The Yazidis: A Faith Persecuted for a Misreading

What is the Yazidi faith, and who are the Yazidis?

Imagine you have a new coworker who mentions, almost in passing, that she is Yazidi. Later you realise all you have ever heard is a news story from 2014 and an ugly rumour that Yazidis worship the devil. You want to understand her world properly.

The short answer: Yazidism is the monotheistic religion of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious community whose heartland is northern Iraq and who call themselves Ezidi. They worship one God, Xwede, who made the world and handed its daily running to seven holy beings led by Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel. You can only be born Yazidi, to two Yazidi parents.

There are three castes, each marrying only within itself: murids, the laity, and sheikhs and pirs, their hereditary guides. Population estimates range from two hundred thousand to a million, none based on a real count.

Most live in Iraq's Nineveh plains and Sinjar district, with communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria; the largest diaspora, in Germany, has grown from some forty thousand around 2000 to figures now given in the hundreds of thousands.

Yazidis are not Muslims, Christians or Zoroastrians, and no book sits at the center. The faith lives in hymns memorized by specialist reciters, duties owed to particular families, and one valley, Lalish, every Yazidi is expected to visit. Less a library, more a family recipe that lives only in the hands of those who cook it.

Even the name is argued over. Many Yazidis link Ezidi to Ezid, or Sultan Ezid, a divine figure of theirs, and some writers tie that to the Old Iranian yazata, a being worthy of worship.

Most Western scholars run it the other way. Christine Allison, author of the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the Yazidis, records the academic consensus as a derivation from the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya, who died in 683 and whose name is loathed across Shia Islam. Enemies did not invent the link: Yazidi tradition itself venerates Yazid ibn Muawiya as an incarnation of Sultan Ezid, so a genuine feature of the faith has been turned against it as an accusation.

Ethnicity is debated too. Most Iraqi Yazidis call themselves Kurds who kept the original Kurdish religion; many in Armenia and the diaspora say they are a separate people who speak Kurdish, and Armenia's post-Soviet censuses count Yezidis as distinct from Kurds. Neither view is fringe, and outsiders who pick a side usually serve an argument of their own.

Who is Melek Taus, and why is the Peacock Angel central to Yazidi belief?

If the devil rumour bothered you, here is the story it grew from, read from the inside.

Melek Taus, more accurately Tawusi Melek in Kurmanji, is chief of the seven holy beings, the Heptad, and the deputy through whom God governs the world. He is shown as a peacock and honored in cast bronze standards called sanjaks.

Commanded to bow before the newly made Adam, he refused, having been created to bow to God alone. Yazidis read that as the strongest proof of loyalty and strict monotheism, and God rewards him with authority over the world. In a widely recited version he then wept for seven thousand years, and his tears filled seven jars that put out the fires of hell.

Yazidis and their hymns reject any reading of him as evil or rebellious. Scholars call him ambiguous, since he allots blessing and misfortune as he sees fit, unquestioned, but that is not rebellion. He is a regent, not a rival, like a trusted steward running an estate for its owner, and praying to him is worship of one God.

The Heptad's members vary by hymn and region, normal for a faith carried in poetry. Most lists include Sheikh Adi, his companion Sheikh Hasan, and the four Mysteries: Shemsedin, bound to the sun, Fakhredin, Sejadin and Nasirdin. Some make Sheikh Adi one with Tawusi Melek and add Sheikh Obekr.

They are angels and historical men at once, twelfth and thirteenth-century holy people around Sheikh Adi whose descendants became today's sheikh families. An eternal being who also walked a particular valley in a particular century is the hardest idea for outsiders used to a clean split between God and history.

Qewwals carried the peacock standards, traditionally seven, of which only some survive, on tawusgeran circuits through the villages, collecting alms and bringing the shrine to those who could not reach it. Hardening twentieth-century borders shrank the circuits badly, cutting the Caucasus communities off from Lalish.

