Winston Churchill on Islam

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.

Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899)

Wow! Powerful stuff. Is he not essentially correct though in his assessment of Islam, at least as it existed in 1899? Keep in mind that the Islam of 2012 is not the same erstwhile Islam of a hundred years ago. If Churchill would have observed the Gulf states of today, he would not have written some of the above. The cities of Saudi Arabia, which look like Phoenix, the towering and ultramodern skyline of Dubai – this is hardly a moribund society.

There are scarcely sluggish methods of commerce in Dubai and the rest of Gulf. I understand that Arab agriculture is well developed and highly productive, except in Yemen, where there is a lot of hunger for some reason.

I actually think that Muslim societies work quite well within the reactionary and backwards system. My Yemeni friends tell me there is almost no crime in the cities of Yemen. You can walk down the street and midnight and not fear a thing. Street crime against females is nearly unknown. A woman I knew went to Saudi Arabia and said she used to walk around at midnight not fearing a thing.

There is little of the chaos, filth, random violence and cruelty and sheer evil that we see in South Asia, Black Africa and even Latin America. The preacher calls to prayer several times a day, and all bow down and pray. Men are men and women are women. There is a rhythm that ties it all together and somehow makes it work.

It’s twisted, backwards and nuts, but it’s more or less functional within that archaic mindset.

The problem is that it looks like the Muslim system is not that stable. It is only stable when a dictator is holding everything down. Cut that loose, and things can fall apart quite rapidly with religious based civil wars. Violence and oppression against non-Muslims is a continuous backdrop in most Muslim societies – it’s only a nice place if you are Muslim.

I have a feeling that if you go along with the rules, you will probably be ok under Islam. But I’m an asshole, and I try to break rules everywhere I go. If I were living under Islam, I would probably try to steal some Muslim’s wife and fuck her. I have a feeling that if you break societal codes like that, the punishment is pretty vicious.

There is a background violence in these cultures, a sort of a seething sense of superiority and fanaticism that threatens to rear up at any time. You mess up and you could easily find your ass kicked, in jail or on a slab.

While Muslim society is functional for the complacent and obedient, it seems terrifying to a guy like me.

“Why We Are Afraid, A 1400 Year Secret,” by Dr Bill Warner

This is a video by an Islamophobic (he calls himself a counter-jihadist) far rightwing activist in the US. As such, it rubs me the wrong way. I don’t like US reactionary Islamophobia. It’s retarded.

On the other hand, most of what this reactionary scholar says about Islam is true. The Muslims are in a similar situation with US Blacks. Just as the behavior of Blacks gives ammunition to their haters, the same is true with Muslims. If so many Blacks and Muslims didn’t act so bad in the first place, there would be little hatred and discrimination against them.

Hence it’s a sad fact about Islam that much of what Islamophobes accuse it of is actually true. This is especially true if we look at Islam historically as opposed in its moderated essence. The era of the Caliphates when all of Islam lived under Islamic Law shows us the true essence of Islam. The modern secular era and the reactionary Islamist backlash against it is but a distortion.

The scholar points out the obvious: The Golden Age of Islam in Spain and Baghdad was anything but. It was only tolerant and open-minded in comparison to the backwardness and reactionary stupidity that preceded and followed these eras.

To be fair, most religions have been pretty backwards in a historical sense. The Catholic Church committed many outrages against heretics and even the advancement of science.

Traditional Talmudic Judaism in Europe was a miasma of backwardness, superstition and stupidity under a “dictatorship of the rabbis” as Israel Shahak painfully points out. It is this prison of idiocy that the formation of Orthodox Judaism in the late 1800′s sought to return the Jews to, and it is this nightmare of totalitarian nonsense that the Reform and Conservative Jews want to swim away from.

Jews only began to climb out of this hole when Napoleon tore down the walls of the ghettos and welcomed the Jews into secular society. Through the 19th Century, most progressive thinkers regarded the Jews that emerged from centuries in the ghetto as damaged creatures in need of assimilation to society to heal them.

But back to the video.

Warner points out that Islam has always been an expansionist religion.

Those of my mother’s generation, wise and correct about so many things, often said, “Islam was spread by the sword. It was convert or die.” This is not completely true, but there is much fact behind this. Muslims did not always offer that stark choice to the conquered or the dhimmis, but they offered it often enough. In jihadi-stricken areas today, Muslims continue to occasionally make this demand of infidels. We have some recent reports out of Iraq of such demands.

