Yezidis in Syria by Maisel Sebastian;

Author:Maisel, Sebastian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

That there was a legal gray zone was admitted by a sharia court judge in 1993, who sought clarification on the matter of registering a marriage or birth as Yezidi. Apparently, some of his colleagues decided one way or the other. His recommendations about how to deal with the problem were remarkable: Should we force them to change their religion from Yezidi to Muslim, which would violate the Islamic principle of There is no compulsion in religion Or should we advise them to file a lawsuit at the courts demanding the correction of their affiliation from Muslim to Yezidi?79 In response to his query, another judge and colleague summarized the ministrys official position about the Yezidis: they were considered a deviant, polytheistic sect founded by the heretic Adi bin Musafir. At no time were they associated with Islam. Thus, there was no need for a sharia court to accept complaints or lawsuit with one of the parties being Yezidi.80 Unfortunately, no other official documents pertaining to the debate were found; thus, we had to rely on the personal testimony of Yezidis who tried registering their marriages or birth as Yezidi. The standard reply was no, but with bribes it sometimes worked.

The political situation in the Kurdagh during this time period was different from the Jezira regarding the notable absence of Kurdish political parties until the state-sponsored arrival of the PKK in the 1980s. This coincided with the governments move to tactically support the PKK against Turkey. The party was allowed to operate more freely and quickly expanded their sphere of influence among the inhabitants of the Kurdagh. Yezidis in the area were lacking any sort of political or religious leadership and were thus easily attracted and incorporated into the party apparatus. The PKK also competed with local Muslim religious elites, in this case the Sufi sheikhs and brotherhoods over material and ideological resources. Ultimately, they reached a consensus and status quo of mutual tolerance and accommodation. The resulting Sufi/Kurdish identity alienated and confused the local Yezidi community. First they had to accommodate those families who converted earlier to Islam. And furthermore, they were exposed to the PKK propagated idea of a joint Yezidi-Zoroastrian identity. But the idea gained momentum and became a well-established fact in the new millennium. It took another two decades until the PKK reversed its position on the idea of Sufism as the representation of Kurdish Islam and its adoption of Yezidism as the true Kurdish religion appropriating a new sense of Kurdish unity under its banner.

The semiofficial ban on education among the Yezidi masses was mentioned earlier. It should be noted here that this was a prewar position and mostly enforced in the Jezira and more so among the Yezidis from Efrin. In the Kurdagh, Yezidis had their own school in the early 1930s, and they contributed to the cultural and intellectual movement in the area. Among the intellectuals and writers in the Efrin area were some prominent Yezidis, for example, Walid Hassan Hasso. He was born in 1955 in Qibare and later worked as a French teacher in Aleppo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.