Why are Yazidis wrongly called devil worshippers?

If you have repeated that label without thinking, you are not alone. Knowing where it came from helps you set it down.

Muslim neighbors, then European travelers, mapped Tawusi Melek's refusal onto the Quranic Iblis, who refuses the same command and is cursed. Same scene, opposite verdicts: in the Quran, pride and damnation; for Yazidis, loyalty and authority over the world.

Two details hardened the mistake. Some Islamic lore called Iblis the peacock of the angels, an exact match to suspicious eyes. And Yazidis avoid saying Satan or words that sound like it, which outsiders read as fearful reverence rather than refusal to name.

The label was never harmless. Classed as devil worshippers rather than People of the Book, Yazidis had no protected status under Ottoman law until 1849, and enforcement after that was uneven, leaving them exposed to forced conversion, conscription and massacre.

If you were looking for the Western esoteric Devil, see The Devil Tarot Card Meaning: Upright, Reversed, Love and Career, a symbol with no connection to this community.

Two Arabic manuscripts did enormous damage. The Mishefa Res, or Black Book, and the Kiteba Cilwe, the Book of Revelation, surfaced in the Mosul manuscript trade around 1900 and were published in 1911 and 1913 as secret Yazidi scriptures. Specialists generally hold that non-Yazidis wrote them for European buyers with very clear expectations.

Some content does match oral tradition, and writings under those titles seem to have been known in the community earlier, so the labels are older than the fakes. They were quoted as proof for most of a century anyway.

In October 2014 the charge was revived with lethal intent. The fourth issue of the Islamic State's English-language magazine Dabiq ran an article titled The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour, arguing Yazidis were mushrikun, polytheists, not People of the Book, so their women could lawfully be enslaved. A centuries-old insult became a legal justification for genocide in a single article.

Yazidi organizations now correct the phrase wherever it appears, and careful English writing has mostly dropped it.

What do Yazidis believe about creation, the soul and reincarnation?

If you have ever wondered where the people you lost have gone, the Yazidi answer is a gentle one: souls return, in a new garment.

Yazidis hold that God made a white pearl containing everything that would exist, kept it for an age, then broke it open so the material world spilled out, to be arranged by the seven holy beings.

Souls do not go to eternal reward or punishment. They are reborn. The Yazidi phrase is kiras guhorin, changing the garment: the body is clothing the soul puts on and takes off across many lives. A soul is purified by its own conduct and by the holy beings' intercession, so there is no need for a permanent hell, and in most tellings no hell at all once Tawusi Melek's tears put it out. Rebirth is not described as punishment, and no fixed number of lives is given.

Every Yazidi is also tied to a personal sheikh and a personal pir, fixed by their own descent, not chosen, and takes a brother or sister of the hereafter, usually from a sheikh family, who performs rites at marriage and death. These bonds carry duties in life as well as at its end.

None of this sits in a catechism. It lives in the qewls, which disagree on details, such as the order and names in creation, in ways that would scandalize a religion with a central authority. Yazidis generally do not mind.

Reincarnation, the clearest Iranian element, sets the faith apart from its Abrahamic neighbors and has social effects: death is spoken of with less finality, and past massacres are sometimes discussed in terms of who has come back since.

Christine Allison and Eszter Spat, who both worked directly with Yazidi communities in Iraq, describe how much belief is carried in ordinary conversation rather than formal teaching. A child hears the creation story at a feast, in verse, from someone who assumes the rest is already known.

Where does Yazidism come from, and how does it relate to Zoroastrianism, Sufism and Christianity?

Have you heard that Yazidism is secretly Zoroastrian, or a form of Islam? The real story is more interesting.

Yazidism took its present shape in the Kurdish mountains between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, around Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a Sufi of Umayyad descent from the Bekaa valley in what is now Lebanon, who settled in the valley of Lalish and died there around 1162. Within a few generations his Sufi order, the Adawiyya, became something his teachers would not have recognized: a religion outside Islam, absorbing older western Iranian material and treating Sheikh Adi as a manifestation of the divine.

