Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  So did the taxi driver Taha, as he revealed to me as he drove me north toward a town called Dohuk, where I was due to meet a Yazidi scholar and Kurdish official named Khairi Buzani. “You’ll see that I won’t eat any of their food,” Taha warned me as he drove. “People say that Muslims used to eat the Yazidis’ food. Not anymore. That Melek Taoos that they worship—that’s the devil.” Younger Yazidis would later tell me that it has become common for Muslim Kurds to refuse to eat with them. Early European visitors were also chary of the Yazidis because of Melek Taoos. Austen Henry Layard, an archaeologist who traveled through northern Iraq in 1840, found the Yazidis to be better-behaved than their neighbors; he particularly noted their “quiet and inoffensive demeanour, and the cleanliness and order of their villages.” Still, he hesitated to take up their invitation to take part in a naming ceremony for one of their children. “Notwithstanding my respect and esteem for the Yazidis . . . I was naturally anxious to ascertain the amount of responsibility which I might incur, in standing godfather to a devil-worshiping baby.”

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  What the Yazidis really believe about Melek Taoos is far more intriguing and thought-provoking than devil worship. Back in the ninth century ad, Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others were all jostling against each other in the Muslim-ruled Abbasid Empire. Islam’s theology was not as fixed then as it since became, and Sufis were particularly given to developing inventive and daring new interpretations of religion. One of these Sufis was Hussein ibn Mansour al-Hallaj. Hallaj’s grandfather had been a Zoroastrian, a believer in dualism, the notion that the universe is the locus of a battle between good and evil. His grandson had the opposite idea. One day he knocked on a friend’s door. When the friend asked who was there, Hallaj replied, “Ana al-Haqq—I am God.” “There is nothing in this cloak but God,” he said at another time.

  Hallaj’s words won him admirers. The poet Rumi said that it showed a spirit of greater humility than calling oneself a “servant of God” because Hallaj’s phrase represented a total denial of self, a willingness to be absorbed completely by God. “When you destroy your own heart,” as Hallaj wrote, God “enters it and discloses His holy revelation.” Some Christians had had a similar idea: a former pagan priest called Montanus, who went on to found his own breakaway Christian movement, had claimed to be possessed by God and declared, “I am Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Yusuf Busnaya, a ninth-century Christian priest, described his own mystical experiences by saying that a person’s “spirit itself becomes Christ . . . it becomes God and God is no longer God.” Hallaj, though, was making a wider philosophical point. He meant that everything was God. “It is You that I see in everything,” as he wrote in a poem. This was the ultimate monotheism: for everything, literally, to be made of God to a greater or lesser degree.

  As a complete monotheist, Hallaj wrestled with the idea of Satan. In a world that was made of God, the devil was a piece that could not fit. In the orthodox Islamic tradition, which was shared by Jews and Christians, the devil was pure evil—a rebel against God who could never repent and could never be reconciled. Didn’t that mean that the creator God was either unjust or not as all-powerful as religion taught? Zoroastrians, too, had spotted this particular question. If God was all-powerful, they challenged their Christian neighbors, then why does he allow the devil to do evil in the world? Why can’t he redeem Satan as he redeemed mankind? One of those Christians, Isaac of Nineveh, came up with a reply. At the end of the world every creature would indeed be redeemed and even devils would enter heaven. Hell would disappear. “Demons would not remain demons, nor sinners sinners.”

  Hallaj developed his own reply to the Zoroastrians. The Koran, like the Christian and Jewish scriptures, said that Satan had been the prince of angels; he had refused to bow down before Adam and rebelled against God, and for this he was cast down into hell. But Hallaj gave this story a startling twist. It was out of jealous and uncompromising love of God, he said, that Satan refused to bow to Adam. Satan was the archetype of all those Sufis and others who focused only on contemplating God and had no time for other people. But, said Hallaj, Satan was more misguided than evil. Today Hallaj’s view would be regarded by most Muslims as very unorthodox. In the religion’s early centuries, though, there were other Muslim mystics who similarly wrestled with the question of how Satan fitted into the world. One of these, Rabi’a of Basra, shocked her hearers by refusing to say that she hated Satan and by threatening to burn heaven and quench hell because fear of punishment or hope for reward came between people and the true love of God.

