Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (46 page)

Abu Shihab was no fan of America and Britain’s foreign policy. They had failed, as he saw it, to solve his country’s problems—especially those of his own region, Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq. But he wanted me to know how much he appreciated the help he had gotten from the United States since his arrival. “If it wasn’t for America, my son would be dead,” he said, pointing to one of his teenage sons, who promptly ducked out of sight. This son, and one of Abu Shihab’s daughters, had a kidney condition that required frequent injections of a kind that the family could never afford. In Syria, where he had first taken refuge after leaving Iraq, the state does not pay for this kind of medical care, and Abu Shihab’s family were poor even by Middle Eastern standards. In Sinjar, his chances of securing adequate medical care for his sick children would have been even lower. He told me that there was only a single ten-bed hospital in the area, which is home to half a million people. Abu Shihab put his hand up to his black-dyed hair. “It is on my head!” he said, meaning that he acknowledged the debt he owed his adopted nation. “We never fought against any other country for America, and we aren’t from here, but we get health care for free because of people’s humanity. In Iraq we are people of the country, and we get nothing.”

Their relations with their neighbors, in this largely white working-class suburb, seemed good (a neighbor came in while I was there, and explained to me that he wished he could do something to help the Yazidis in Iraq, because from what he had learned from Abu Shihab, their lives sounded terrible). The one thing that upset the family about American culture was the way their religion was represented. Abu Shihab said he had heard a CNN reporter describe the Yazidis as “the most hideous religion in the world.” I found this hard to believe, but he was very sure he had heard it, and he said he hoped that if I wrote my book, then at least nobody would say it again. Indeed, I came away impressed by the family’s hospitality, the cleanliness of their home (a well-known characteristic of both Yazidi and Mandaean households in Iraq), and the closeness between generations. This being my first time in a Yazidi home, I was also struck by how little evidence there was of their religion. There were two signs of it: a picture of Lalish—an artist’s impression rather than a photograph—standing on a sideboard, and, of course, the obligatory peacock image.

The other pictures in the living room were all of the family—especially of its youngest member, Abu Shihab’s three-year-old daughter, Naalin. She provided relief during some of our more depressing conversations, usually by lying upside down on the sofa with her legs in the air, or curling her hands like binoculars and peering at us through them. She was particularly fond of her grandparents, Mirza explained, and they treated her with a great deal of affection. I wondered what life would be like for her when she grew up—specifically, when she was old enough to get married. Yazidi rules on marriage are complicated and very strict. Not only must a Yazidi woman marry a Yazidi man, but he must be from the right caste and the right clan. Some Iraqi families from the smallest caste (the middle-ranking
pir
caste) have to find husbands or wives in other countries. An Iraqi man might find a wife in the Yazidi community in Russia, for example. To ensure that marriage follows these rules, some families force their children to marry when they are only fifteen or sixteen. Abu Shihab’s family were
murid
s, the lowest caste. In America there might be a handful of suitable men for Naalin. In a religion that otherwise made few demands of its followers, this was one they could not disobey.

The family wanted to show me the local sights, so we visited Niagara Falls, and they put a CD of Yazidi music into the car stereo. The singer, Abu Shihab told me, was called Khidr Faqir. He had been gifted with musical talent suddenly. When he was a young man in the fields of Sinjar, the Yazidi saint Khidr Elias had appeared to him in a dream. When he awoke, he could sing and play the lute (the
baghlama
, which resembles a guitar) better than any Yazidi alive. Khidr Elias had risen in Abu Shihab’s eyes when he refused to perform wearing in Kurdish clothes. “He would only wear Yazidi clothes,” said Abu Shihab. Both he and Mirza were keen to stress the Yazidi identity as something separate from the Kurdish one, and derided me for having spent time in Iraq with pro-Kurdish Yazidis.

This family of Yazidis was quite alone in Buffalo, a thousand miles from their nearest coreligionists, who lived in Lincoln, Nebraska. It seemed though that their desire to be themselves, to hold on to their traditions, remained strong. The family had attended a Christian church when they first arrived in America, Abu Shihab told me. The people at the church had helped them when they were new there, and they still felt a bond of friendship with them. “But we did not give up our own beliefs,” he added with emphasis. Internet telephone services such as Skype allowed dispersed Yazidis to remain linked to each other. Virtual groups had sprung up across the world, opening new avenues to find potential marriage partners for their children. And yet a major challenge for Yazidis in America remains: as with the Druze, very few of them know the theology of their religion. There was a plan, his son Shihab said, to set up a community center in Nebraska where people could meet to play cards and learn the basics of the religion. “The problem is that the older generation, like my dad, are closed-minded. He knows things about the religion but he won’t tell us. It’s only Sheikh Mirza who will tell us things.” His wife chipped in, “You probably know more about our religion than we do.” The Yazidis are at a loss when they have to explain their beliefs to others or take part in theological debate.

Nor do they have a counterpart in American society. Middle Eastern Christians have an instant bond with American Christians, and Muslim immigrants now can easily find communities of American Muslims who will give them some kind of practical assistance and a place to worship. The Yazidis are alone—except, that is, for Amaru Mark Pinkham, the grand prior of the International Order of Gnostic Templars. The grand prior told me that he had been meditating in South America, experimenting with new ways to experience reality, when he suddenly found himself surrounded by a flock of peacocks. Puzzled by the vision, he later asked his friends about it, and one of them pointed him toward the Yazidis. To his series Secrets of the Knights Templar (both books and online videos) he added a new and final episode:
Mysteries of the Peacock Angel
. On its website, his order describes itself as “dedicated to the revival of Gnostic Wisdom and the Goddess Tradition of the Original Templars.” The organization, which Grand Prior Pinkham (pictured on the website along with his wife, both wearing very tall red-and-white miters) traces back to John the Baptist via Mary Magdalene and the Knights Templar, had thirty to forty members when I spoke to him in 2013. But he hoped that “Jedi Templar” training, offered from 2014 onward, would raise its numbers.