Even after conquest, repression and dhimmitude slowly withered away non-Muslim majorities down to the tiniest of minorities. This constant repression was combined with occasional massacres and even horrific and sometimes genocidal wars.

Once again, let us look to our elders.

Those in my mother’s generation noted about the Armenian genocide and the genocide in East Timor: “Yes, but the Turks were killing the Armenians because they were Christians. And the Indonesians were killing the East Timorese because they were Christians.” I, being PC, protested this forbidden account, but my elders just shook their heads. “No, they killed them because they were Christians. That’s how Islam works.”

We who went through the revolutions of the 1960′s ridicule our elders as old fashioned and bigoted fogeys. We have carved out a new way, a way of liberation, Political Correctness. But it turns out in so many ways that our elders were right, and we revolutionaries were wrong. Among other things, my elders understood the nature of Islam.

Warner points out correctly that not only was Islam spread by sword, it made continuous raids on neighboring non-Muslim regions including Europe. The attempts were to conquer them for the Muslims. He also suggests that the Dark Ages were caused by Islam’s war on Christian Europe. That is certainly a provocative topic in our PC times, but he may be correct. He also points out that the wars of conquest never really ended until the fall of the Caliphate in 1918.

Where I feel he is wrong is in assigning all modern Islamist attacks to jihadi attempts to conquer the infidels. Instead, most such wars are occurring in Muslim lands or in majority Muslim lands in non-Muslim states. Examples are the jihads in Southern Thailand, Southern Philippines and northern Nigeria. In all of these wars, sickening slaughters of non-Muslim civilians have taken place for no other reason than “kill the infidels.”

The horrific bombings in India appear to be some sort of a “war on the infidels.” Most other jihadi attacks are attacks on non-Muslim minorities in Muslim lands (typical Muslim persecution of minorities that tends to go on as background under Muslim rule.)

I disagree with Warner that the attacks in Europe are jihadi attacks aimed at conquering Europe for the infidels. Instead, the attacks seem to be Muslim retaliatory attacks against Western wars in Muslim lands (say Iraq) and against non-Muslims who harshly criticize Islam (Theo Van Gogh killing.)

The 9-11 attacks were not attempt to violently convert us as so many misguided folks think (including my Mother’s generation). Instead, Al Qaeda attacked the US as an enemy state that was killing the Muslims in various parts of the world, propping up the Israeli enemy and occupying the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the only people who are complaining about this backwards, violent and barbaric religion are backwards, violent, barbaric, and often-Christian reactionaries in the West. This ideological war is really a war of reactionaries against reactionaries, one fundamentalist group against another.

Amidst all of this, the secular Left, ostensibly opposed to obscurantist barbarism, has lined up with one set of reactionaries (the Islamists) against the other set (fundamentalist Christians). It makes no sense. A reactionary fundamentalist is a reactionary fundamentalist. The flavors matter little as it all digests the same in the end.

“Reform and Orthodoxy in Islam: Understanding the Dualism in Islam Through a Historical Narrative,” by Dota

This is a piece written by one of my commenters, Dota. Enjoy.

Reform and Orthodoxy in Islam: Understanding the Dualism in Islam Through a Historical Narrative

by Dota

The purpose of this essay is to explore the dualism inherent within Islamic theology regarding progress and orthodoxy. This essay argues that Islamic theology lends itself to progress/reform but also contains an element that is retards progress. This essay is intended to provide the reader with a basic introduction to Islamic history and the ideologies that have shaped its course. The scope of this essay lies in understanding the dualism within Islam in light of the historical ideological undercurrents that have shaped Muslim societies over the past 1400 years.

Marx defined human history through class struggle, and similarly I believe that Islamic history can be defined through a dialectic of its own: a perpetual conflict that is born with every generation and determines the direction of the faith. Islam is only as liberal as the Muslim who practices it. It can be constructive or destructive, progressive or regressive. Whenever Islam has been in the hands of modernists, it has flourished. When hijacked by conservatives, it regresses and causes untold misery.

