Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (14 page)

Ayad’s theory of his people went as follows: “We are one of the peoples of the sun. Once the people of Syria, Russia, Armenia, Iran, and Turkey all considered the sun as a god. That was the first stage of our religion, which was nature worship; then it became monotheist; and last came the teaching of Sheikh Adi.” The Yazidis did not worship the sun anymore, Ayad said. But they did continue to bow to it when they prayed. When the first Yazidi member of parliament took his seat in the new Iraqi assembly, he took his oath of office not on the Koran or the Bible but on the flag of Kurdistan—and specifically on the image of the sun at its center. Ayad did not see that as a coincidence. “We are the original Kurds,” he said. Some Yazidis fear that assimilation among Kurds will threaten the Yazidi identity, but Ayad felt that the safest and truest course was to place his people right at the heart of the Kurdish identity.

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THE DRIVE FROM AIN SIFNI
to Lalish was described in a 1940s travel book as a painful experience, one that could give a car a broken axle. Things have improved: now there is a smooth paved road that winds down through a wooded valley to the temple. The day I traveled this road, cars were parked along it, and I could hear Kurdish pop music and teenage laughter. As Taha and I approached to the shrine, we passed a stone effigy of the sun. The shrine turned out to be an assortment of stone buildings resembling an old monastery (a Christian priest in the Middle Ages claimed that Lalish had once indeed been a Christian church) and nestled in a wooded valley. The day of my visit was a Friday, the Islamic weekend. Many families were at Lalish to picnic under the mulberry and fig trees that shaded its flagstone courtyards. The Yazidis’ holy day is Wednesday, when they do not work in the fields, travel, bathe, or wash their clothes. Few keep this old tradition, though, which may date back to the old taboos of pre-Christian Mesopotamia. Friday, being the Muslim day for communal prayer, has now become more popular as a weekly holiday than Wednesday.

Leaving Taha in the car—he said he would meet up with us later—Ayad and I joined one of these families and sat beneath the trees, with sliced watermelon on a plate between us. The family we sat with spoke no English or Arabic. The father, his head swathed in a red-and-white
keffiyeh,
smiled in friendship, but my attempts to turn a broken phrase or two of Kurmanji fell flat. His sons sat with him, while his wife and daughters had their own picnic a few paces away, protected from the sun by the stone walls of a small building topped by a twisted conical spire, a familiar characteristic of Yazidi shrines. (The spire’s twisting lines, radiating down from the tip of the cone to its base, may be designed to resemble the rays of the sun.) Ayad volunteered to show me the temple itself, the building at the center of the complex. We walked along a roofless passage overlooked by a balcony, on which a woman dressed in white regarded us silently. As well as studying the Mandaeans, E. S. Drower used her time in Iraq to visit the Yazidis at Lalish. She mentions “the white-clad, nun-like attendants of the shrine” who never married, spending their lives spinning wool and tending the shrines and the gardens around them. This, I thought, must be one of those attendants. In Babylonian times there were consecrated women who likewise spent their time within temple precincts, spinning wool.

We reached the sunlit courtyard of the temple after walking through an arch surmounted by a carving of an ibex head. Beside the temple’s door, a large black snake was embossed on the stone wall, head pointing upward, acting as an amulet to prevent evil from entering. The door had a huge lintel. Ayad motioned that I should remove my shoes and step over the lintel without touching it, as the Yazidis do, for the lintel is kissed by the faithful who regard it as holy. We thus entered a dark, stone-flagged room that smelled of dust and antiquity, light filtering through small windows, the only decoration some rolls of brightly colored silk—yellow, red, light blue—that hung from its central pillars. Passers-by could tie or untie knots in them for good luck. A few family groups were walking about the room, cheerful-looking but quiet.

