[The Yezidis] have no forms of prayer, and it is shocking to any Christian mind to hear them allow with the utmost indifference that they never pray. I have frequently urged upon them the duty of acknowledging their dependence on God on the ground of common gratitude, natural instinct, and what they admit to be due to any earthly benefactor to whom they look for help, or from whom they had received any benefits. Their only answer has been: “Such is our way; as our forefathers did before us even as do we”.Footnote 1
These are the words of the Reverend George Percy Badger, a missionary of the Anglican church, who travelled around what today constitutes the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in the mid-nineteenth century. As a man of God, he was dismayed to observe that Yezidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority he was among the first Westerners to describe, did not pray to God. Though on the preceding pages Badger himself admits that Yezidis possess a number of hymns “handed down traditionally among the Kawwâls, who may be regarded as the sacred musicians and hierophants of the sect … The hymns are chanted by the Kawwâls at their principal festivals to the sound of flutes and tambourines”,Footnote 2 he did not deem this sufficient to make up for what he perceived as a lack of “personal and direct form of communication between believer and the divine”.Footnote 3 Badger’s observations and criticism were echoed by other travellers in the region, for example Empson, who wrote in 1928:
There is no order of prayer or command to pray in their holy books,Footnote 4 and as they believe that Melak Tâ’ûs is sufficiently powerful to save them, Yezîdîs are never seen at prayer, which they regard as a superfluous form of worship. Actual worship entirely consists of the hymns sung by the Qauwâls and the religious rites practised by pilgrims at festivals.Footnote 5
A more nuanced picture emerges reading the works of two later travellers, who spent considerable time among Yezidis in the mid-twentieth century (driven by academic curiosity rather than missionary zeal). Lady Drower, who is best known for her work on the Mandaeans of southern Iraq, spent some time among Yezidis during the Second World War, in the Yezidi village of Baʿshîqe near Mosul. In her book, The Peacock Angel, she reports a discussion she had on prayers with a qewwal, or “reciter” of sacred texts, whose role it is to memorize sacred texts and perform them on ritual occasions to the accompaniment of the two sacred instruments, the flute and the tambourine:
As for prayer, he told me that five prayers daily are ordered for the pious Yazidi, one at dawn, one at sunset. Each time the worshipper must face the sun. Before praying, hands and face should be washed; indeed, before all worship the Yazidi should wash himself, and before any feast the body should be cleansed completely in either hot or cold water and white garments should be put on. Prayer is necessary before eating. Before and at the festivals, he said, there are special prayers.Footnote 6
The reference to “pious” Yezidis, as well as to prayer before mealsFootnote 7 indicates that qewwal may be talking about the practice expected from (the very few) men acknowledged as “religious experts” (which among Yezidis includes not just knowledge of religion but also adherence to its prescription) and those (usually elderly) people who are known to have devoted themselves to religion,Footnote 8 and not the everyday practice of common Yezidis. Clearly, the qewwal here is describing the “ideal”, not the everyday reality. It must also be added that the only people Lady Drower describes in her book as regularly performing prayers are, as she refers to them, the “nuns” or “white ladies” of Lalish, a special group of women living a celibate life in the holy valley of Lalish and serving the Central Sanctuary and its pilgrims.
The account of Roger Lescot, a French orientalist who was perhaps the first to carry out field research in the modern sense among the Yezidis of Sinjar, is the nearest to my own field experiences as regards common Yezidis and daily prayer. Though he displayed little interest in Yezidi religion (seeing it as a degenerate form of Islam), he devoted a few lines to prayer in his book. According to him Yezidis pray at dawn and dusk, as well as at the rising and setting of the moon.Footnote 9 However, his description makes it clear that what is referred to here is very different from the formal, verbally memorized prayers of Christianity, but rather it is a short and personal supplication for protection. As he says, after washing their hands and faces, Yezidis face the star (i.e. sun or moon), cross their arms over their chest and:
l’on prononce des invocations du genre de cesses-ci:
«O Şê Şims,Footnote 10 protège-nous contre le Malheur et l’adversité!
Seigneur, sois bienfaisant pour ta nation!
Seigneur, fais prospérer ta nation!
Seigneur, protège nos enfants!
Seigneur, protège nos troupeaux!