This struggle goes right back to Muhammad himself, as he had to engage the society he was trying to reform. Islam was an indigenous attempt at reforming 7th century Arabian society. As Akar Patel points out, cultures must be engaged from within. An external impetus might prove somewhat effective (the West pushing globalization, economic liberalization etc.), but this would come at a cost: the compromising of a culture’s moral integrity. The culture begins to lose its sense of self, its soul, and what makes it unique.

Genuine progress occurs when motivated and reflective individuals engage the culture from within and push it forward. Muhammad was acutely aware of his society’s values and had a keen insight into Arab psychology. Given his lack of formal education, one can easily conclude that Muhammad was a remarkable man who possessed a quiet brilliance. Islam was to reform Arab society by engaging it from within, but how?

Muhammad clearly had some idea of where he wanted his people to go as he had spent much of his youth as a traveling salesman visiting lands as distant as Syria and Jordan. He had seen the Byzantine Empire and its workings firsthand, and despite the empire being in decline, it left a lasting impression on the future prophet. Cultures never evolve within a vacuum and neither did Islam. Karen Armstrong states that Muhammad’s antidote to Mecca’s materialistic malaise was a spiritual one, an observation that isn’t unreasonable by any stretch.

He was faced with one primary decision: How much of the old culture must be retained and how much of it must be excised for the greater good? He decided to retain the old Bedouin values of chivalry and hospitality by absorbing them into his nascent spiritual framework. Values such as elitism (defined through lineage) and egoism (defined through excessive materialism and not individualism as defined by the West) were to be discarded.

This process did not go smoothly and neither was it expected to. There was resistance on several fronts from Meccan society, but most Muslims are only aware of the spiritual schism: polytheism versus monotheism. The Meccans also did not take too kindly to Muhammad’s more humane approach towards women’s interests. Indeed his own companions, Omar and Abu Hurreirah were deeply patriarchal and rejected Muhammad’s softer approach towards women.

But Islam ultimately triumphed. The Umayyad Dynasty of the 7th Century had gotten immensely corrupt, and a similar ideological battle was being waged between the conservative Umayyad government and the newly formed Mutazalite movement.

The Mutazalite thinkers were appalled at the prevailing amorality of the Umayyad regime that insisted that it was not to be held accountable for its corruption since everything was preordained by God. The Mutazalites, who initially constructed their arguments around Islamic theology, challenged this narrow notion of predestination.

As Majid Fakhry points out, this approach proved ineffective since the Quran makes a case for both predestination and free will. Muslim theologians have tried to reconcile this dichotomy for centuries, but their attempts are beyond the scope of this post.

The Mutazalites then shifted their focus to Greek philosophy (namely Plato) and in doing so, sowed the seeds of a civilization that would eventually influence another one in Europe. The Mutazalites introduced the seed of philosophy within mainstream Islam that eventually led to progress in other disciplines such as science and mathematics. Philosophy was instrumental in inculcating an insatiable curiosity within the Arab and Muslim mind.

The Ummayyads were eventually driven out of power and replaced by the more liberal Abbasids who believed that Islam wasn’t Arab property but instead belonged equally to all those who sincerely recited the Shahada (declaration of faith). This was a radical notion too, as classical Islam was always perceived as an Arab religion by Arabs for Arabs.

The liberal Abbasids were keen on patronizing science, art and philosophy. Philosophers such as Al Kindi, Al Razi and Ibn Sina flourished during this period. Scientists such as Omar Khayyam and Ibn Al Haytham pushed forward the boundaries of science.

Caliph Mamun’s Bait Ul Hikma library (the House of Wisdom) drew scholars from the far-flung corners of the world such as India, China and Persia. Eventually a wave of conservatism spread through the Abbasid caliphate just when there was a hint of an awakening in Europe. The Muslims began to turn their backs on what the Europeans had just begun to taste, the nectar of the intellect. The Abbasids spiraled into decline only to be put out of their misery by the Mongols.

But how did it ever come to this? The tug of war was lost to the conservatives once Caliph Al Mamun died. Al Ghazali waged a tireless war on philosophy and science that led to a resurgence of orthodoxy.

By the 12th century, Islam was firmly in the clutches of the conservatives, with scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah openly calling for a return to an “earlier Islam” which excluded science and philosophy. Taymiyyah’s extreme interpretation of the literalist Hanbali school laid the foundation for another extremist ideology: the Wahhabism of the central Arabian Peninsula.