We descended a set of stairs, and I encountered Melek Taoos again: a curtain in front of a niche concealed one of the surviving
sanjak
s, the brass representations of the Peacock Angel. When we reached the lower floor, we found ourselves in a room reeking of the stale oil that was oozing from bottles stacked against the wall. Teenagers were throwing a bundle of silk over their shoulder and seeing if they could gain a bit of luck by hitting a particular stone in the wall, which I thought might be a statue so worn away by time that its features were unrecognizable. (Later I was told by Yazidis that this stone was miraculously suspended in midair. “But,” they said, astonished at the stupidity they were about to describe, “some years ago, people who lacked faith insisted on putting up a wall behind it.”) When I backed out of the room I saw a stone sarcophagus covered in a green cloth. Yazidis were walking around it, left hands trailing on the tomb. A black woolen cloak, typical of Sufis, was spread reverently nearby. Only a very pious Yazidi would be allowed to don it. Sheikh Adi, I was told, wore such a cloak. Was he a Muslim? I asked. A group of Yazidis were listening, and they all chorused: “No!”

Ayad told me I was lucky: a body called the Spiritual Council, which included some of the most influential laymen and top clergy, was meeting at the temple that day. To ask them for an audience I had to walk from the temple to an alcove of a neighboring building. As was required, I removed my shoes before entering. There were no women inside. A group of young men sat on stone benches running along the side of the alcove walls. Beyond it a courtyard opened up, leading to a room where the Spiritual Council was holding its meeting. I could overhear snatches of conversation from the men on the benches, who were earnestly discussing (in English) the history of Kurdish nationalism. When I talked to them I found that many of them had foreign passports, mostly from Germany or Sweden. They were sheikhs, the topmost of the three Yazidi castes. According to tradition, sheikhs should marry within their own caste. Wasn’t this hard, I asked one of them, for Yazidis living in Europe and America? “I preserve the customs,” he replied, “and I managed to find a wife who was a sheikh. But when my daughter is twenty I won’t be able to control what she does!”

I could see the members of the council gathering in the courtyard; evidently the meeting had ended. Some were wearing suits, but five men, with long gray beards and traditional dress, held themselves with particular dignity. They could easily have passed for Arab tribal chiefs, with their white headdresses fixed on their heads by black circlets; some of them wore the gossamer-thin cloak called a
bisht
in Arabic and signifying high rank. One of these was the Mir, the temporal leader of the Yazidis. Another man was dressed a little differently, in the red-and-white turban of a cleric and cream-colored robes. This was the Baba Sheikh, who technically was the chief spiritual leader of the Yazidis (though, at least while I was there, he left the talking to the Mir). The men in the courtyard were, collectively, the leaders of the Yazidi faith. I asked if they would grant me a brief audience, and they asked for my questions in writing and then sent me away to wait for their decision; I sat for a time in a stone-floored upper room until I was summoned back. They had decided that it would be safe to talk to me.

The Mir’s answers were bland. He told me the Yazidis wanted to live in peace with all religions and to keep their own distinct traditions; relations with Muslim and Christian clergy were good, and they would visit each other for festivities; the Yazidis rejected missionary work and would never seek to convert others. “In our prayers,” he said, “we ask for good for others first, and then for ourselves. People will be judged for their actions, not for their beliefs. The spirit that God breathed into Adam passes down to all humans. In the wrong kind of people it is repressed, and in the best it shines out.” After he finished, the five gray-bearded elders stood up, shook their robes, and went out for a cigarette break. Roast chicken and rice were brought in. Ayad and Taha the driver joined us. There were no chairs. The Mir gestured for me to stand beside him. He ate without talking, crossing his hands on his belly whenever he set his fork and knife down. Taha, I saw, stood there and ate nothing, as he had told me he would.

I left Lalish with many questions still unanswered. The Yazidis were endlessly intriguing. Why was it forbidden to wear blue, for example, or eat lettuce? When I asked Yazidis about this, they had vague answers, mostly suggesting that these were meaningless rules that perhaps had been imposed by past Yazidi leaders because the hated Turks wore blue, or just because they disliked lettuce. Mirza dated the rule against lettuce quite specifically to 1661. I was more inclined to see ancient roots in these traditions, seeing parallels to them among other religions in the area. For the Mandaeans, blue is the color associated with the evil Ruha. Among the Druze, blue is the color of robes worn by the most respected sheikhs. The taboo against lettuce has a counterpart among the Druze, whose elders sometimes eschew a similar vegetable called
molokhiya.
The Harranians avoided eating beans. But I could not see how these traditions had originated. No matter how hard I tried, the Yazidi faith still guarded at least some of its secrets.

