Yazidism

Yazidism holds that there is one God, who created the world and entrusted its care to seven holy beings. The chief of them is Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel, God's regent over the world, and it is to him that Yazidi devotion is chiefly addressed. He is not a rival to God and not an independent power; he is the form in which the divine will meets creation.

Outsiders have persistently identified him with the Devil. The identification rests on a story that Yazidism shares with Islamic and Jewish tradition and reads in the opposite sense. God commands the angels to bow before the newly created Adam, and one refuses. In the Quranic telling the refuser is Iblis and the refusal is damnable pride, the origin of Satan. In the Yazidi telling the refusal is obedience, because the angel had been commanded earlier and more fundamentally to bow to no one but God, and he is vindicated and exalted for holding to it. The same narrative, the same refusal, opposite verdicts.

The Yazidi position is not that they worship a misunderstood devil. It is that there is no devil. Evil in Yazidi teaching is not a person and holds no kingdom of its own; it originates in the human heart. There is no adversary figure for Tawusi Melek to be. Yazidis do not utter the Arabic name of Satan and avoid words that merely resemble it in sound, an avoidance strict enough to have shaped everyday vocabulary, which outsiders have sometimes taken, backwards, as evidence of reverence for the being whose name is not said.

The correction is not a matter of courtesy. Devil-worshipper has been the standing charge in the persecutions Yazidis count as firmans, and it supplied the legal pretext for the worst of them. Islamic State propaganda in 2014 argued explicitly that Yazidis were devil-worshippers rather than People of the Book, and therefore could be enslaved rather than taxed. The libel and the atrocity are directly connected.

Yazidi society is divided into three hereditary and endogamous castes: the sheikhs and the pirs, both priestly, and the murids, the lay majority. Membership is by patrilineal descent and cannot be acquired. Marriage across the castes is forbidden, marriage to a non-Yazidi is forbidden, and there is no conversion in either direction: a person is born Yazidi or is not one. Every murid family is attached to a particular sheikh and a particular pir, and each individual also has a brother or sister of the hereafter, a spiritual sibling from a priestly lineage who attends them at death. Two offices stand above the structure: the Mir, the hereditary prince who is the community's temporal head, and the Baba Sheikh, its senior religious authority.

Transmission has been oral rather than textual. The content of the religion lives in qewls, hymns in Kurmanji Kurdish memorised and performed by a specialist class of reciters, the qewwals, together with prayers, stories, and the ritual practice itself, baptism in the White Spring at Lalish, pilgrimage, the seven-day autumn assembly, seasonal fasts and prayer turned toward the sun. Literacy was for centuries discouraged outside the priestly lineages, which reinforced the oral character and left the tradition without the kind of book outsiders expected to find.

Which is where the two texts usually named as Yazidi scripture come in, and they are a cautionary tale. Manuscripts of the Kitab al-Jilwa and the Mishefa Res circulated and were published in the early twentieth century and were taken by Western scholars as the community's hidden books. Scholarly opinion now generally holds those manuscripts to be forgeries, produced for a Western market by people who were not Yazidis. The judgement is qualified rather than simple: their contents draw on genuine Yazidi tradition and are not invented outright, and it remains open whether texts of those names existed in some other form. But older reference works were built on them, and accounts of Yazidism derived from that literature should be treated with care.

On 3 August 2014 Islamic State forces attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga units withdrew ahead of them without evacuating the population, a decision that remains bitterly disputed within Yazidi politics. Men and adolescent boys were separated and shot. Women and girls were taken and sold into sexual slavery, a practice the organisation set out and justified in its own publications rather than concealing. Younger boys were taken for indoctrination and military training. Tens of thousands fled up Mount Sinjar and were besieged there without water in August heat until a corridor was forced open.

A retrospective household survey published in PLOS Medicine in 2017 estimated that about 3,100 Yazidis were killed and about 6,800 abducted in the first days of the attack, some 9,900 people in all, and roughly a fortieth of the region's Yazidi population. Thousands are still unaccounted for. In June 2016 the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria concluded, in a report titled They Came to Destroy, that Islamic State had committed genocide against the Yazidis, alongside crimes against humanity and war crimes. Iraq passed a Yazidi Survivors Law providing reparations in 2021, and the German Bundestag recognised the genocide in January 2023; other parliaments have done likewise.

The aftermath has forced change inside a religion built on purity and descent. Yazidi teaching had held that sexual contact outside the community, and conversion even under compulsion, placed a person beyond its boundary. In 2015 the Baba Sheikh issued a decree welcoming enslaved women back into the faith, and survivors were received and rebaptised at Lalish, a substantial doctrinal accommodation made quickly and under pressure. The status of children born of rape has proved far harder. A 2019 statement by the community's senior spiritual body that appeared to accept such children was withdrawn or reinterpreted within days, and the question is unresolved.

More than a decade on, Sinjar remains substantially depopulated and large numbers of Yazidis are still in camps in the Duhok region.