The Ottomans faced a choice of their own – either rely solely on religious traditions or imitate western systems. The Persians were confronted with a similar choice when the Russians soundly beat the Qajar Dynasty. Muslims must make this same choice today.

But can they? Alexis Tocqueville felt that Islam lacked the edge that Christianity possessed:

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man.

Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.

Indeed it seems that Islam possesses an element within it that retards its own progress. It is easy and indeed very tempting to lapse into orthodoxy by severing one’s connection to reality. You can see this today in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The case of Pakistan is interesting and particularly illuminating. These are essentially Indians who have severed their connection with their Indian heritage. Yet despite this denial, the very same Hindu thinking that they have spurned dominates their worldview – the lack of respect for human life, casteist thinking and dominance of emotion over reason that are characteristic of Hinduism.

Pakistani culture possesses these Hindu traits in abundance, yet in their arrogance, Pakistanis believe that they have transcended their Indian roots. They are deluded fools who have created nothing new and built no lasting legacy for future generations.

But by severing their link to their Indian heritage, Pakistanis are left with no identity save religion. Hence Islam has come to dominate the Pakistani identity and exerts such a stranglehold over their psyche that the condition of Pakistan today clearly fits Tocqueville’s prediction. The Pakistani cannot see beyond Islam. It is the very lens that defines his reality, and he cannot express reality in any other terms.

The Pakistani will choose Islam over common sense. He will choose Islam before economic prosperity, before reason, before the harsh reality that confronts his senses.

And why shouldn’t he? He has no other identity. Without Islam, the Pakistani is no different from a disconnected Borg drone – lost and purposeless. Such is the folly of the idea of Pakistan.

Orthodoxy causes Islamic identity to supersede cultural/ethnic identity. Cultural identity has continuity, and with continuity comes balance, as this is how a society has always interpreted its reality. To discard this equilibrium is to choose suicide over life. This means that unless Islam isn’t in a position of power, it will agitate from within. It will agitate as it struggles to implement its own set of rules against a reality that functions with another set.

The Pakistani struggles in vain against the tide of modernity but chooses to drown instead of learning to swim, if this is what it takes to keep his Islam from being compromised.

So which way forward?

Islam has a built-in survival kit: moderation and reason. The Quran frequently uses phrases like, “Do they not see?” and “Do they not reflect?” It is the only religious scripture that I’m aware of that attempts to rationalize its doctrine. Reason is the divine gift bestowed upon man that makes him God’s most supreme creation. From reason is choice derived. From choice comes free will and the decision to build upon oneself so that man may in time mirror the reflection of God. Thus Islam, like Christianity, celebrates humanity like few other religions in comparison.

It is the Quran’s emphasis on reason that enabled the Arab philosophers to build the foundation of a graceful civilization. Reason begets philosophy, which in turn begets science and art. This brings this essay’s thesis to full circle: The direction of Islam is determined by a struggle between modernists (Reason) and conservatives (Orthodoxy). This conflict is reborn with each generation, and the tug of war goes right back to Muhammad.

So why are the conservatives winning this round? This is largely due to the legacy of colonialism. The drastic reduction of global Muslim power triggered a reactionary response to the ‘humiliation’ inflicted upon them by the West. Conservatives argue that only by reclaiming the pristine religion of the Prophet can Muslims reclaim that which was lost. Does this view sound familiar?

It is no different than the reactionary view held by the Pharisees who believed that only a rigorous observance of Torah would end Jewish humiliation at Roman hands. It was this mindless literalism that Jesus bitterly opposed. Progressive Muslims argue that Muslims must keep pace with current times by improving upon their ailing education institutions and infrastructure.

The battle lines are drawn. In India, the progressives/reformers project their views through the liberal curriculum of the Aligarh Muslim University in the state of Utter Pradesh. Their opponents project their conservative views through the Darul Uloom School. Aligarh was founded in 1875, and Darul Uloom was established a decade earlier, both founded during the height of British power in India. Yet their responses to this adverse reality highlights the bifurcation of Islamic thinking that dates back centuries and spans across several heterogeneous Muslim societies.

