Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (12 page)

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon it provoked a theological crisis among Alawite scholars. Like the Harranians, they believed that the moon was a physical manifestation of a spirit that stood in the heavenly hierarchy as an intermediary between God and man—but how could that be true if it was a lump of rock, and not even the only moon in the universe but one of many? So an Alawite sheikh named Ahmad Mohammad Haidar wrote a book called
After the Moon,
which attempted to explain the problem. This, at least, is what I was told by my anonymous source. And although I found that the book had indeed been published, and I found a review of it that confirmed that it discussed the nature of the stars and planets, all copies of it had mysteriously disappeared, so I was never able to discover the sheikh’s proposed solution to the problem. This thoroughgoing secrecy fit with what Jacob de Vitriaco, a Crusader bishop of Acre in the thirteenth century, wrote about the Alawites’ secret doctrines, which he called their law: “If any son were to reveal the law to his mother, he would be killed without mercy.” The Alawites remain rigidly secretive today. They are even more so, in fact, because of their political power and their associations with the controversial Assad regime. I did not press my inquiries too far into the Alawites’ beliefs.

The Yazidis, who have no power, are less embarrassed. Sheikh Shams, Mirza told me, “is responsible for” the sun. But he is also an angel who came to earth and took human form in order to spread divine wisdom. There are other similarities between Harranians, Alawites, and Yazidis. All three believe in reincarnation and have a reverence for fire. (A nineteenth-century British missionary, Percy Badger, commented that Yazidis “never spit into a fire, and will frequently pass their hands through the flames, and make as though they would kiss and wash their faces with them.”) Yazidis and Alawites pray three times a day toward the sun; the Harranians prayed three times a day facing south, Biruni tells us, but the sun does stand to the south at midday. Some Yazidis share the taboo against killing fish, which they see as sacred because they live in water. (A friend of Mirza Ismail’s, Abu Shihab, told me that a Yazidi saint pitched his tent at Damascus “1,350 years ago” and that fish came out of the river to be his tent pegs; ever since then, Yazidis have not killed fish. Damascus, he added, used to be Yazidi. And indeed, a thousand years ago Biruni recorded that the Harranians had a shrine at Damascus.)

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THE ROAD EAST FROM SANLIURFA
heads toward the land where the Yazidis still live. The poverty of the places that we were passing became more and more evident, even just from the roadside restaurants at which we stopped. At the last of these there was only a bare kitchen with a few disappointed men queuing by empty soup tureens, waving away flies. It felt unimaginably far from the tourist resorts of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, but at least one thing was more familiar to me here: the language I heard being spoken had an echo of other places I knew.
“Panj dakka,”
said the driver when we stopped. I recognized that phrase: “five minutes.” It was the same that I had heard in Iran, and in Afghanistan.
“Choni?”
asked one man of another, meaning “how are you”;
“Bashi,
I am well,” was the reply.

This was Kurmanji, the Kurdish language, which has for a hundred years survived consistent efforts by the Turkish government to suppress it. When the charismatic Mustafa Kemal, called “Ataturk,” was trying after World War I to shape the decaying remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the modern state of Turkey, he felt that his new country’s diversity was a source of weakness and division. He attempted to suppress the many local and regional identities, and in some cases succeeded—but not with the Kurds. He and his successors banned Kurmanji in schools, but it survived (and the ban has now been lifted). Kurds were taught that they were Turks, but they held on to their Kurdish identity, and a strong separatist movement demanded a separate Kurdish state on the basis that they were a people whose language and ethnicity distinguished them from the Turks to their west and the Arabs to their south.

In Iraq that particular dream has come close to fruition. When we reached the frontier I could hardly be sure that it was Iraq I was looking at across the reedbeds, the thin river, and the wire border fence. A huge flag hung on the other side of the border, its tip almost hanging over the Turkish side of the border, but it was not the Iraqi flag. Red, white, and green with a yellow sun in its center, this was the flag of Kurdistan. For decades this flag was a banned symbol of the Kurds’ desire for independence. Only after 1991, and only in Iraq, did the Kurds feel strong enough to fly their flag. This period saw the Western powers set up a no-fly zone in northern Iraq, which enabled the Kurds to defy Saddam with impunity. Since the fall of Saddam in 2003, in the three provinces of the country that they now call Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have raised their flag by constitutional right.