I was skeptical of his genuine historical continuity with John the Baptist, but his help was welcomed by the Yazidis—though they could not allow Pinkham himself to join their religion. That, anyway, was what the Yazidis of Lincoln told me when I visited them in 2013. Having heard from Abu Shihab and Sheikh Mirza that there was a much larger community in Nebraska, I was keen to find out how one of Iraq’s esoteric faiths was surviving in middle America. When I arrived at Lincoln’s little airport, a group of twenty Yazidis was waiting to greet me—Iraqi hospitality in the Cornhusker State. Many were recent arrivals and had reached Lincoln courtesy of the federal refugee resettlement program.

Basim, a Yazidi in Lincoln, Nebraska, shows his reverence for Melek Taoos by decorating his living room with the image and feathers of a peacock. Photo by the author

Basim, who had been there several years, was my host for the visit and proved to be something of a community organizer. He arranged for six Yazidis to meet me at a café in downtown Lincoln. One of them was a
pir,
and one of the others in the group used him as an example of how they have had to change their customs. “He is a
pir,
and back home we would normally kiss his hand when we meet him. But we don’t do that here.” He looked at the bare wooden floor and chic-austere interior of the café, whose other customers were all wearing headphones and staring at their iPads. “People would think it was odd.” Most of these men had arrived in the past three years. One who had been in the country longer than that and had attended high school in Lincoln experienced his culture shock early. “Seeing boys and girls kissing by the lockers,” he said, “that was hard for me to accept. And I had never seen a big city before.” Another, a recent arrival, had been shocked by something else. “The assault rifles that they sell openly in the shops here,” he gasped. “In Baghdad you would never find guns like that for sale!”

They worried that their community would not keep up the Yazidi religion for long. “We have no money for our own festivals,” said Basim. “So the Fourth of July will end up more important than the Yazidi New Year, because everyone else celebrates that. Yazidis are doing Christmas and not Charsema Sor.” One sheikh, he added, still lit 366 candles at home for religious festivals, and Basim himself organized an occasional quiz about the religion, testing Yazidis on their knowledge of Yazidi lore. But they were all hampered by not knowing enough. “If my children ask what is a Yazidi,” lamented one of them, “I can’t tell them.” And the
pir
told me that he faced a particularly difficult challenge. He was meant to marry within his specific subcaste, which has now almost died out. “In my home city there were fifteen thousand Yazidis,” he said, “but I could not marry a single one of them.”

I asked if they had trouble explaining their religion to people in America, but the response was that there was not much interest in hearing about it. “People don’t want to ask open-ended questions. They just ask, ‘Are you Muslim?’ There was some trouble after 9/11 because people thought we were Muslims.” As with Abu Shihab, their sentiment toward America was gratitude, with their complaints mostly directed at governments back in the Middle East. They talked about a Jordanian customs official who had laughed at and thrown away the sacred earth from Lalish that one family tried to take with them on the plane. They talked about Turkey, where Yazidis still (they said) had to declare themselves Muslims, and where rocks could still be seen on which Yazidis who had refused to convert during the massacres of 1917 had been beheaded. They were concerned at news from Kurdistan, where rioters had burned a Yazidi-owned alcohol shop a few months before (they showed me the video). They had no nostalgia for the Middle East. “There are more rights for prisoners here than for free men there,” the young man who had gone to high school in America said. “I don’t suppose any country treats immigrants better. I just have to explain to new arrivals that it’s normal for people not to greet you here.” People in American small towns, especially in the midwestern areas, are often considered unusually friendly, but to these Yazidi villagers they seemed cold and distant.

—————

FLEEING THE DECLINE
and diminution that their communities are suffering in their homelands, these immigrants were for the most part thriving in the United States, putting up new places of worship and increasing in confidence. Christians in Syria live fearfully in the shadow of what happened to their co-religionists in Iraq. But in Detroit Father Shalhoub is putting the finishing touches on another set of spectacular icons. The churches of Baghdad are emptying, but in Boston, an Iraqi nun who acted as chaplain to Boston University has now founded a new religious order for women in that American city. In London Nadia Gattan, married to a British man, is teaching her children about their Iraqi heritage, and Shahin is preparing the water that Zoroastrian children can spray over each other to celebrate the summer solstice, just as their Persian ancestors did for Tirghan every year.

—————

I BEGAN THIS BOOK
with some observations on why minorities are leaving the Middle East. After spending four years meeting them and reading their history, I care about them more than ever. So what can be done? It is the people of the Middle East who most of all must stitch together their frayed communities. A better understanding of history may give them something in which all, regardless of religion, can share a common pride. I was struck by something that a devout Muslim friend of mine from Iraq said after she had visited the British Museum: “It was amazing to discover that Babylon had an even greater history than Egypt, that it was the cradle of civilizations; I had never understood what that meant. Hearing the Epic of Gilgamesh and realizing that a massive part of my heritage was in the British Museum gave me more than Saddam to relate to.” Best of all, a knowledge of history can help us all—wherever we are—to see that any civilization, whether Roman or Arab or British or America, is at its most successful where it is most open to others and the ideas of others.