Conservatives thrive when ‘Islam is under siege’; at least in post-colonial times. The West’s involvement in the Middle East gives conservatives the upper hand. Islamic countries situated away from the chaos of the Middle East and Central Asia (Indonesia/Malaysia) are generally more modern, progressive and economically prosperous.

To a large degree their success is determined by their Asian values, but also by a peaceful and stable environment where liberals have the upper hand over conservatives. East Asia’s influence on Indonesia and Malaysia has been wholly positive whereas the West’s influence has been fairly negative. The West seeks to challenge and overthrow indigenous ideologies (neoliberalism/neoconservatism), and this approach is myopic, as indigenous nationalism can provoke a relapse.

East Asia on the other hand gently prods its slower Islamic neighbors by setting a good example for them to follow, not unlike a benevolent tutor. This rouses the reformers to engage their cultures from within in order to bring them on par with their neighbors. Confucian Singapore’s success has not gone unnoticed by its neighbors, and nobody embraced Lee Kwan Yew’s ‘Asian Values’ trend more wholeheartedly than Malaysia’s Muhathir Muhammad.

East Asia has created a peaceful and stable environment that fosters trade rather than ideological competition, and it is this softer approach to which Muslims are responding. Ultimately, every indicator tells me that a future rise of Islam is strongly correlated to the rise of East Asia. But it ultimately begins with Muslims making the right choice.

A Critique of Islam

This comes from the comments section of a conservative White racist publication, American Renaissance. The comment quotes several websites, apparently all rightwing. At least one is run by anti-Muslim Jews. Let us put aside for a moment that this critique is written by our enemies, Zionists and the Right.

The painful question is how much truth is there in this critique?

When it comes to identity among Muslims, nationality does not count at all in comparison with culture and religion. The consequence is a powerful and growing opposition to Western culture and values in Muslim ghettos throughout Copenhagen and other major European cities.

To a Muslim (as to the regional precursor peoples going back to Alexander) tribe is nation And failure to make that correct interpretation is a direct result of our legacy inheritance from a millenia of manorial feudalism because Nascere means by birth, not by land. We come from peasant serfs. Not them.

Myself before my brother, we brothers before our cousins, our cousins before the tribe, the tribe before state. And all before Islam.

Islam did not change these peoples exploited, exploitative, natures, it harnessed them by explicitly forbidding them any other lifestyle choice and rewarding them with breeding rights and loot for becoming part of a robber gang.

Said gang takes tribute from one area, denuding it of females on a 4:1 basis of reward to warrior males. Then it recruits on the basis of pillage as genetic persistence rights in the next area over and so on and so forth. Growing as it expands. Because if you want anything from Islam, you must convert.

Before the Renaissance, Islam was the most successful, expansive culture on the planet.

Finding those they cannot convert or kill outright, Islamically trained young toughs today are at a complete loss for how to interact on a cop:boss:landlord level of graduated hierarchies above them because respect and dominance is their whole (rote) acquired culture.

A system of warrior privilege that cannot live but that it grows through conquest.

And what’s most despicable about this is that the Muslims know it quite well themselves, choosing to conceal it behind a facade of ‘Taqqiya’ or tactical disinformation.

Indeed, back in 2005, shortly after the Beslan tragedy, the brother in law of the owner of Al Jazeera, himself the owner of a very influential newspaper in Kuwait, wrote a personal editorial that basically said: “Look you idiots, the whole world thinks Islam is a terrorist religion because 9 out of 10 terrorist acts in the last 10 years have been by or included Islamic indoctrinated youth. You had better get your young men under control or we will be the pariahs of the planet.”

And nobody listened to him. Because he wasn’t telling a shocking unknown.

What The West refuses to acknowledge is that Islam is a majority fundamentalist religion (which is to say natively extremist), of which the high-IQ, college bound, ‘Ivy League sweater wearers’ of the upper class moderates (that Islamic and particularly Iranian TV occasionally parades before the camera) are entirely non-representative. Anymore than the Kennedys are accurate reflections of our culture.

Jizya (legal extortion from non-believers) payments only reinvigorate the belief that strength deserves to dominate weakness as the system or ‘racket’ by which Islam functions as a warrior cult built upon conquest.

For two years I’ve been researching a book about Alexander the Great’s counter-guerrilla campaign in Afghanistan, 330-327 B.C. What struck me most powerfully is that that war is a dead ringer for the ones we’re fighting today – even though Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic.

