Who are the Y azidis?ByIshaan TharoorAugust 7 at 1:36 PMYazidi women who fled the violence in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, take shelter in a school in the Kurdish city of Dohuk (Safin Hamed/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images) It's tragic that the world pays attention to largely forgotten communiti es only in their moments of greatest peril. This week, we've watched as tens of
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Despite its connections to Islam, the faith remains distinctly apart. It was one
of the non-Abrahamic creeds left in the Middle East, drawing on various pre-
Islamic and Persian traditions. Yazidis believe in a form of reincarnation and
adhere to a strict caste system. Yazidism borrows from Zoroastrianism, whichheld sway in what's now Iran and its environs before the advent of Islam, and
even the mysteries of Mithraism, a quasi-monotheistic religion that was
popular for centuries in the Roman Empire, particularly among soldiers. Not
unlike the rituals of India's Parsis — latter-day Zoroastrians— Yazidis light
candles in religious ceremonies as a sign of the triumph of light over darkness.
Yazidis believe in one God who is represented by seven angels. According to Yazidi lore, one of the angels, Malak Tawous, was sent to Earth after refusing
to bow to Adam, explains the Economist. Represented in peacock form, he is
considered neither wholly good nor evil by Yazidis, but Muslim outsiders
know him as "shaytan," or Satan. The Islamic State has justified its slaughter
of Yazidis on the basis of the long-standing slur that they are "devil-
worshipers."
Bobby Ghosh, former Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief, writes that his
Sunni and Shiite colleagues referred to Yazidis as devil-worshipers "as a joke,
even a term of endearment." But the Islamic State "is taking the false claim of
satanism far too seriously."
Well before the current outrages— which have targeted other religious
minorities in Iraq as well— the sect suffered a long history of persecution,
caught amid the overlapping ambitions of empires and later the emergence of
fractious Arab states. The Yazidi member in the Iraqi parliament referenced
"72 massacres" in her people's history, ranging from the rampages of
conquering Mongols to the zealous purges of the Ottomans, who at various