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16
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ May, 1926
probably due to the ignorance which is almost an article of faith among them. Before the war the arts of reading and writing were confined by an old tradition to a single family; and when, after the Armistice, the British Administration determined to open & school in the Jebel Sinjar many obstacles were encountered. The letters sh, and words rhyming with sheitan, had first to be eliminated from the text-books, and shatt, the usual Mesopotamian word for river, had to be replaced by the synonym nahr. The school, opened in the face of much opposition, did not survive for long. After a few weeks four pupils were drowned while fording a river gwollen by the rains, whereupon the Yezidis regarded their aversion from learning as divinely (or infernally) vindicated.
The catholicity of their beliefs has not saved the Yezidis from unpopularity and even persecution. Layard gives, in his “Nineveh and its Remains," a graphic account of how they were decimated by the Kurdish Beg of Rowanduz, who pursued those of the Sheikhan to Mosul, and massacred the wretched fugitives on the hill of Qoyunjik in Nineveh, on the site of Sennacherib's Palace, within full view of the exulting Moslawis. Soon afterwards came the turn of the Sinjar; and there were massacres of Yezidis in 1892 and during the war. There cannot now be more, at the outside, than 50,000 survivors, including the Yezidis in Transcaucasia, of a race which a hundred years ago mustered well over a quarter of a million. The steadfastness of the Yezidi under persecution is the more remarkable in that Melek Taus seems an uninspiring deity for whom to die. His cult rests on a basis of fear and expediency, from which love is wholly absent, yet scarcely ever have his followers been known to abjure, even when faced with torture and death, their singularly negative creed.
The Yezidi is a gentle being whose sufferings have left their mark in his cowed and melancholy demeanour. His chief enemy is the Turk, but to the Christian minorities, es. pecially to the Nestorians, he is drawn by the bond of a common oppression. It must be accounted unto the Yezidis for righteousness that during the war, albeit themselves heavily oppressed, they gave shelter to hundreds of Armenian refugees, who crawled from Deir ezZor to the Jebel Sinjar in the course of the great Armenian massacres, and stoutly refused to surrender them despite the persuasion and threats of the Turks.
The Yezidi Mecca is the shrine of Sheikh Adi, called after two persons of the same name, the one a Sufi saint of the 12th century, the other a Kurdish gardener of the 13th, who appear to have been blended into one nebulous identity. Before visiting Sheikh Adi we stayed for & day and a night with Said Beg, the hereditary Mir (Chief) of the Yezidis, in his castle of Ba Idri in the Sheikhan. Ba Idri, distant a few miles from Al Qosh, is an Oriental version of the true feudal stronghold of the Middle Ages. It stands assertively on the top of a small
plateau or hill, while the village crouches obediently at the bottom, some hundreds of feet below. The relative positions of castle and village symbolize not inaccurately the relations which exist between the Mir and his people.
The Power of the Mr. Over the Yezidis the Mir exercises an absolute and autocratic sway. The best lands, the handsomest women are his without question, and he is supported by an annual due leviod in money and kind upon all his subjects. So, while they are poor, he is tolerably rich, and is the proud possessor, as we learned with surprise, of five American cars. Nevertheless, his position has its drawbacks, for rarely does a Mir of the Yezidis die in his bed. Said Beg's great-grandfather, Ali Beg, was killed by the aforementioned Rowanduz Kurds ; his father, another Ali Beg, was shot by his mother's paramour, with the connivance, it is said, of the lady. Nor is Said Beg likely to make old bones, for he loves to look upon the wine when it is red and, above all, upon the Arak when it is white. Yet & certain charm of manner gever leaves him altogether, and intoxication seems but to heighten his natural melancholy.
