Yazidis history
L'archange yezidi Taous Malek. CC BY-SA 3.0 In our Human rights broadcast we wanted to take some time to talk about the migrants and refugees that left their home and country, looking for better life, and safeness for the families and told you the story of the refugee community that arrived in august in Camp Serres… The Yezidis Community
We, in Serres are hosting a very special refugee community from Northern Iraq: the Yezidis, most known in the rest of the world as sectarian community whICH worshipped Satan.
This community has been persecuted for decades for their astonishing beliefs and recently attacked by ISIS in their main city: Singal, the 3rd of august 2014. 35 000 of them run away to the mountains of Singal and stayed there for 7 seven days without food or water.
We know there are between 100 000 and 800 000 Yezidis in the world, it is quite hard to estimate because they do not really claim their religion to the world these days. But their population is one of the most ancient we have, appeared more then 4 000 years ago. They mainly were located in the Irakian Kurdistan, but you can also find them in Syria, Turquia, Armenia and Georgia.
As for Europe, the main community is in Germany, which gathered 40 000 Yezidis so far. And maybe more in the years to come if you take into consideration 90% of camp Serres has for ultimate goal to go build a new life in Germany.
But anyway, lets go back to the History of this community…
We, volunteers of Praxis, have met them, talk to them everyday for the past 2 months and we believed their culture and religion is very different from what the world seems to know about them, at least from the ones who actually already have heard of them before.
The first time I talk about their beliefs with them was because I just had made some tea and one of them did not want to drink some because he was fasting, when on the other hand another boy was eating all the cookies we had…
They both told me they were fasting but they choose how long and how many days according to some rules we could not understand with my very limited Kurmanci and their approximate mixt English/greek.
From our first talk we understood
- That they have one god that they compare to Muslims and Christian andJewish gods
- They also have 7 angels and the main one is often represented as a peacock angel called Malek Taaus.
- They believed they come from Adam but they don’t believe in Eve,
- They cannot wear blue clothes or eat cabbage.
- They cannot marry outside of the Yezidis community but in the meantime its not completely forbidden, but if you do you are not considered Yezidis anymore if you do it.
- Which also led to the fact that You cannot convert to Yezidis, you have to be born Yezidis
- They don’t believe in Hell, because the main angel, who detrayed god, cry for 40 000 years and with his tears he flooded Hell
- They believed in rebirth, and as it is a community made of different casts, the better they did in their previous life the higher they get in the next one.
After this talk, their religion was even more mysterious and also they are supposed to an older religion than Christianity or Judaïsm but they seems to have taken a lot from them.
After some more research we discovered that
According to Yezidi myth, God created seven angelic beings, the chief of whom was named Tawus Malik, the Peacock Angel. Tawus Malik, like Lucifer in Jewish and Christian belief, rebelled against God. However, in Yezidism, when God cast Tawus into the fire because of this rebellion, Tawus spent 40,000 years weeping. His tears put out the flames of hell and demonstrated his repentance. Reconciling with God, Tawus was placed in charge of the daily affairs of the world.
As God’s underboss, Tawus contains both good and evil, light and darkness. It is this relationship with Tawus, whom Christians, Jews and Muslims identify with Lucifer that has led to the accusations that Yezidis worship the devil.
We though it was important to have a first overview of this community that is both a religion and a culture that could be threatened to disappeared into the culture and religions of their hosted countries.
A text by Pauline C. and Charlotte S.
