Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (10 page)

Mirza Ismail and his friend Abu Shihab in Sinjar, northern Iraq. Photo courtesy Mirza Ismail

Mirza was born in a village on well-watered, oak-forested hills in the Sinjar region of northwestern Iraq (a place far to the north of the Iraqi Marshes, in which the Mandaeans live; the two communities know about each other but have very little contact). Long ago this region was part of the Assyrian Empire, which culturally had much in common with the Babylonians—but it changed hands many times since, being conquered by Babylon, Persia, the Romans, the Arabs, and finally the Turks. When Mirza was a young boy, his family was relocated by Saddam Hussein’s government to a housing development called Qahtaniyah. Saddam was trying to bring the restive northern provinces under tighter government control in order to crush a growing rebellion there by Kurdish separatists who wanted to found their own breakaway state. Although not all Yazidis saw themselves as Kurds, Saddam was taking no chances. In Qahtaniyah the Yazidis would be easy to control, especially as without their land they were dependent on government food handouts.

Mirza therefore grew up in one of Qahtaniyah’s simple mud-brick single-story homes. Water dripped through the ceiling during the infrequent rainstorms of the winter season. The streets were dirt, and there was no sewage system, but the schools were good, the settlement’s one clinic did at least offer treatment for free, and the nearest city, a long but practicable journey away, had a hospital. At the front of the house each family had a garden, where they grew food—radishes, tomatoes, eggplants, and sunflowers for their seeds. The gardens were a reminder of a time when these families had lived in their hill villages, cultivating rich crops of figs and olives. Mirza went back to the hills from time to time, to pray at conical-roofed Yazidi shrines and sometimes to admire the sacred hidden caves where Yazidi families had sought refuge from persecution in past centuries.

Yazidis keep a list of the seventy-two persecutions to which they have been subjected over the centuries. In particular, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman authorities several times hunted them down as heretics—heretics who were particularly vexing because they evaded military conscription and paid no tax. The Ottomans did not find their task easy, though. Even by the easiest road, Sinjar was a day’s walk from the nearest city before motorized vehicles were invented. The Yazidis were usually a match for the Ottomans—using their knowledge of the local hills and caves, they could fend off invaders and loot passing caravans. Even when forced to convert to Islam, they could go back to their own religious practices as soon as the outsiders had gone. As subsistence farmers, they could survive without much goodwill from the outside world.

Yazidis and Christians lived alongside each other for centuries and made common cause in past centuries against Muslim overlords. People would convert from one religion to the other; one Yazidi even came to believe that in a former incarnation he had been a Christian priest. (Recently a Christian man in Germany called up a Yazidi woman, claiming to have been her father in a former life. The Yazidis were skeptical.) Yazidis have no special objection to praying at Christian shrines, and they sometimes wear crucifixes—though as amulets to protect against evil, not as signs of belief.

When Mirza was four or five years old he was taken many miles east to a place called Lalish. Located in a wooded valley just under three hundred miles north of Baghdad, it consists of a collection of old stone buildings. The Yazidis insist that this place is the very center of the earth, where creation began. Under one of the buildings of Lalish, in a place closed to non-Yazidis, a white-robed sheikh (the Yazidis use the same word as Mandaeans and Muslims for a member of their priestly caste) dipped Mirza into a sacred spring called Zemzem—a ceremony performed, like Christian baptism, once in a lifetime.

Mirza himself had been born into the caste of sheikhs. “When I was very young,” he told me, “I was told how to be a sheikh. It’s a prestigious position; people who are fighting each other must make peace when a sheikh comes among them.” Sheikhs were one of the classes of religious figure that the Yazidis respected, along with self-denying
faqir
s, the
kawwal
s who recite the religion’s sacred songs, the
kochek
s who guard the shrine at Lalish, and the
pir
s, who are a priestly caste junior to the sheikhs. Sheikhs traditionally had been looked to for miracles as well as spiritual guidance. One family of sheikhs cured eye diseases using saliva or dust from the tomb of their ancestors; another charmed snakes. All eschewed manual labor and lived off charity. The Yazidi community had traditionally been averse to reading and writing (something that we know was true of the ancient Persians as well), and a century ago Mirza’s family had been distinguished among other sheikhs by their literacy.

