Until 2003, the Mandaeans escaped the fate of the Jews. In the following ten years, however, their fortunes would change, and Nadia would hear from a Jewish Iraqi exile a glum verdict comparing the two communities’ fates with the sequence of their different sabbath days: “We were on Saturday, and you are on a Sunday. Now your Sunday has come.”
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Baghdad in early 2003 was a place simmering with suspicion and fear. From time to time demonstrators (paid, everyone knew, by the government) would parade through the streets, shouting their support for Saddam. Once a crowd of excited men thought they had seen an American soldier hiding in the thick reeds that lined the Tigris, which runs through the city, and beat the reeds with heavy sticks as they tried to hunt the intruder down. Nadia was not interested in campaigning for or against Saddam. She only wanted to keep her brother safe. He had just received call-up papers from the Iraqi army; he was to join the force that would resist the American-led invasion. If he obeyed the draft, she feared, he might be killed. If he did not, he risked a brutal punishment: the amputation of an ear. And so, in their family’s small house in southern Baghdad, the two of them argued over whether he should enlist. She thought not. She was the older sibling and had no interest in conforming to traditional ideas of feminine meekness. If she was going to persuade him, she knew, she had to be more intimidating than Saddam. “If you ignore those papers, I’ll pay every bribe you need,” she said. “And if you obey the call-up, then I’ll break your arm.” He relented.
Nadia told me that she had almost never encountered discrimination from Muslim Iraqis. At school she had met one pupil who declined to eat her food and called her nejas, an Islamic word meaning “unclean.” But otherwise she felt that, if anything, being a Mandaean meant that she was treated with extra respect. (This was in a middle-class part of Baghdad; in rural areas, things might have been different. In Suq al-Shuyukh even now, there are eating places and coffeehouses that refuse to serve Mandaeans because they are believed to pollute the utensils they eat with.)
Educational standards dropped during the era of sanctions, as Nadia had described to me, and Iraqi society became coarser—but it was only after the US-led invasion in 2003 that she began to sense danger. She was drawn into arguments at work. “Saddam was like a crown on our head and the invaders are kuffar,” said one colleague—kuffar being the plural of kafir, a word that legitimizes violence against nonbelievers.
“I think he was like a pair of slippers. You put him on your head if you want to!” Nadia replied.
As time went on, she found it harder to sustain her bravado. The conflict gave plenty of opportunities for religious bigotry to fester. “We started to hear of people being kidnapped, hijacked, killed just like that,” Nadia told me. Her own workplace, the Red Cross, was bombed in October 2003. The violence struck even closer to home four months later. On January 18, 2004, she was on her way to assist at an international charity in Baghdad when she heard an explosion. Not only heard, but felt—the car she was in shook with the force of the blast. “The sky was cloudy,” she remembers, “and I got a strange feeling afterward, as if someone I knew had been caught in the explosion. So I called Hadeel.” Nadia and Hadeel, a Christian woman, knew each other from working together in a print shop in Baghdad in the 1990s. In 2003 Hadeel had taken a job with the American embassy and had also managed to find her ideal husband—an Iraqi dentist working in Denmark. Nadia and her other friends had bought her an engagement ring, which Hadeel wore on the same finger as the ring given her by her fiancé.
“I called Hadeel’s house; her little brother said she had gone to work. I called her mobile phone, and the mobile phone of a friend who used to go to work with her. No answer. I called her colleague, and he said she had never arrived. When I went home I called her family. They said she had just disappeared. Hadeel’s mother called me later—she knew I worked for the Red Cross—and she said, ‘I want you to get good news about my daughter.’” News came, but it was not good. The car Hadeel had been in turned out to have had a bomb planted under the driver’s seat. It was detonated, and killed the driver; two other women in the car had been injured. But there was no news of Hadeel. Nadia took a day off work and toured the hospitals looking for her. She found nothing. It was only later that she heard. The body had been hard to identify, the hospital said. It was badly burned. The only things that remained uncharred were two rings on one of its fingers.