Seigneur, notre témoignage est le nom de Tawûsê Melek!»Footnote 11
Lescot adds, in a footnoteFootnote 12 that such supplications “sont soumises à la libre invention de chacun”, adding that all the Yezidi prayers that he collected or read in published form differed from one another.
The publication of Yezidi sacred texts and the practice of prayer
The late twentieth century brought radical changes in the perception of and academic knowledge about Yezidism. A literate Yezidi middle-class (both in Northern Iraq and in the Western, primarily German, diaspora) and Yezidi sacred texts appeared for the first time in print, first in Kurdish, then in English translation.Footnote 13 These publications provided a new image of Yezidi religious oral tradition, making it clear that Yezidis had a rich inheritance of sacred texts, in the forms of both poems and prose. Prose narratives of Yezidi myth are transmitted in the form of storylines, with the wording changing from performance to performance.Footnote 14 The poems are, at least theoretically, transmitted verbatim. Yezidis use a number of terms to denote such poems. The most important poems are usually referred to as qewls (translated into English as “hymns”) and beyts,Footnote 15 but some poems known under the title dua or “prayer” are included among the most highly esteemed sacred texts, for example the Morning Prayer and the Evening Prayer, which should, ideally, be recited every dawn and sunset by the believer.Footnote 16
Scholarly publications (by Yezidis and non-Yezidis), religious experts, as well as “ordinary” Yezidis, all agree that these orally transmitted sacred poems, with their difficult, archaic language and many stanzasFootnote 17 are only known to and recited by a small number of religious experts. Such experts have a high standing in Yezidi society. In the literature on Yezidis, the experts most often mentioned are the qewwals or “reciters”. Only the son of a qewwal can become a qewwal, and all qewwals come from the twin villages of Baʿshîqe – Beḥzanî, near Mosul. From here, qewwals used to set out from time to time, travelling far and wide to visit all the far-flung Yezidi communities of the Ottoman Empire (and even the Caucasus). Beside the qewwals, there are also other experts on oral sacred texts, variously referred to as qewlbêj (“who says qewls”) and ʿalemdar Footnote 18 (“a person who possesses knowledge”). Some of these come from the caste of sheikhs and pîrs,Footnote 19 who are, at least theoretically, supposed to know some texts in order to perform their religious duties.Footnote 20 There are also some commoners or murîds who become well-established experts. In the region of Sinjar, near the Iraqi–Syrian border,Footnote 21 the class of feqîrs is known for having produced many ʿalemdars.Footnote 22 Feqîrs (or “poor ones”), are the Yezidi “ascetics” living a piouslife, who constitute a special (and hard to define) group among Yezidis. Historical sources indicate that in the past any Yezidi could have chosen the path of piety and asceticism, and become a feqîr.Footnote 23 However, these days, only a man born into a feqîr lineage can become a feqîrand put on the sacred black shirt of the feqîrs, the khirqe.Footnote 24 Though a man born into a lineage of feqîrs is under no obligation to become a “feqîr of the khirqe” (a true ascetic), relative to the rest of the community, many descendants of feqîr families have, by tradition, at least a scattering of religious knowledge and some limited familiarity with the sacred texts. In the Sinjar Region the majority of the esteemed experts of sacred texts come from feqîr lineages.