Mirza’s family was dedicated specifically to Melek Sheikh Hassan, who Yazidis believe was a superhuman being and vice-regent of the angels whose will governed the planets and the stars. Under the name Sheikh Hassan, the Yazidis believe, he had once assumed human form, and his tomb was at Lalish. Mirza always swallowed the first syllable of the name Hassan, I noticed, so the name sounded like “Sheikh-san” or “Sheikh-sin.”
Sheikh
means “elder” or perhaps “lord,” and in Babylonian and Assyrian times the people in and near Sinjar worshipped a Lord Sin, the moon god. Similarly, the Yazidis revere Sheikh Shams, whose name resembles that of Shamash, the Assyrian sun god. His name is not the only point of resemblance, for Sheikh Shams’s tomb is the venue for a ceremony that thousands of years ago honored Shamash: the great bull sacrifice.

The sacrifice is intended to bring rain in winter, and fertility in the spring that follows. A small bull not less than a year old is brought inside the sanctuary of Lalish, and then chased, by men whose tribe have had this honor as long as anyone can remember, to the shrine of Sheikh Shams. The men carry thin sticks to drive the bull; other men carry machine guns, to fire in the air in celebration. When the bull reaches the shrine of Sheikh Shams, it is captured and a sheikh is at hand to whisper in its ear and then cut its throat. The event almost could be described by the words of the four-thousand-year-old epic of Gilgamesh: “And when they had killed the bull, they tore out its heart, and placed it before Shamash the sun / They stepped back and fell down before Shamash in homage.” This is not the only sun-related festival of the Yazidis. They observe a fast of three days in December, followed by a feast day called Eid al-Sawm (the feast of the fast). Long ago when the sun failed to appear, three days of prayer and fasting by Yazidis led God to restore the sun; this event commemorates that occasion.

The Yazidi faith, like the Mandaean one, is a mystery religion. Far from being anxious to communicate its inner messages and convince others of them, the Yazidi clergy want to keep them secret. Since Mirza belonged to the caste of sheikhs, he was entitled to learn them—but he would have to earn the right to this knowledge. If he made the commitment to dress entirely and always in white, and to fast twice a year for forty days each time, giving up all food during daylight hours and staying indoors, then he would gain the ability to foresee the future, and those who had taken this step before him would teach him the unwritten scriptures of the Yazidis. Mirza told me that these scriptures had once been written down but that Western scholars had stolen the manuscripts; all that remained was a leather scroll with gold writing on it, which he believed would show him the history of his people. (In fact, the manuscripts that Western scholars once thought were the Yazidi scriptures have since been shown to be fakes, and it turns out that the real scriptures are orally transmitted. The religion’s secrets have been kept well, even from its own followers.)

What Mirza knew already was that the first prophet had been Abraham and the last Mohammed, but that the four elements were more important than any prophet. Of these elements the greatest was fire, and the sun was the main intermediary between humans and the unknowable God. “Yazidis and Assyrians both worshiped the sun,” he pointed out. He knew, too, that Yazidis expected to be reincarnated—as men, or possibly as animals. (I found it odd that Mirza was unsure on this point, but many Yazidis appeared to be incurious about the afterlife, or else perhaps secretive about their beliefs.) They regarded the Greek philosophers as prophets. And a crucial figure in their religion was the figure of the Peacock Angel, as I would discover when I went to Lalish myself.

—————

I HAD WANTED TO GO TO LALISH
ever since hearing about it when I lived in Baghdad. It was 2011 by the time I made the journey there, beginning it in an unglamorous suburb of Istanbul where I caught a bus for the first leg of the thirty-hour, thousand-mile journey to Iraq. Over the following day, I watched the landscape around me change as we traveled from the northwestern corner of Turkey to the far southeast, where the road crosses into Iraq. Istanbul, where I started, is Turkey’s biggest and richest city; the land in Turkey’s coastal areas is fertile, and the climate a temperate Mediterranean one. The country’s southeast, by contrast, is hot, poor, and sparsely populated. It is here that the city of Sanliurfa sits in what is effectively a huge oasis surrounded by semidesert. Once known as Edessa, Sanliurfa was visited in the fourth century
AD
by Christian pilgrims keen to see a letter that Jesus had supposedly written during his lifetime to the king of Edessa, Abgar. Among the pilgrims was a diarist named Egeria, from whose writings we can see that there were also pagans still living in Edessa who regarded the fish in the local rivers as sacred and refused to kill them. As a Christian, Egeria made a point of eating these fish (“very tasty,” she commented).

