The Yezidis
Eszter Spät
Saqi
Little is known about the Yezidis, an ancient and enigmatic mountain people of Kurdistan who have been unjustly labelled ‘Devil-worshippers’ and persecuted through the ages. Eszter Spat lived in their midst over several journeys, observing and recording their ways of life. The result is one of the first detailed surveys of Yezidi culture to appear in English.
The Yezidis’ distinctive religious oral tradition incorporates motifs from Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Gnosticism. They are monotheists but revere their protector, the Peacock Angel - a being inaccurately associated with Satan by outsiders.
In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Yezidis’ resolutely traditional culture endured radical changes including forced resettlement, geographical isolation and the political fallout from two Gulf wars. More recently, Spat shows, the pervasive influence of modern media culture is having possibly further-reaching effects. Proud to be known as ‘the original Kurds’, the Yezidis have also long supported the creation of an independent Kurdistan.
The author has been privileged with very rare access to some of Yezidi culture’s holiest sites and rituals. Together with an insightful analysis ofYezidi practices and beliefs, Spat documents the increasing demands of modernisation on one of the oldest ethnic minorities of the Middle East, which continues to endure despite many attempts at eradication over the centuries.
Eszter Spat is a Hungarian scholar who has extensively researched
Yezidi history and culture.
Contents
Illustrations / 7
Acknowledgements / 9
Foreword / 11
Preface / 13
Introduction: Yezidis / 17
Geographical and Historical Background / 17
Yezidi Communities of Northern Iraq / 19
Communication between the Communities after the
Establishment of the Autonomous Kurdish Region / 23
Yezidis within the Context of Kurdish Society / 25
1. Religion / 31
The Yezidi Faith / 32
Recent Developments and Changes / 37
Caste System Among the Yezidis / 42
2. Festivals / 49
The Autumn Assembly / 50
Other Religious Events / 60
3. The Second Gulf War / 71
4. After the War / 77
End of the War / 77
Legacy of the Saddam Years / 79
Selected Bibliography / 91
Index / 92
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the Central European University (CEU) and the Kurdish Institute of Paris for supporting my research with their generous grants. I am grateful to the University of Duhok for providing me with a room at the girls’ dormitory and the Kurdish Democratic Party for completing the construction of this room.
My thanks to Professor P. Kreyenbroek, who encouraged me to put down my experiences on paper and gave me generous access to his collection of Yezidi oral texts, and to his student, Loqman Turgut, who helped me translate my recordings and told me about the Yezidis of Turkey. I am grateful to the Medieval Studies Department of CEU, and my tutors Istvan Perczel and Gyorgy Gereby in particular, for their , moral support when I chose a topic rather unusual for a Medieval Studies department, and in Central Europe at that. My special thanks to Professor Janos Bak of the same department, who convinced me to write this book, and together with Professor Aziz al-Azmeh helped to find a publisher.
I also owe thanks to all those Yezidis who helped me with my research, and were proud to talk about their heritage. I received a lot of practical help from the girls in my university dormitory, as well as from other Muslim Kurd friends. I have to mention Jula Haci, head of the Women’s Union in Duhok, from whom I learned a lot about Kurdish society, and Hividar Taha, my colleague at the University of Duhok, and his sister Lelav for offering me the hospitality of a Kurdish family during my stay there. I will always remember Wassfi Haci Suleyman, who gave me special insight into the community of the Yezidis, helped me in my field work and translations and inspired me to carry on even when I felt I had had enough. And finally I would like to thank my family for their unflinching moral and financial support and encouragement, and for having read and commented on the manuscript of this work. I dedicate this book to my sister, Judit Spat, who has acted as my manager and PR officer for years.
Foreword
Although a sizeable proportion of the Yezidi community now lives in Europe, Yezidi culture and religion are still little known in the West. In the mid-nineteenth century, when travellers began to write about this group, there was a great deal of interest in these pleasant ‘devil worshippers’ - an epithet that is not based on any actual practices or beliefs - but research and speculation focused on the origins of Yezidi traditions, and few attempts were made to study the present realities of the community. As little could be learned about the history of this traditionally non-literate community, even this interest soon waned.
In the past decade, the Yezidi community in the West has manifested itself more clearly in the public sphere. Together with new discoveries about their religious tradition, this helped revive academic interest in the group. However, descriptions of Yezidi culture that have appeared so far have tended to concentrate either on the immigrant community in Europe, or on specific aspects of their religious tradition. So far, up-to-date, descriptive accounts of the Yezidis’ way of life and religious attitudes, in their homelands of Northern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and Georgia, have remained a desideratum. This book, therefore, fills a keenly felt gap. The author, a historian of religions, spent ten months in the heartland of Yezidism, in Northern Iraq. She follows in the footsteps of the earliest and most influential authors on the Yezidis by offering us an intelligent and very readable account of her experiences and observations. In doing so she has written an immensely useful book for specialists and interested non-specialists alike.
As Ms Spat was in the Kurdish part of Iraq at the time of the recent invasion of that state and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the work also offers a first-hand account of the reactions of the Kurdish people to these events, and the impact of the invasion on local culture.
This book, in short, is both compulsive and compulsory reading for all those who are interested in Yezidis, Kurds, religion in the Middle East and the effects of political change on minority communities.
Philip G. Kreyenbroek, 2005
Professor of Iranian Studies,
Georg-August University, Gottingen
Preface
Iraq continues to be at the centre of media attention. It started in 2002 with the long, drawn-out, painful debate between the United States, the United Nations (UN) and the international community over the need for armed intervention, and continued with a brief war of three weeks in 2003, when world attention was riveted on the battle scenes from Iraq - a ‘live-on-the-air’ war. Since then the reports on the plans to rebuild Iraq have been alternating in the media with those of gruesome terrorist attacks.