The question of regular prayer among “ordinary” Yezidis, however, remains a debated topic. Based on her fieldwork observations in the mid-1990s as well as the extant literature, Christine Allison writes: “the form of prayer (word or gesture) and even the time of day when prayer is made, often seems a matter of great variation, and perhaps of individual choice”.Footnote 25 Philip Kreyenbroek, who did pioneering work in drawing the attention of the Western scholarly world to the (hitherto unknown) existence of Yezidi sacred texts, translating and publishing some of these texts in English, and starting the academic study of Yezidism as an oral religion, states: “Although … prayers constitute a separate genre of religious texts, verbal worship appears to be less deeply institutionalized and regulated than in many other religions…. It seems safe to say, however, that many Yezidis feel that it is good to pray, ideally at sunrise, noon and sunset, but that this is more honoured in the breach than the observance”.Footnote 26 Elsewhere he adds: “Individual prayer does not play as great a role in the lives of modern Yezidis as it does in many other religions. Even observant Yezidis tend to look on prayer as a thing of the past…. Many people call upon God and the Sacred Beings in more informal ways, e.g. when embarking on any undertaking, such as a journey, or when thinking of dear ones who are far away”.Footnote 27
Some Yezidi authors writing about Yezidism tend to idealize Yezidi religious practice and strive to create the impression that Yezidis pray regularly, usually three or five times a day,Footnote 28 probably in order to make Yezidi religious practice appear equal (or at least not inferior) to Islamic and Christian practice in the eyes of outsiders. Other Yezidi writers, writing about Yezidi religion and customs, mention prayer as a basic fact of daily life without any further elaboration (skipping the question of whether Yezidis pray regularly or whether they recite the long, complicated texts known under the title of dua or prayer), concentrating instead on questions like the connection between Yezidi prayer and sunworship or the (alleged) Mithraism of ancient Iranians.Footnote 29 Journalists visiting the Yezidis (especially since the Sinjar massacre) receive similar information from their minders and the (few English-speaking) representatives of the Yezidi middle-class they meet. As a result, they tend to reproduce this idealized image of Yezidis praying three or five times a day in their articles.Footnote 30
Yezidis I have spoken to during my field research usually claimed that one should pray twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. There are indeed two prayers included among the published text called Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, mentioned above. Prayers under such titles are also included in the curriculum taught to Yezidi children at Yezidi schools, where they learn the “canonized” form of these texts from their textbook. (It must be mentioned, however, that the texts published in the Yezidi schoolbooks differ from those published in the collections of Philip Kreyenbroek.) However, practice, as usual, differs from the ideal. The majority of Yezidis I have met in the Kurdistan Region do not say their prayers, though they are aware that ideally they should. Most people are ready to admit that they do not know the text of the prayers. Elderly people, especially women, often pray – however, these prayers have little to do with the long, formal prayers and hymns recited by religious experts, which are printed in various publications.
This discrepancy between ideal and actual practice was well demonstrated by a family I established close ties with. During one of my early visits, when the topic of prayer came up, members of the family claimed that “yes, of course, we all pray in the morning, after getting up and washing our hands and faces”. However, when I expressed a wish to record the prayer, it soon turned out that “all” means the two elderly grandmothers of the family, but none of the younger generations. When I convinced the old ladies, with some difficulty, to recite these prayers for me, they turned out to be short supplications, in their own words, calling on God and the holy beings for the protection and wellbeing of their family members, rather than formal prayers resembling the published versions of the Morning Prayer. One prayer ran like this: “Oh God, protect us; Oh Sheikh Shems,Footnote 31 protect us from the troubles and tribulation of the world, and from the tribe of the tariqat (i.e. Muslims).Footnote 32 Give us happiness and send good luck (or good destiny) to our children, help us and our children”. The other grandmother recited the following: “Oh Sheikh Shems, take care of the destiny of the community of the Angels; and provide good luck (destiny) to our neighbours and to those near to us, and after that to us”. Aware that her words did not resemble the much longer texts of formal prayers, this second grandmother later added that she “used to know the Morning Prayer”, but had forgotten it. She also mentioned that her father knew many prayers (the superior religious knowledge of the previous generations is a recurrent motif), but she had forgotten them. The prayers or supplications recited by these two grandmothers not only differed from each other, but their text was in no way related to the Morning Prayer published in various sources (which themselves also differ considerably from each other). On the other hand, in their nature, if not in their exact wording, these supplications show a great similarity to the prayers described by Lescot, indicating that even nearly a century ago prayer was understood by many Yezidis as an invocation for divine help, rather than reciting long texts full of Arabic terms and obscure references to religious concepts little understood by common Yezidis.
