Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (13 page)

Sheikh Adi is not the figure that most Yazidis will mention, though, when asked what their religion is all about. Nor is it his picture that hangs on their walls. He was merely the earthly manifestation of Melek Taoos, who is the true ruler of this world, God’s lieutenant in the knowable universe, and the closest figure to God that our limited human minds can grasp. Since the Yazidis’ view of God is a very abstract one—nothing can be said of God with any certainty, they say, except that he exists—it is Melek Taoos who is the focus of their cult. In former centuries seven bronze images of Melek Taoos (called
sanjak
s) were ceremoniously carried around Yazidi villages for people to revere. The missionary Badger described the
sanjak
as follows: “The figure is that of a bird, more resembling a cock than any other fowl . . . fixed on the top of a candlestick, around which are two lamps, placed one above the other, and each containing seven burners, the upper being somewhat larger than the lower.” Five of the
sanjak
s have been lost; two survive. Yazidis also believe that Melek Taoos comes down to earth every year on a day called Charsema Sor, “Red Wednesday,” to initiate the new year. This festival is marked by the painting of eggs, just like the Christian Easter. The Yazidis regard the egg as symbolizing the creation of the world, which in their creation myth was once liquid and (like a cooked egg) became solid, and which was colorless until Melek Taoos laid his peacock feathers on it, bestowing their blue and green shades to its seas and forests.

An Armenian Yazidi girl kisses a representation of the Peacock Angel, Melek Taoos. Melek Taoos is also called Iblis, or Azazael, but is thought by the Yazidis to be good rather than evil. AFP/Getty Images

More controversially, Melek Taoos is also identified by the Yazidis with Azazael or Iblis, which in the Muslim tradition (and the Jewish and Christian ones, for that matter) are names for the greatest of the angels, who rebelled against God and was cast down into hell—in short, the devil. The peacock has similar associations. The Druze in Lebanon believe that it was the peacock, not the serpent, that was the tempter in the Garden of Eden. Some Zoroastrians in Iran believed that the peacock was the one good thing that the devil made, as a way of showing that he had the power to do good if he so chose.

The Yazidis, however, will never call the Peacock Angel by the name Satan (Sheitan in Arabic), for it is a word that is prohibited to them with the sternest and most unbending taboo. In the nineteenth century the Yazidis wrote a letter to the Ottoman authorities describing a terrible practice that they had to carry out on hearing the name of Satan: to kill the person who said the name, and then kill themselves for hearing it. After the Iraq War the sole Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament did not go quite so far when he heard the prime minister curse Satan at the beginning of his speeches. But he did make a stir when he rose to object to the practice, or rather specifically to the fact that other parliamentarians gave him accusing looks every time the curse was said. The accusing looks came because those other parliamentarians considered him a devil worshiper.

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.”

—————

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 close 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.