You can still see the layers. Sufi: sheikh, pir, faqir and khirqa came from Islamic mysticism and became hereditary offices and objects. Iranian: reincarnation and reverence for the sun and the purity of fire, water, earth and air. Christian-looking: infant baptism with spring water and shared blessed bread, most plausibly from centuries beside Assyrian and Armenian neighbors in the same mountains, not a shared origin.

The break hardened under his successors. Two generations on, the movement clashed with Mosul's ruler Badr al-Din Lulu, who had its leader Hasan ibn Adi killed in 1246. Sheikh Adi's tomb at Lalish was razed in a later battle, in 1414, and rebuilt.

Calling Yazidism Zoroastrian, as Kurdish nationalist writing sometimes does, fails both religions. Zoroastrianism has cosmic dualism of a good creator and a hostile principle, the Avesta, an ordained priesthood with a liturgical language, and individual judgment. Yazidism has none. They share a western Iranian inheritance, centuries and a mountain range apart.

The Islamic share is debated too. Kreyenbroek reads the Sufi material as a frame over older Iranian belief; others give the Adawiyya order more weight as the actual origin. Both accept the same timeline. The argument is about proportion, not about whether a twelfth-century Sufi sheikh sits at the root.

Yazidis date their religion far earlier than scholars do, and that claim gets used politically: Kurdish nationalists promoted the Zoroastrian reading because an ancient pre-Islamic Kurdish faith helps argue who held these mountains first, while the Caucasus favored a Babylonian-origins theory. Christine Allison notes these accounts track political climate more than evidence. Many Yazidis now resist that framing, most often citing the peshmerga withdrawal from Sinjar in August 2014.

What are the Yazidi sacred texts, and how is the religion actually passed down?

If you went looking for a Yazidi Bible to read, you would not find one, and that is the point.

Yazidi scripture is oral: several hundred qewls, religious hymns in Kurmanji, plus beyts, prayers and narrative chiroks, held in the memory of hereditary specialists called qewwals and recited to a frame drum and a flute. The qewwal families come from two Nineveh plain villages, Bashiqa and Bahzani, and the office passes from father to son.

The Black Book and the Book of Revelation, Arabic pamphlets sold to European collectors around 1900, still circulate in English as Yazidi scripture. They are not.

What a Yazidi knows depends on lineage and place. A faqir keeps rules a murid does not; a qewwal carries hymns most have never heard in full; villages a day's walk apart keep different versions, and nobody rules between them. With no seminary, weekly sermon or mission, knowledge comes through one's sheikh and pir, family, and the annual feasts.

The religion is spread across the community instead of stored in one place. That makes it tough against many things and fragile against one: the scattering of the families who hold the pieces.

Recording changed everything. A few qewls appeared in a Kurdish folklore anthology published in Moscow in 1978, and in 1979 two young Yazidi intellectuals, Khidir Sileman and Khalil Jindy, printed a collection in Baghdad that caused a serious argument in the community.

Philip Kreyenbroek, whose 1995 Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition is a standard reference, later published many hymns and narratives with Khalil Jindy Rashow, one of those two, in God and Sheikh Adi are Perfect (2005). The community was divided: print freezes the variation that let each qewwal pass on a living version, and hands outsiders material never meant for them.

Demographics settled it. Displacement, mass emigration to Germany and collapsing village life broke the chain in places, and young Yazidis in Germany now learn hymns from recordings, not a visiting qewwal.

For organized religion and priesthood as symbols, see The Hierophant Tarot Card Meaning: Upright, Reversed, Love and Career. The offices described here are real jobs held by real families.

What do Yazidis practice day to day, and why does everything lead to Lalish?

Living with a Yazidi family, you might barely notice daily practice: short, private and turned toward the sun.

