Survival Among The Kurds

First published in 1993. The Yezidis are a community of around 200,000 Kurds who possess their own religion, quite distinct from Islam, which most other Kurds profess, and from the Christian and Jewish faiths. The Yezidis live in the northern parts of Iraq and Syria, in eastern Turkey, in Germany and in the ex-Soviet republics of Armenia and Georgia. (In Armenia the Yezidis, long classified as Kurds, are now recognized as a separate minority group and the term 'Kurd' is applied only to Moslem Kurds.) This book stems from a conversation with the Yezidi priest of the village who remarked that now the children were learning to read and write they were asking him questions about the Yezidi scriptures and the history of the community. Lacking any written material, he could only repeat to them the oral traditions he had himself learned as a child.

John S. Guest

Antecedents; Sheikh Adi and his order; the Yezidi religion; early encounters with the outside world; prisoners on a sinking ship; English-speaking missionaries and explorers; Rassam and Layard; the tribulations of Mir Hussein Beg; Abdul Hamid and the Yezidis; the publication of the sacred books; brother and sister; the epoch of Mayan Khatun; the Yezidis in transcaucasia. Appendix: the Yezidi sacred books and Sheikh Adi's hymn; texts of the Yezidi letters to the Grand Vizier and Sir Stratford Canning; an interview with Yezidi religious leaders.