Today Sanliurfa is a Muslim city, and its heart is an ornate mosque surrounded by a park where families and couples stroll in the relative cool of the evening. After reaching the city and installing myself in a local guesthouse, I joined them, thinking about the city’s past. There has been a settlement on the site for thousands of years—for instance, between 2000 and 600
BC
in the time of the Assyrian Empire, whose legendary king Nimrod features in the Bible and whose capital, Nineveh, stood where Mosul is today. The modern city was founded by one of Alexander’s lieutenants and subsequently changed hands many times as Romans, Persians, and Byzantines—and, in a later era, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks—fought over it. Above the mosque, on a ridge, a tall pillar still stands with an inscription in the extinct language Syriac, a reminder of this history.

There turned out to be another relic of the past in the park: Egeria’s tasty fish. A small stream ran through the park, and I noticed it was full of carp—thousands of carp, as thickly gathered together as if they had been caught in a net. They thrashed about, writhing past each other, three or four deep. A man came to stand next to me, his head draped in a black-and-white
keffiyeh
. Every so often one of the people walking in the park would come scurrying up to him, half kneel, press the man’s hand to lips and then forehead, and mutter briefly in Kurmanji. Each time this happened, the man would scowl with feigned annoyance and maybe move his hand out of the way in a condescending gesture. But he never turned the supplicants away.

Eventually the man addressed me. “Maybe you are wondering how there are so many fish here?” he asked. “Nobody here will kill or eat them. When the evil king Nimrod wanted to punish the prophet Ibrahim, he ordered him to be burned alive on a pyre of flaming coals. But God turned the fire into water and the coals into fish. This is why we regard these fish as holy.” Ibrahim was Abraham, who is claimed by Muslims as well as Jews as a prophet. But the tradition of Sanliurfa’s sacred fish was older than Islam, dating back at least to Egeria’s time and perhaps much further. The people standing around that pool once spoke Aramaic, then Greek, then Arabic, and now Kurmanji, and Christianity has come and gone, but the fish remain.

“My name is Mahmoud,” the man said. He was a Muslim, and a Kurd like many of the people of Sanliurfa. He explained that he was a man of some standing locally. And as we talked he told me about a ruined city to the south of Sanliurfa, called Harran. That evening I read about Harran and discovered that, though now abandoned, it had once played a major part in history. It was allegedly where Abraham lived before adopting Yahweh as his God. (This has now been called into question: the biblical account certainly places him in a town called Harran, but it may have been a town of the same name much further south.) It was definitely the place where the Romans experienced one of their most famous defeats. In 53
BC
the Roman plutocrat Crassus launched what he hoped would be a lucrative military campaign against the Parthian Empire (the successor to Cyrus’s Persian Empire), coveting its gold and its monopoly on the traffic of Chinese goods to the west. Tricked by a local Arab who was a double agent for the Parthians, Crassus and his legions were annihilated by a numerically inferior Parthian army. It was the first encounter in history’s longest war. Hostilities between Rome and Persia continued, with intervals of truce, for nearly seven hundred years.

We have forgotten this longest war, for both protagonists are extinct, but it shaped their world and ours. In its last phase, when the Roman emperors had moved to Byzantium, the Persians found allies among the Byzantine Empire’s Jewish communities; the Byzantines, meanwhile, employed Arabs, some of them Christians, to fight against Persia. News of the war even reached remote Mecca, where the Prophet Mohammed was converting Arabs to the new religion of Islam. At one point, after a Persian victory at Antioch in
AD
613, it seemed as though the Byzantine Empire was on the verge of utter defeat. The Persian emperor wrote to his Byzantine rival, “Even if you take refuge in the depths of the sea, I will stretch out my hand and take you,” while the Byzantines issued coins inscribed “God help the Romans.” The Prophet Mohammed and his followers were troubled, because Christian Rome was meant to have God on its side. A Koranic verse offered comfort. “The Byzantines have been defeated in a nearby land,” it acknowledged, “but after their defeat they will overcome . . . And that day the believers will rejoice.” The Byzantines did recover, dealing the Persian empire a mortal blow—and cutting payments to their Arab mercenaries, dismissing them as “dogs.” The Muslim Arabs changed their mind about Byzantium and marched north to seize its southern territories and ultimately conquer the Persian Empire, too. The seven-hundred-year war had exhausted both empires; without it, Islam might not be the world religion that it is today, and the Christian West, with its capital at Istanbul, might have a Zoroastrian-dominated culture as its Eastern rival.