Formal prayer is largely personal choice. Facing the sun at dawn, noon and sunset, as travelers recorded, is an ideal, not a universal habit; gestures include kissing the rounded collar of the sacred shirt. There is no congregational service.

The calendar matters more than the day. Yazidis keep a three-day fast in December, the fast of Ezid, followed by a feast. The new year falls on the first Wednesday of April in the Julian reckoning: Charshema Sor, Red Wednesday, when Tawusi Melek is said to have come down to earth, eggs are dyed and doorways decorated with red anemones.

Everything points to Lalish, north of Mosul: Sheikh Adi's tomb, the sacred springs and the shrines of the holy beings. Every Yazidi is expected to make the pilgrimage at least once. The seven-day autumn Feast of the Assembly gathers community, leadership and qewwals each year for sacrifice, processions with the sacred standards, shared meals and the bathing of ritual objects, while leaders handle community business. Think of a family reunion at the old house everyone is still connected to.

Lalish is entered barefoot. Visitors step over, never on, the shrine's threshold, a rule enforced gently and without exception, and olive oil lamps are lit along the walls at dusk.

Two sacred springs: Zamzam, rising in a cave beneath Sheikh Adi's sanctuary, and Kaniya Sipi, the White Spring, whose water baptizes infants (mor kirin) and washes Yazidis back after long absence. Spring water mixed with valley earth makes barat, small molded balls pilgrims take home for marriage and funeral rites. A custodian, the Baba Chawush, and a small staff live there.

After 2014 Lalish took on an undesigned role. Women and girls who escaped Islamic State captivity were received and ritually washed there, publicly and on purpose, so nobody could argue that rape or forced conversion had put a woman outside the religion. For a faith with no way to admit anyone at all, it was as close to a doctrinal change as the community has made in living memory.

What is the history of Yazidi persecution, from the firmans to the 2014 Sinjar genocide?

If you came here because of the 2014 news, this is the history behind it. It describes mass killing and sexual violence, so take it at your own pace.

Yazidis count persecutions in firmans, the Ottoman word for a royal decree, which in Yazidi usage means an attempt to wipe them out. The traditional count was seventy-two; the 2007 truck bombings near Sinjar became the seventy-third and the 2014 Islamic State assault the seventy-fourth, now the standard name for 2014, used by scholars too.

Without Ottoman legal protection until the mid-nineteenth century, attacking them cost little, and that century was especially violent: the Kurdish leaders Muhammad Pasha of Rawanduz and Bedir Khan Beg of Bohtan attacked Yazidi districts in 1832 and the 1840s, and the Ottoman official Omer Wehbi Pasha ran an early 1890s campaign that seized Lalish and pressed forced conversion and conscription.

Under the Baath government, Yazidis were registered as Arabs, moved off their land and concentrated into collective settlements in Sinjar in the 1970s, which is why they lived in dense clusters in 2014.

On 3 August 2014 the Islamic State took Sinjar. Men and older boys were shot in groups, and thousands of women and children were carried off. A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded in a June 2016 report that it was genocide. A household survey of displaced Yazidis later estimated about 9,900 people killed or kidnapped within a few days, roughly 2.5 percent of the area's Yazidi population.

The decade since has been a slow struggle over recognition and return. Mass graves around Sinjar were documented from 2015, and the first exhumations began at the village of Kocho in 2019.

The UN investigative team UNITAD, set up under Security Council resolution 2379 of September 2017 to gather evidence, saw its mandate end on 17 September 2024 at Iraq's request, with an unresolved argument over who could access its archive.

The first genocide conviction anywhere for these crimes came from a court in Frankfurt, Germany, in November 2021, which sentenced an Iraqi man over the death of a five-year-old Yazidi girl he had chained outside in the sun. Germany's Bundestag recognized the killings as genocide in January 2023. Iraq passed the Yazidi Female Survivors Law in 2021, promising reparations, land and pensions, and implementation has been slow enough that survivors have organized publicly to demand it.

Nadia Murad, who escaped captivity in 2014, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.

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