Between 2002 and 2013 my fieldwork concentrated on the Yezidis living in the Kurdistan Region or on its borders (in the disputed Sheikhan district). Following the attack of the Islamic State on the Sinjar Region in August 2014 and the subsequent displacement of most of the Sinjari Yezidi community to the Kurdistan Region, I was able to carry out fieldwork among Sinjari Yezidis as well. Though Sinjaris, who live in an isolated and impoverished region far from urban centres, are considered far more devoted to traditional religious practices than other Yezidis, and the number of religious experts of sacred texts is considerably higher there than in the Kurdistan Region, their attitude towards prayer did not significantly differ from that of their brethren living east of the Tigris. Many Sinjari refugees living in the Kurdistan Region, either in IDP (internally displaced person) camps or in local Yezidi villages, expressed the opinion that people should say the Morning and Evening Prayers – but few actually did so. Those who did recite these prayers were men who held high positions in society either as religious experts or as heads of family lineages of feqîrs (traditionally associated with piety). Among the “common masses”, some acknowledged not knowing any prayers, while others claimed that they knew parts of the text (of the prayers) but did not actually perform them. Others again said: “I used to know the text, but since the attack of the Islamic State, I have forgotten it, my head is so confused now”. There were also some who said that they knew only bits and pieces from the prayers, but planned to learn more later on. Finally, there were many who used their own words to briefly invoke divine help, just as the old ladies mentioned above, either in the morning or when visiting holy places.
Incantation-prayers
In the past few decades, as scholarly interest in Yezidi religious textual traditions grew, a number of prayers have been translated into English and published, along with other sacred texts in various academic collections. There is, however, a sub-genre of prayers, one which was not included in these publications on Yezidi religious texts or in Yezidi schoolbooks for religious education.Footnote 33 Although Yezidis refer to these texts as “prayers” (dua), the language and function of these prayers differ from such prayers as Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer or most other prayers performed regularly or on ritual occasions (such as pilgrimage to Lalish, holidays or funerals/wakes, for example). Referred to as “healing prayers” by Omarkhali in her categorization of prayers according to their content,Footnote 34 they function as verbal charms or incantations used for healing various physical ailments or warding off evil attacks, be it the Evil Eye, snakes and scorpions, or the pernicious influence of the new moon. Their text is short (especially when compared to other prayers), consisting usually only of a few lines. Furthermore, they contain some unusual imagery (not directly connected with Yezidi mythology or religious language), as well as nonsensical words, usually known to students of magical texts as voces magicae, which contribute to the power of charms through “realizing significant sound patterns”.Footnote 35 Unlike other Yezidi prayers and other sacred texts in general, these are not performed on specific ritual occasions (such as holy days or funerals/wakes, etc.), but whenever the contingency arises for supernatural help regarding a concrete problem. Furthermore, the oral performance of such “prayers” is often accompanied by various non-verbal ritual gestures, without which they would not be efficacious. Though referred to as prayers, they would much rather fit into the category of verbal charms or incantations – had Yezidis made such distinctions.
As with many other ritual and religious activities, there is a marked difference in the use of such verbal charms or “incantation-prayers” between the Yezidis living east of the Tigris and the Yezidis of Sinjar. Among the first group, according to my fieldwork experience, performing such incantation-prayers seems to be the exclusive domain of acknowledged religious experts these days, usually people belonging to the so-called priestly castes. As far as I know, there is no specific injunction against common people performing these incantation-prayers – I cannot recall witnessing any instance of it. In fact, even the repertoire of religious experts seems rather limited. While I cannot claim that no other verbal charms exist, I have only heard three such incantations performed: the prayer against the evil eye (dua nezerê), the prayer against headache (dua ser êşê) and the prayer against the “smallness of the moon” (dua kêma heyvê). The latter refers to a mysterious affliction attributed to the influence of the waning moon, which, just as the evil eye, often causes bodily aches in adults or undiagnosed ailments in children. Of these three, only the dua nezerê (the best known of all invocations – just as the evil eye is the reason for most troubles) is regularly performed. The performance of this invocation includes slowly moving an egg in a circle over the sufferer’s head and then smashing it on the ground at the end of the prayer. That the incantation-prayers may have played a more important social role in the past was indicated by the daughter-in-law of the late Feqîr Hecî, one of the best-known experts, who was the source of many scholarly publications of Yezidi sacred texts. During my last visit, in the fall of 2017, Feqîr Hecî (born in 1923) was struggling with serious health issues and spent the greater part of his day sleeping. However, whenever he woke up, he recited the prayer of kêma heyvê to alleviate the pain in his legs, while holding a berat (a small ball of earth from Lalish, the sacred valley of the Yezidis) to his forehead. As his daughter-in-law remarked watching him pray, “people used to come all the time to have him pray over them. But now that he is sick, they don’t come any longer”.
