The Truth about the Yezidis
YezidiTruth.org - A Humanitarian Organization
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The Yezidis
"When you kill someone, you kill yourself"
Yezidi Faqir
Who Are the Yezidis?
The Yezidis or Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking people who live principally in northern Iraq. They number approximately 500,000 - 600,000 with another 200,000 settled in other parts of the world. They are mostly a poor and oppressed people, but they have a rich spiritual tradition that they contend is the world's oldest. Originally from India and therefore related to the Hindus, they also have close connections with many other cultures and traditions they have lived among during their gradual migration westward to the Middle East. For example, they have close ties with the Zoroastrian religion they encountered in Persia, and they reflect some of the doctrines and rites of Islam which were integrated into Yezidism by the faith's Sufi reformer, Sheike Adi, during the 11th century. Well before this time, as far back as 2000 B.C., the Yezidis were living in the Middle East and playing a role in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Jewish civilizations.
The Yezidis claim to have the oldest religion in the world, contending that the truth of this is reflected in the antiquity of their calendar. They can trace back their religious calendar 6756 years, thus making 2008 CE the Yezidi year of 6757. In relation to some of the other major religions, the Yezidi Calendar is 4,750 years older than the Christian or Gregorian Calendar, 990 years older than the Jewish Calender, and it is 5329 years older than the Muslim Calender.
The Yezidi Name
Since their founding many thousands of years ago in India, these people have always been known as the Yezidis or Yazidis. According to Eszter Spat in The Yezidis, the name is derived from ez Xwede dam, meaning "I was created by God." Some Yezidis maintain that it translates as "Followers of the true path." The term Yezidi or Yazidi is also very close to the Persion/Zoroastrian word Yazdan, meaning "God", and Yazata, meaning "divine" or "angelic being".
For this reason scholars have theorized a Persian origin for the Yezidis. Other scholars have associated the name Yazidi with Yazid bin Muawiyah, a Moslem Caliph ofthe early Umayyad Dynasty. According to the current Yezidi belief, however, the Caliph Yazid was a Moslem ruler who eventually became disenchanted with his religion and converted to Yezidism.
Yezidi Persecution
Even with all of their ostensible connections to other faiths, the Yezidis have for hundreds of years been under constant attack from Moslems who promulgate the idea that the Yezidi's principle diety, Tawsy Melek, the "Peacock Angel", is Satan. Moslems also contend that the Yezidis are not "People of the Book", i.e., that they don't have a sacred revealed scripture like the Holy Bible or the Koran at the center of their religion, so they claim justification in their massacre of them. Or even worse, some Moslems have pronounced the Yezidis as heretics who were once orthodox Moslems - an allegation that puts them in the lowest rung of humanity. Over the course of 700 years, nearly 23 million Yezidi people have been murdered, thus bringing their civilization to the brink of extinction.
YezidiTruth.org - A Humanitarian Organization
Hosted by: International Order of Gnostic Templars - United States
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