For as long as I was on Turkish soil, however, “Kurdistan” was a forbidden word, suggestive of separatism and the breakdown of Turkey into its separate ethnic parts. Spotting the word on my computer screen, a fellow passenger wagged his finger at me until I deleted it. Yet “Welcome to Kurdistan!” were just about the next words I heard, as soon as I was across the border. What was heresy in one place was orthodoxy in the next. Once in Iraq, I found that people said “Kurdistan” as often as they could. Iraqi Kurds used it emphatically, assertively, as though it had a magic force, as though its use were the source of their freedom and growing prosperity.

Iraqi Kurds are enjoying unity without uniformity. They are divided among dozens of tribes, three languages, and two political factions that once fought a civil war against each other and even now work together uncertainly, but they have cooperated effectively enough to win a high degree of autonomy, reduce terrorist attacks in their territory to a minimum, and gain a 17 percent share in Iraq’s oil revenue, worth billions of dollars every year. The Kurds have never before experienced such wealth. Theirs has been a long history: there are references to “Kurti” in those hills three thousand years ago, and some scholars trace their origins back even further. But they were never rich and left little trace of their culture—perhaps because the mountains and hillsides that they farmed were ungenerous, even if they provided excellent shelter from enemies. In Marco Polo’s time they were highwaymen, if that intrepid or possibly fraudulent traveler is to be believed. “The Kurds are lusty fighters and lawless men,” he grumbled, “very fond of robbing merchants.”

Now, by contrast, it is in the areas where Kurdish is spoken that a foreigner is safest. On a map I saw during my visit showing a red dot for every violent attack in the past year, Kurdistan was an empty space. Red dots were spattered around its edges, especially in a strip of land on its western border called the Plain of Nineveh. Nearer to the site of biblical Nineveh itself, which is now within the limits of Iraq’s second-biggest city, Mosul, the red dots thickened. Mosul itself—“the most dangerous city in the world,” as a newspaper once called it—was just one large blood-red stain.

When I had been to Mosul before, as an election observer, it had been in a car so fully armored that the only view of the outside was on video screens. Even then, we apparently came close to being hit by a roadside bomb. “I wasn’t expecting to see you,” the base commander told our little group when we reached his outpost on the edge of the city. “I had a report one of our vehicles was hit, and I thought it was yours.” The next day in the city we were met with cold, quiet stares from its people. No, I had no wish to go back to Mosul. And yet the bus from Istanbul seemed to be headed there: certainly it was now careening along the road under Saddam-era signs saying “Mosul,” past harvested fields and shorn hilltops.

I could see now—rather too late—how much geography was going to matter to my safety. I had gotten onto this bus on an impulse and had done little planning other than buying a map of northern Iraq. It was supposed to be the best available, but it gave me just enough information to worry me. My destination was Erbil, the Kurdish capital. And on the map the thick red line of the main road to Erbil went through Mosul. My heart sped up, and I gripped the window frame. I tried to ask my fellow passengers whether that was the way we were going, but they were Kurdish and Turkish merchants and could not understand me in Arabic or Farsi.

I started to look anxiously out of the window, willing the bus to turn off onto a side road, to find a shortcut across the fields. I took off my glasses and was wondering how I could change my shirt, duck out of sight, or hide my British passport, when—at what felt like the last moment—the bus finally swung left, off the main highway and onto a narrow, newly built road not on my map. It seemed that Kurds were just as keen to avoid Mosul as I was, and had built a web of new roads to circumvent it. Indeed, as I realized later, years of fighting have reshaped not just the roads but the landscape of the region.

