January 13, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Learn something new every day
One of the groups putting forward a party for the Iraqi elections is the Yezidis, who practice a faith that seems to be a syncretic amalgam of Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. Their theology is a little confusing, but no more so than Original Sin or the Trinity.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 13, 2005 3:16 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksWilliam Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain (A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East)" (1997) has a small mention of the Yezidis on page 140. At this point in the book Dalrymple was in Syria, searching for refugees from the Nestorian Church; according to the book, 50,000 Nestorians fled into Syria from western Iraq after Desert Storm, though only 10,000 were still in the refugee camps as of Dalrymple's visit.
from the book:
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Dalrymple: "And the Nestorians who are left?"
Syrian local guide/driver: "There are about ten thousand of them, still incarcerated in a refugee camp ten miles from here, towards the Iraqi border. It's a horrible place. They're locked up in a barbed-wire pen with only two thousand devil-worshippers for company."
"Devil-worshippers?"
"Yezidis. They're an Iraqi sect. Strictly speaking they're actually devil-propitiators, not devil-worshippers. They call Lucifer 'Malik Tawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the world's affairs."
"And how do they get on with the Nestorians?"
"Actually very well. Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian Church. I don't know whether that is true, but the Yezidi priests and the Christian bishops certainly make a point of visiting each other on different feast days."
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Jane:
OT, but I just realized that with my current RSS reader, I usually click through to the post page directly, and miss the front page entirely. So if it is possible to put ads on the post page, that might help the problem that Mindles was talking about. (All of which was suggested by others, but I just thought I'd confirm that people often do miss the front page).
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