The situation is different in the Sinjar Region, possibly reflecting the practice of the wider Yezidi community in the past. There, healing prayers or incantations are practised more widely and are recited even by people who otherwise claim no expertise in religious matters, do not possess knowledge of more “formal” prayers and hymns, and play no role in communal ritual activities. The repertoire is also more vast, though even in Sinjar people claim to retain only a fraction of the “healing prayers” that their parents or grandparents used to know. While, no doubt, this is partly due to idealizing the past, when people “still had respect for religion and God”, it is likely that this claim is at least partially based on the real experience of seeing traditional oral culture (whether religious or secular) slowly disappear with the encroachment of modernity. The knowledge of this potential loss of sacred tradition is partly what has been fuelling the scripturalization process of Yezidi oral religion in the past decades.Footnote 36
However that may be, at this moment some Sinjari Yezidis still remember and perform incantation-prayers or oral charms which they have inherited from their forebears, to fight anything from the dreaded evil eye to ants swarming a house. Here I shall give the text of four such prayers or charms, collected from the female members of a family who had fled to a Yezidi village in the Kurdistan Region following the onslaught of ISIS. There they lived in the old, mud-brick house of their local relatives, who had moved into two huge new houses built a few years before the rise of ISIS, during the years of unprecedented economic boom in the Kurdistan Region. The refugee family was originally from Tel Ezer, a huge collective village on the southern side of Sinjar. (Such collective villages were created by Saddam Hussein when he moved the inhabitants of small Yezidi villages on and at the foot of the Sinjar Mountain into mujama’at or collective settlement in the 1970s.) The family belongs to a lineage of feqîrs, tracing their descent to the famous feqîr leader Hamu Shiru, the self-styled Paramount of Sinjar at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 37
According to the members of the family, they learnt the charms from “the grandfather” who had passed away in around 2008. They claimed that the grandfather was a true ascetic, a “feqîr of khirqe” (wearing the khirqe or sacred black shirt of those who embark on the path of piety) or “feqîr of Sheikh Adi” (Sheikh Adi is the central figure of Yezidi mythology, believed to have settled and been buried in the holy valley of Lalish). They also asserted that beside prayer-charms, the grandfather also knew many qewls (hymns), and on holy days his house was filled with guests who came to hear him recite sacred texts. What was even more important for his descendants, however, was the grandfather’s ability to heal. As they said, his “hand was medicine” (destê wî derman bû). This expression is applied to people who were gifted with the power to heal (which often includes some form of laying on of hands). Such people may come from any class or caste, be murîds as well as sheikhs, and their ability is not connected to their knowledge of Yezidi religion or sacred texts, though being a feqîr of khirqe and knowing sacred texts (or at least incantation-prayers) is likely to increase one’s reputation as a healer. While younger relatives did not inherit his gift of healing power, nor learn any of the hymns he could allegedly recite, they did learn some of the healing prayers or incantations, and continued to perform them after the demise of the grandfather whenever the need arose. In what follows, I shall reproduce the four prayers I heard from members of this family and try to give an English translation.Footnote 38
Prayer of the scorpion (Dua dubişkê)Footnote 39
This prayer is believed to both cure scorpion bite and to keep away scorpions. It is said over a cup of water and at the end of the prayer water from this cup is sprinkled around. (They added that someone bitten by a scorpion must not drink water for 24 hours in order to prevent the spread of the poison and quoted a case of death in the family, where this advice was not followed.)
Prayer for stomach ache (Dua zik êşê)Footnote 45
While saying this prayer, the healer is caressing the stomach of the sufferer (pushing a hand from the chest downward), giving it three gentle slaps at the end.