As the bus sped along this new shortcut, sharing the road with daredevil drivers and at least one wrecked car, I was given another lesson in the geography of danger. It turned out there was one man on board who spoke enough Arabic to understand me. He was called Hajji Abbas and lived in the city of Kirkuk, just outside the borders of Kurdistan. I learned from him that a referendum was going to decide whether his city, along with a whole swath of land bordering Kurdistan—“the disputed territories,” which also include Mirza’s birthplace, Sinjar—would be run by the Kurdish regional government in Erbil or by the Iraqi central government in Baghdad. In the meantime, Kirkuk had become a quiet and half-deserted city plagued by religious and racial violence. “Do not forget the Turkmen of Iraq,” were Abbas’s parting words to me; I supposed he must be one himself, a descendant of conquering armies from the steppes of central Asia who had preserved their Turkic language over the centuries and were now a distinctive Iraqi community. I would hear many more appeals in the next few days from other vulnerable groups: the Shabak, who are Muslims who practice a ceremony of drinking wine and confessing their sins; the Assyrians, who are the last remnant of the Church of the East, a Christian sect that once reached as far as China; and the Kakais, a group like the Yazidis but who reject the Yazidi caste system and, instead of following Sheikh Adi, follow instead Sultan Sahak. The “disputed territories” were home to most of Iraq’s beleaguered minorities, all of them nervous about what might happen next.

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THE BUS DROPPED ME AT ERBIL
, Kurdistan’s capital, at a shopping mall full of electronic goods. I drank a bad cappuccino, glad of the chance to stay out of the burning sun while I pondered my next move. Erbil had expanded rapidly in just a few years, with housing developments and new roads everywhere I looked. A friend was staying in the city, and when I reached him on the phone he helped me find a driver named Taha, a gruff former Kurdish militia fighter who kept his car in immaculate condition; the crinkly plastic wrapping was still on its seats. In halting Arabic he told me that he had never been to Baghdad. He stayed within Kurdistan. He was happy, though, to take me to Lalish and to some of the other places where Yazidis lived—though not to Sinjar, which was outside Kurdistan and which he said was less safe.

Lalish is where one of the two founders of the Yazidi faith is buried. His name was Sheikh Adi bin Musafir, and he was a Sufi preacher; his holiness and asceticism are much celebrated by Yazidis. Traditionally he is seen as the reformer of the Yazidi faith, which was founded by a mysterious figure called Sultan Ezid. Mirza told me that “Ezid” was just another name for God. A more controversial reading has it that Ezid is the caliph Yazid, one of the early Sunni rulers of Islam and a figure despised by Shi’a Muslims. The Yazidis are at pains in Shi’a-dominated Iraq to deny this account.

There is less controversy over Adi bin Musafir, a historical figure who appears in non-Yazidi sources. He was born in around the year 1075, a descendant of the onetime rulers of Islam, the Umayyad caliphs. His birthplace was near Baalbek in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon—where at that time the Harranians may still have had an outpost. So he may already have had some acquaintance with customs like those of the Yazidis when, from that remote village, he set out on a journey hundreds of miles long to study mysticism in Baghdad. Then, instead of staying in the imperial capital and enjoying a comfortable life as a scholar, he went as a missionary to the Kurdish areas, which at the time were untamed, dangerous, and resistant to Islam. He founded an order of Sufis (self-denying mystical preachers who resembled, and maybe inspired, the wandering friars of medieval Europe, and who wore wool—
suf
in Arabic) called the Adawiyyah. Sufi preachers who converted people on the frontiers of Islam often gave themselves flexibility to accept aspects of their converts’ old beliefs, sometimes grafting Islamic names onto them and reshaping them so that they could sit alongside Muslim practices. The intention was that eventually the converts would see themselves as Muslims. Sometimes, though, the new teachings did not take root; some aspects of Islam were adopted, but they were superficial ones, and deep down the supposed converts never saw themselves as Muslims but remembered their older identity. Perhaps some such process happened to Adi’s converts, who eventually abandoned any pretence of being Muslim at all.

Adi himself had, in the view of his Muslim contemporaries, somewhat outlandish views. A poem that was attributed to him by the Yazidis in the nineteenth century certainly sounds unorthodox. “My wisdom knoweth the truth of things,” it begins innocuously; “I have not known evil to be with me.” But the poem goes on to make grander claims: “All creation is under my control . . . and every created thing is subservient to me. I am he that guideth mankind to worship my majesty . . . and I am he that pervadeth the highest heavens.” Some Yazidis also seem to have regarded him as having a godlike status. “Who is the author of good?” said the attendant at the Lalish shrine to a British missionary, Percy Badger, in the nineteenth century. “God or Sheikh Adi.”