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IN THE MODERN WORLD
, the Yazidis can no longer count on being left to their own devices. With the rise of far-reaching government bureaucracies and modern technologies, there are now fewer places where a people can hide. Sometimes a new idea of citizenship has developed in tandem with the bureaucracy and technology, and has resulted in minorities being treated generously when they are not perceived to pose a threat. But when they are seen as a threat, or when old prejudices have come to the fore, the results have been bloody and sinister.

In Mirza’s hometown, Qahtaniyah, on a summer’s evening in 2007, a crowd of men in off-white cotton
jelaba
s and black-and-white head scarves gathered when they saw a truck drive into town. They hoped it had come to distribute food. Instead, it delivered a blast so powerful that it knocked down houses, scattered people across streets, and left corpses stripped of their clothes. The bare facts were terrible enough: four trucks, with explosives hidden probably inside their doors, had blown up, leaving approximately eight hundred dead and around fifteen hundred homes damaged or destroyed. Furthermore, ambulances and earthmoving machines had never arrived because the roads were considered too dangerous; clothes hung from sticks as memorials to children whose bodies were never found. It killed more people than any other terrorist attack save that against the Twin Towers on 9/11. The immediate reason for the bombing was the killing of a Yazidi woman called Du’a Khalil Aswad, who was murdered by her relatives for wanting to marry a Muslim man. A rumor spread that she had converted before she was killed, and so she was adopted as a Muslim martyr by various groups that then began to carry out reprisals against Yazidis.

These clashes happened in a context, though, in which resentments between all the ethnic groups in the area had been deliberately stoked by Saddam’s government, which tried to maintain control of the population by inciting Arab against Yazidi, and Yazidi against Kurd. In the years since 2003, furthermore, intolerant and violent varieties of Islam had spread, according to Dakheel, an elderly and distinguished Yazidi. “Religious hatred” lay behind the Qahtaniyah attack, he said to me sadly as we sat in the new lobby of Erbil’s Sheraton hotel. “It was pure religious hatred.” After the Ba’ath came to power in the late 1950s, he said, religious divisions had deepened, but this was a small change in comparison to the decline in tolerance since 2003. Salafi Muslims, fundamentalists who want to mimic as closely as possible the behavior of the first Muslims and are particularly hostile to heterodox groups such as the Yazidis, had grown in influence. Dakheel was gloomy about the future. The Yazidis would one day cease to exist, he thought, as they were less well-organized than the Mandaeans and the Druze. They were also fractured geographically. Most Yazidis in Iraq lived in Sinjar, to the west of Erbil, outside direct Kurdish control. This was traditionally the area where they were strongest, and where for several centuries they had held off the Ottomans. Around 15 percent of the Yazidis lived around Lalish, north of Erbil. The remainder lived farther north, around Dohuk.

On the other hand, Dakheel added more optimistically, Yazidis were also becoming better educated. Before World War I, a British writer observed that only one Yazidi family could read and write. In the 1940s, Dakheel’s uncle had been the first-ever Yazidi to become a schoolteacher. In 1973 the community’s first doctor graduated. “Now there are plenty of Yazidi doctors in medical school. There are more than 3,000 Yazidis at university. We have no other way to survive except through learning,” Dakheel told me. The cost of living in the Kurdish areas had soared since the region had stabilized, attracting migrants from the rest of the country. Amid the general rise in religious fervor across the country, though, the Yazidis had if anything become less fervent. “Ten or fifteen years ago in Sinjar, cutting off one’s mustache was punishable with death,” Dakheel added, reminding me that wearing a mustache was a religious obligation for a Yazidi man. “That’s not true anymore. And people no longer wear special clothes when they make the pilgrimage to Lalish.”

Later, back in Erbil, I visited the rocky plateau on which the city was originally built, and which has now been turned into a heritage site. From the edge of it I looked down toward a newly refurbished square in which young Kurds sat and chatted around fountains. Then I looked beyond, to the dusty western horizon. Out there lay Sinjar. To its west were Syrian villages where Kurds, Arabs, and Yazidis lived. Beyond that were Harran and the lands to its south, and then the wooded hills of the Syrian coast. All of this territory has historically been a haven for minority groups of all kinds—adherents of ancient religions that somehow made their peace with Islam; heterodox Muslims; and believers in faiths that mixed old folk traditions with Islamic practice to produce fascinating and curious hybrids.