All these have made the public familiar with many hitherto unknown facets of Iraq and aroused some new curiosity concerning the Iraqis, the real protagonists of this live drama. Interest in the people of Iraq has grown, and minority groups have come into the limelight. By mere chance I happened to be a witness to the events of the decisive year of 2002-3 and, what’s more, a witness sharing the unusual perspective of a small, much-persecuted minority group.
I spent ten months, between August 2002 and June 2003, and another two, April and May 2004, in a country that did not officially exist - Iraqi Kurdistan - researching a people of whose existence very few had heard in the Western world: the Yezidis.
The Autonomous Kurdish Region (AKR) of Iraq, colloquially referred to as ‘Iraqi Kurdistan’ and also known as the Kurdish Safe Haven, existed between 1992 and 2003. It was a unique experiment by the international community at setting up a state within a state with the intention of protecting the rights, or even the mere lives, of a minority. The Safe Haven was created after the Kurds of Iraq staged an armed uprising against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein following the first Gulf War. Western help failed to materialise and millions of Kurds fled toward the Turkish and Iranian borders, fearing the retaliation of the Iraqi army. The humanitarian catastrophe that followed prompted the UN to create the Kurdish Safe Haven, protected by a No-Fly Zone that incorporated if not all then at least a part of Iraqi Kurdistan.
After the 1992 general elections this Safe Haven functioned as a quasiindependent country, under the name of the AKR or, as Kurds hopefully called it, ‘Kurdistan’. It had its own army, currency and parliament in Erbil, its capital, until the Second Gulf War toppled Saddam’s regime -with the help of Kurdish pesbmergas. Despite a bloody civil war between 1994 and 1998, a precarious economic situation and the tenacious survival of the numerous social reflexes of a tribal society, the AKR still achieved more in the field of religious freedom, human and minority rights than any other regime in Iraq before.
The majority of the citizens of the Kurdish region are Muslim Kurds, but there are Neo-Aramaic-speaking Christians, Turkomans and Yezidis, whose minority rights were protected by laws for the first time in the history of Iraq.
My special interest - indeed, my reason for travelling to the region -was the Yezidis, a Kurdish-speaking, non-Muslim minority with a religion of their own. As Yezidis were the chosen subject of my PhD research at Central European University, Budapest, and research on the oral religious tradition of this group is still in its incipient phase, it was necessary to collect material right in the field. The most practical course seemed to stay in Duhok, the third-biggest town of the AKR, near the Turkish border, teaching English at the University of Duhok and collecting material for my thesis.
I worked among Yezidis living in the collective villages of Shariya and Xanke, near Duhok, and also stayed in the holy valley of Lalish, which is visited by Yezidis from all of Iraq and Syria on the occasions of great festivals. In the tense weeks leading up to the war I started writing for a Hungarian daily, Nepszabadsag, and continued my career as a war correspondent until my return to Hungary. I fled Duhok along with hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants at the beginning of the war, to take refugee in the village of Baadra, traditional seat of the Yezidi princes.
Following the war and the reunification of the Safe Haven with Iraq, I had the opportunity to visit a number of Yezidi settlements in the Kurdish territories, until recently under Saddam’s rule. I also had the chance to see when the two Yezidi communities, divided for more than a decade, became united again, and learn how villages under Saddam’s rule had fared in the last twelve years and hear something of their hopes and apprehensions for the future.
This book does not aim to be an exhaustive academic account of the Yezidis, their past, social and religious practices. Even less does it aim to solve the perplexing question of their origins. It is merely an account of what I saw among the Yezidis during my year in Iraqi Kurdistan, relying on the work of other researchers only where my own personal knowledge would have been insufficient. Its aim is to introduce this people and their customs to the interested reader. The first three chapters deal with social customs, the religion and the religious festivals of Yezidis, and their position in the society. The last chapter talks about the state of the Yezidi community and the challenges and difficulties they had to face in 2003-4, a turbulent time when the whole of Iraq was undergoing radical changes.
Introduction
Yezidis
Geographical and Historical Background
Yezidis, also known as the ‘people of the Peacock Angel’, are perhaps the most enigmatic minority of the Middle East. Even in this heterogeneous and highly diversified region they stand out as a little-known and little-understood community of mysterious origins. Ethnically they are Kurdish or, to be more exact, they belong to the North Kurdish or Kurmanji-speaking group. However, they have a religion of their own, which separates them from the Sunni Kurdish majority.
Most Yezidis live in Northern Iraq, but there are Yezidi communities in Syria, Georgia and Armenia as well. Until recently a sizeable Yezidi community existed in Turkey, where they were officially considered Muslims, but with a very few exceptions Turkish Yezidis have all emigrated to Europe (mainly Germany) in the past few decades. The religious and cultural centre of the Yezidis, however, continues to be in the mountains of Northern Iraq, where their creed is believed to have originated.
The exact number of Iraqi Yezidis is uncertain. Yezidis themselves claim half a million in Iraq, a number that may easily be exaggerated. This uncertainty is due not only to the lack of a reliable census and a very high birth rate, but also to the fact that under the rule of Saddam Yezidis were officially considered Arabs' and appeared on all official documents as such. Despite government attempts at ‘Arabising’ them (or perhaps …
Eszter Spät
The Yezidis
Saqi
Saqi Books
The Yezidis
Eszter Spät
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-86356-593-X
EAN 9-780863-565939
copyright © Eszter Spat 2005
First published in 1985 by Saqi Books
The right of Eszter Spat to be identified as the author ofthis work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
1988
Ail rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade
or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This edition published 2005
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