Prayer for headache (Dua ser êşê)Footnote 49
The person reciting this prayer places their hand on the head of the sufferer. At the end, s/he wets a fingertip with a little saliva and presses it to the forehead of the sufferer. (Saliva, widely believed to possess apotropaic powers in the region since antiquity, is routinely used in Yezidi healing and blessing rituals. For example, when a Yezidi sheikh, pîr or some religious leader fixes the dezî, the sacred thread protecting a newborn around its neck, first they wet the dezî with their saliva, then the forehead of the child. Similarly, some seers anoint the forehead of their clients with saliva to help healing and protect against evil forces.) It is believed that headache may be caused by the breath of jinn passing by. Therefore, this prayer is addressed to Sakhre Jinn (Sexrê Cin),Footnote 50 a holy entity also considered the lord of the jinn, who can cure jinn-induced sickness – madness, headache and insomnia – by commanding the jinn to leave the sufferer alone. People suffering from such ailments are often taken to places consecrated to Sakhre Jinn in Lalish or in the village of Bozan (in the Sheikhan region) or to a valley near Bozan, which is believed to be an abode of jinn and which contains a huge rock dedicated to Sakhre Jinn.Footnote 51
Grammatically, the last sentence is not clear, but bread (a food considered sacred, which cannot be thrown away) is often connected with healing and cure. The women of the same family told me how the feqîr grandfather told people for whom he performed the Prayer against the Evil Eye to distribute pieces of bread in the name of Sheikh Shems among their neighbours next morning. Sheikh Kerim Xidir, a well-known religious expert in the collective village of Khanke, has also said that after the performance of the Prayer against the Evil Eye, warm bread should be given to the neighbours (or to the domestic animals) for the cure to work. Distributing freshly baked bread among neighbours, or to any passerby in the street, in case of sickness, a successful cure, or the granting of some wish, is a widespread practice among Yezidis, as well as Muslims, Kurds and Christians.
Scripturalization of Yezidi oral tradition and the birth of cultural heritage
As I hope I have demonstrated above, the question of whether or not Yezidis pray is not easy to answer. It depends on the definitions of prayer and praying. Those performing the incantation-prayers cited above would certainly insist that they pray, or say dua, whenever the need arises. Others, including Yezidi intellectuals who have so far opted not to include such prayers in their publications, may not see these texts as meeting the criteria of “sacred text” and “prayer”. Neither are they included, to the best of my knowledge, in online archives that have emerged in the last decade or so and which contain recordings of sacred texts, beside videos explaining various aspects of Yezidi religion, culture, and history.Footnote 61
The future of such verbal charms, just as of any other part of Yezidi religious oral tradition, is just as uncertain as the definition of what constitutes prayer in an oral society. While such incantation-prayers, going by the evidence, are still being recited in the Sinjar, even by relatively young people (one of the women reciting the prayers was in her thirties), it is doubtful how much longer these charms will survive – at least as a part of living oral tradition. The cultural map of the Yezidi community is being redrawn by its changing social needs, a kind of “rural urbanization” brought about by living in huge collective villages, increased connection with the outside world (both in Iraq and the Western diaspora) and especially by the spread of literacy and the appearance of a Yezidi middle-class. Despite recent setbacks caused by the ISIS attack and displacement, education and literacy are fast spreading among Yezidis. Less than a generation ago many Sinjaris refused to send their children, especially female ones, to school. Now most Yezidi refugees, living in camps or mud-brick houses constructed on the outskirts of their host villages, try to ensure that their children attend school, and many cite the lack of schools in Sinjar as the reason for not returning to their destroyed villages. Concurrently with this rise of literacy, written texts (and more recently, in a twist of post-literate orality,Footnote 62 YouTube and other online videos) have been fast replacing oral tradition. This transformation, or scripturalization, of oral religious tradition has already made deep inroads among the Yezidis of Kurdistan Region and the Western diaspora, changing Yezidis’ perception of what constitutes “correct modes” of religion and prayer. This changing attitude was eloquently demonstrated by the younger members of the family, when I asked the two elderly grandmothers, mentioned above, about the way they prayed in the morning. While I was recording their prayers (two short, free-style invocations to Yezidi Holy Beings), their school-aged grandchildren came rushing in, bringing their schoolbooks for Yezidi religion class to show me: here, this is the Morning Prayer.Footnote 63 For them, Morning Prayer was the text printed in their schoolbooks (even if they themselves could not recall the text and even had trouble reading it from the book) and not the prayers or supplications they had heard their grandmothers recite in the morning all their life.