  The Yazidis’ view of Melek Taoos fits into this tradition. By referring to him as Azazael or Iblis, they are identifying him as the rebel angel, but not as the prince of darkness. They justify this by saying not just that demons will be changed into angels at the end of time but that it has already happened. Khairi Buzani explained this to me when I reached his office in Dohuk, surrounded by houses painted in pastel colors with metal poles sticking out of their roofs, ready for when the next story would be built for the next generation. “After his rebellion, Azazael”—he carefully avoided the forbidden name, I noticed—“was punished but repented,” Khairi said. In seven thousand years of exile, Azazael had extinguished the fires of hell with his tears, and so he was restored to favor as the chief of all the angels. This gives the Yazidis a different view of the universe, one in which hell does not exist. Buzani told me more: “We have an idea about the One God which the heavenly religions do not have: evil and good both come from God. There are not two struggling powers that fight each other for dominance in the universe.” Far from worshiping the devil, the Yazidis believe that there is no such thing.

  They may possibly have been directly influenced by Hallaj’s followers. The radical preacher came to a cruel end: after backing a slave rebellion in southern Iraq, he was captured by the forces of the Abbasid caliph and cut into pieces. His devotees fled into the north and took refuge in the mountains there, not far from where Sheikh Adi would later preach and where the Yazidis now live. Their ideas could have filtered through to the ancestors of the Yazidis, either in the time of Sheikh Adi or even earlier, and been fitted into their religious life alongside the remnants of much older traditions and beliefs.

  The tradition of propitiating malevolent deities was a very old one in Iraq. The Nabatean Agriculture (mentioned in the last chapter) records a prayer, in use in ninth-century Iraq, that seems to show traces of Islamic influence but quickly reveals itself to be from quite a different tradition: “There is no god but Allah alone and there is no companion to him . . . all might, majesty and greatness belong to him . . . blessed art thou, lord of the Heaven and everything else . . . by my life, we ask you to have mercy on us. Amen. . . . While you are praying this prayer give a burnt offering to his idol consisting of old hides, grease, strips of leather and dead bats. Burn for him fourteen dead bats and an equal amount of rats. Then take their ashes and prostrate yourself on them in front of his idol.” The prayer was addressed to the god Saturn, the “lord of evil and sin and filth and dirt and poverty,” and intended to persuade him to leave the supplicants alone.

  The temple at Lalish. Photo by the author

  Saturn’s role in ancient Assyria was played by the god Nergal, who was identified as god of the fierce noontime sun, the plague, and the dead; lion-headed colossi guarded his temples. It may be significant that he took the form of a cockerel, which the sanjak somewhat resembles. In later centuries Mithraists set up lion-headed statues labeled “Deo Arimanio”—a reference to Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian spirit of evil, whom it seems the Mithras worshipers wanted to propitiate. Propitiation of evil, according to the first-century ad Greek historian Plutarch, took place in his time in Iran, and involved offerings of the intoxicating plant extract haoma mingled with the blood of a sacrificed wolf and poured out in a dark cave. Yohannan bar Penkaye, the seventh-century Christian writer who came from the Syrian-Turkish border c
lose to where some Yazidis still live today, said that people in his region worshiped the sun, the stars, and also Baalshamin and Baalzebub—the former being an ancient sky god, the latter being Lucifer.

  Whatever his origins, Melek Taoos was a constant companion as Taha drove me to Lalish: the peacock emblem, painted on doors and gateways, was visible everywhere as I entered the Yazidi town of Ain Sifni, not far from Lalish. The head of a bird was even carved into the top story of a block of apartments. There was a branch of an institution called the Lalish Cultural Center in this town. It was a simple place, with a good library and a small museum. In the library I met Ayad, one of a new generation of Yazidis, reading a magazine. He could read and write in four different languages and had a degree in political science. Like many of the Yazidi intellectuals I spoke with, he was fascinated by the history of his own religion. I was getting used to every Yazidi giving me a slightly different account, which was not surprising, given that they have no catechism or publicly available religious texts. Instead, every person tells the Yazidi story in a slightly different way, though there are themes that are common to every version.

  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 sanjaks, 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, col
lectively, 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.