Sinjar has been the Yezidis’ guarantee of survival and separateness. Its meagre permanent population speaks Arabic as its second tongue, just as the scattered Yezidi pockets in eastern Anatolia use Turkish and the Yezidis in Transcaucasia use Russian, Armenian or Georgian in addition to their primary language, Kurdish.
Tradition as well as geography has isolated the Yezidis. According to some investigators, they believe they are descended miraculously from the seed of Adam after his death, and so must forever segregate themselves from the rest of mankind, the descendants of Eve. In Ottoman times monogamy, endogamy and emigration restrained their numbers, and in the Young Turk census of 1912 the Yezidi population in the province of Mosul is put at 18,000. Russian statistics show 24,500 Yezidis living in Transcaucasia in that year. Today John Guest estimates the Yezidi population at 150,000 — close to two thirds in Iraq, the rest in the Soviet Union, Turkey and Syria. The Yezidis are segmented by national borders, some of them closely guarded, and are vulnerable to governmental pressures in the countries where they live. This, nevertheless, is the context, tolerable rather than tolerant, in which the Yezidis have so long endured. If, despite their long record of survival, the community succumbs to the forces of nationalism or secularism, John Guest’s tribute to the grand matriarch who governed the Yezidis for the first half of this century may prove, after all, to be the end of a very old song.
In Guest’s account, the reader will find the continuum of religious practices as interesting as the shifting fortunes of the Yezidi communities. The clerical hierarchy, the sacred books, the brass or copper peacocks commemorative of Melek Taus and the other angels who assisted at the Creation, are all here. Melek Taus in particular is that fallen angel, restored through his repentance to God’s favour, who ever afterward supervised the worldly affairs of mankind as the active agent of a passive God; far from inspiring worship of Satan, it was Melek’s tears which extinguished the fires of Hell, a locality which has no place in Yezidi thought. At every turn in the narrative, the reader will find reasons for pondering the origins ofYezidi faith; shamanism shows in the burial procedures, the importance attached to visions and dreams, the use of dancing as exorcism; Nestorian Christian influences seem implicit in the practice of baptism, the use of wine in a eucharistic sense, and the willingness of Yezidis to attend church occasions like weddings; Islam may underlie the commitments to fasting, pilgrimage and circumcision, and Sufism the attachment to tomb-visiting, to secrecy and to revelation through ecstasy. Were the Yezidis once Nestorians, or Jacobite Christians, who came under Islamic dominance, as has been suggested? To speculate further back in time and argue a case for Zoroastrian origins seems to place a heavier burden of interpretation on the existing evidence than it can bear.
Allan Cunningham
Professor of History
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia
Chapter One
Antecedents
The people and events described in this book belong to a world, once known as the Near East, visited by few people nowadays. The cities are crowded, but the highways and rail lines carry only intermittent traffic and the rivers flow silently toward the sea. Most of the frontiers are closed.1
In the countryside life goes on as it has for thousands of years in these ancient lands. Shepherds tend flocks of sheep and goats, farmers raise crops from the fertile soil and camels aid man to subsist in the deserts to the south. But one element is missing — the immemorial movement of people and their animals — the traders, migrants, pilgrims and preachers who once frequented the traditional routes connecting the Mediterranean basin with the world east of Aleppo.
Before modern technology created air lines and motor highways across the desert, travellers were obliged to follow routes where they could find water and pasture for their livestock and could expect a reasonable degree of security from robber tribes. In those days three historic routes connected the trading cities of the Levant with Mesopotamia — the mellifluous name given by the Greeks to Iraq?
The 'Great Desert Route’, most direct of all, followed a series of water holes south of the Euphrates to Basra; but it was often endangered by tribal wars. The ‘Little Desert Route' followed the Euphrates to a point level with Baghdad, making the final stages overland; the river itself was navigable most of the year.
But the preferred route was the one from Aleppo to Mosul and thence down the Tigris valley. At Mosul travellers could elect to transfer their families and goods to keleks — rafts supported by inflated sheepskins — for a swifter, less ...
John S Guest
The Yezidis
KPI
KPI Limited
The Yezidis
A Study in Survival
John S Guest
KPI
London and New York
First published in 1987 by KPI Limited
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Distributed by
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Set in Baskerville
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and printed in Great Britain
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© John S. Guest, 1987
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passages in criticism
ISBN 07103 0115-4
Jacket illustration:
General view of the Yezidi Sanctuary at Lalish in 1850