However, the growing importance attributed to written texts may give a new lease of life to these prayer-charms in a novel way. What was formerly transmitted within the family, with practical ends in view (that is, with the purpose of healing), may now be transformed into written family heirlooms. Upon seeing my interest in these prayers, the local relatives who hosted the Sinjari refugee women reciting the invocation told me to speak with their son (in his late teens). As they said, he was also interested in such prayers and collected many of them himself, writing them down. Hoping to learn about more charm-prayers, and excited that a Yezidi teenager was interested in recording oral tradition, I spoke with the son. He duly produced a leather-bound exercise book full of handwritten prayers or sacred texts referred to as dua. As it turned out, most of these prayers were actually copied from various printed publications, to which he added the charm-prayers he had heard from his relatives.
While I was somewhat disappointed to realize that the collection contained only those incantations I had already recorded myself, the rest of the prayers representing the more erudite category of sacred texts recited on religio-ritual occasions, the manuscript eloquently reflected the recent explosion of interest in Yezidi religious heritage among Yezidi youth (who prior to ISIS were at best uninterested in, or sometimes even contemptuous of, Yezidi religion). While there were a number of middle-aged, literate men who had their own handwritten collections of Yezidi sacred texts (collected both from oral sources and from printed publications, depending on their attitude and dedication), these people were usually considered religious experts by their environment. “Ordinary” Yezidis and especially young people did not collect texts, create manuscripts for private use, or pay much attention to sacred texts published in locally edited books or the Yezidi periodical, Lalish.Footnote 64 The existential threat posed by ISIS to the Yezidi community, and felt by even those members of the community who were not directly affected, brought about a radical change. Defiance in the face of the attempt to exterminate Yezidis led to the shared sentiment that Yezidis should actively safeguard their religious customs and traditions if they wanted to survive and preserve their identity.Footnote 65 The discourse on Yezidi “cultural heritage” (mîratê rewşenbîrî), including religious and other forms of cultural heritage, is no longer confined to a handful of Yezidi intellectuals, but has gained a much wider audience and entered the public domain. Videos of the holy valley of Lalish (accompanied by a Yezidi religious dignitary’s chant) is posted on Facebook under the caption “OUR HERITAGE IS OUR Identity”. There are now festivals being organized to showcase Yezidi folklore and heritage,Footnote 66 while the Mirzo music band,Footnote 67 formed by young people in Sinjar with the aim of playing and preserving the musical heritage of the region, participated in the Mosul Music Heritage Festival dressed in Yezidi “folk clothes”Footnote 68 and organized a “Cultural Week” in collaboration with USAID, which showcased “traditional food, traditional dancing, storytelling, traditional songs and traditional crafts”.Footnote 69 Sinjar Academy, an American Yezidi NGO (or as they refer to themselves: hybrid educational academy) that usually concentrates on teaching courses on practical topics like English, IT, programming and digital media, organized a course on “Yezidi religion and cultural heritage” in late 2023. According to the course description available on Facebook and Instagram, “Our team of researchers, educators, and Yezidi religious experts have created a unique curriculum to help the next generation learn more about Yezidi customs, traditions, history, literature, and culture. It’s crucial to pass on this knowledge and preserve the Yezidi identity”.Footnote 70
The handwritten manuscript of the young man mentioned above, containing copies of published sacred texts, can better be understood within the framework of this new-found consciousness of Yezidi heritage. However, to these texts he added the incantation-prayers he learnt from his Sinjari relatives, giving his collection a unique feature and turning it into a family heirloom, not “merely” communal heritage. Given his (university-level) educational background, it is obvious that unlike his aunt and great aunt he is unlikely ever to recite the charms for the purpose of healing – in fact, he may not even memorize them. Instead of a piece of practical religious knowledge to be performed, for him these incantations constituted something valuable in a more abstract way, something that should be preserved in the written form for future generations. Thus, the texts of these charm-prayers pass from the realm of performed religion to written cultural heritage, attesting to all that Yezidis do indeed have a tradition of prayer.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the family of the late Ali Anjul from Khanke, who not only supported my work, but also provided me with a “Yezidi family” during my fieldwork over the years. The prayers in this article were recited to me by female members of the family, Tamina Hecî Hecî and Kamo Hasim Xidir. I also thank Khalid Aomar from Sinjar for his help in interpreting the text of the prayers.
Funding statement
I would like to express my thanks to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, who supported my fieldwork in Northern Iraq with a generous grant (grant number 2017-00830). I would also like to express my gratitude to George Soros for funding the Central European University of Budapest (1991–2019), which used to provide a space for my research.