Hadeel’s family went ahead with the wedding party anyway and sang the traditional celebratory chants and ululations. But they did it after having buried the bride. “And they said, ‘This is not the wedding we wanted.’ I couldn’t bear seeing them again. It was such a pointless waste of life. I think people should be aware of these stories before they go to war.” The death preyed on Nadia’s mind and made her want to leave. “I thought, I don’t want to be killed like my friend. I don’t want to break my parents’ heart.”
Nadia had never defined herself by her religion. “I see myself first as a human being, second as an Iraqi, and only third as a Mandaean,” she told me. But humanism and patriotism did not help her in postwar Iraq, where more atavistic loyalties came to the fore. Religion was not the only thing that put her in danger: so did her ability to speak English, and the facts that she did not wear a veil or belong to a tribe. “I realized the power of the tribes,” she said. “And we, as Mandaeans, don’t have a tribe.” In the past Mandaeans had used the time-honored tactic of attaching themselves to a tribe not as members but as dependents, an “annex.” The tribe would agree to protect them, but since they remained outside the tribe proper, they did not have to accept its religion. In the frightful horrors of Iraq after 2003, Nadia’s family had a tribe to protect them, but, as she said, “they don’t provide as much protection to their annexes as to their own people.” Mandaeans were exposed to kidnapping, forced conversion, and murder. Between 2003 and 2011, the Mandaean Human Rights Group documented 175 murders and 271 kidnappings. In 2004, the group reported, thirty-five Mandaean families living in Fallujah were forced to convert to Islam.
Nadia got on a plane leaving Baghdad on March 18, 2004. Her identity papers—she had no passport and had never been on a plane before—were stamped for the first time. Her parents were worried for her: if she lived abroad on her own, no man would marry her afterward, they fretted. She found London so expensive that she had to pawn her jewelry to pay the rent, and she was startled by the “much milder culture.” She missed Iraq and nostalgically sought out the fragrance of orange blossoms. Going with her friends to Iraqi concerts, she was quizzed by Iraqi Jews who had left Baghdad forty years earlier and wanted to hear the latest news about their favorite places there.
Despite the nostalgia, she abandoned thoughts of returning home. “I love it there,” she said, “but I can’t live it.” She was not the last Mandaean to leave. Two years after her departure the high priest Sheikh Sattar fled to Australia. By the time of this writing, more than 90 percent of the Mandaean population of Iraq has emigrated or been killed. It is only in southern Iran that one can find their communities intact. Nadia believed that the Mandaeans’ departure was a loss for Iraq. “We were the fulcrum in a pair of scales—holding Iraqi society together. And when the Mandaeans and other minorities left, the scales were broken.” And after what we had both seen from looking back in the Mandaeans’ history, Nadia and I could agree: with their departure, Babylon has truly fallen.
2: Yazidis
On a street in a city in Canada, looking up at an apartment block any day at dawn, one may see a window lit: Mirza Ismail is praying, as he also does at noon and sunset. No outsider may witness his prayers, and since no other member of his own community lives nearby, he performs them alone. Each time he prepares himself carefully. He washes his hands and face and winds a special girdle called a pishtik around the white shirt he always wears. Then he prostrates himself toward the sun and begins praying in Kurmanji, the language of his peopl
e, to an unknowable God. “There is no god but God,” the prayer declares, “and the sun is the light of God.” He prays that God may give the world peace.
Mirza is a soft-spoken Iraqi man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache, and because he prays at regular intervals during the day, colleagues and acquaintances often wrongly assume he is Muslim. He is instead a Yazidi, a follower of an esoteric religion that has superficial similarities to Islam but is very different from it. Although his people are often thought of as Kurds and speak the same language (Kurmanji) as their Kurdish neighbors, he insists that they are a separate people. Sometimes called Ezidis, they number hundreds of thousands in northern Iraq and in parts of Syria, Georgia, Armenia, and northwestern Iran. Yazidis believe in reincarnation, sacrifice bulls, and revere an angel who takes the form of a peacock. Their traditions forbid them to eat lettuce or wear blue; men must grow a mustache, though few have beards. They are also victims of an ancient calumny—the accusation that they worship the devil. And even before 2014, they were the victims of the second-deadliest terrorist attack in history.
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 faqirs, the kawwals who recite the religion’s sacred songs, the kocheks who guard the shrine at Lalish, and the pirs, 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 hou
rs 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.
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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).
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 7