The heart of every tribal male is that of a warrior. Even the most wretched youth in a Palestinian refugee camp sees himself as a knight of Islam. The Pathan code of nangwali prescribes three virtues: nang – pride; badal – revenge; melmastia – hospitality. These guys are Apaches.

What the warrior craves before all else is respect. Respect from his own people, and, even more, from his enemy. When we of the West understand this, as Alexander did, we’ll have taken the first step toward solving the unsolvable.

Islam is a revealed religion with a distinct set of unchanging rules and guidelines to follow. It is not a religion that is supposed to “come from within” like some new age religion. It seems quite incongruous to claim that one believes that Muhammad was Allah’s prophet and therefore profess to be a Muslim and then reject clear Islamic doctrine as established by Muhammad when the Qur’an demands that Muslims obey Muhammad and follow his “perfect” example.

The religion is named Islam, meaning submission, because its founder, Muhammad, claimed that is the word Allah said to him in several alleged revelations. Otherwise, the religion would surely have been known as Muhammadanism or something similar.

What Went Right Set The Stage For Decline

Understanding what went wrong in the Islamic world is, perhaps, best addressed by first recognizing what went right because the initial success of Islam and its early rise to economic, political, and military power is also a primary cause of what ultimately went wrong.

When Muhammad and his early followers arrived in Medina, it is clear that they were in a less than secure economic state. They had cut themselves off from the protection and support of their tribe – an act that was considered tantamount to a death sentence at the time. Moreover, this severance from their tribe’s support and protection occurred in a hostile environment.

The Arabian Peninsula consists mainly of desert that, under normal circumstances, can only support a low-density population. Whether Muhammad felt that he had no other alternatives or whether he felt he had other options is something we will probably never know with certainty, but there is no question that Muhammad chose to create a society that sustained itself and advanced its interests by preying upon non-Muslims.

Mohammed said: “I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, None has the right to be worshiped but Allah, and whoever says, None has the right to be worshiped but Allah, his life and property will be saved by me…Allah made the Jews leave their homes by terrorizing them so that you killed some and made many captives. And He made you inherit their lands, their homes, and their wealth…Clearly, Muhammad viewed non-Muslims’ land and property as fair game, and his conduct established that he practiced what he preached.

Instead, we see Ahmadiyya Muslims, many Sufi Muslims, and Bahai Muslims all believing they are “Muslims” when they have deviated so far from the religion Muhammad preached and practiced that Muhammad would hardly consider them Muslims. Muhammad once ordered a mosque, whose members were practicing a heretical form of Islam, burned, and his followers burned it to the ground with the heretical Muslims inside, thereby establishing in Islamic doctrine that schisms were not only not to be tolerated, but should be violently suppressed.

One important answer to the question lies in an ingenious social invention arising among the early Muslims. This was a breeding system that motivated successful warriors with a great incentive to spread their faith and their culture. Bloom puts this motivation in stark terms as “the restless effort of human males to find more wombs to carry their seed.”

Islam has the remarkable advantage of being highly patriarchal and polygamous with great sexual benefits for those warriors able to conquer in its name; Islam was and remains a great male racket. Furthermore, these advantages are not the temporary kind that have always been associated with warfare, but continue to exist within the peacetime new order.

Warriors were not the only Muslim males sexually rewarded for advancing Islam. As seen above, Islam was also spread by trade and mercantile activity. The wealth accumulated by a successful merchant could be considerable. Thus, those responsible for promoting Islam beyond the borders of the Dar-al-Islam could also obtain the means of purchasing concubines and of affording multiple wives.

Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil?

Repost from the old site. This is a very, very long piece, so be warned. But the subject, the Yezidi religious group, is extraordinarily complex, as I found out as I delved deeper and deeper into them.

They are still very mysterious and there is a lot of scholarly controversy around them, mostly because they will not let outsiders read their holy books. However, a copy of their holiest book was stolen about 100 years ago and has been analyzed by scholars.

I feel that the analysis below of the Yezidis (there are various competing analyses of them) best summarizes what they are all about, to the extent that such an eclectic group can even be defined at all. The piece is hard to understand at first, but if you are into this sort of thing, after you study it for a while, you can start to put it together. There are also lots of cool pics of devil and pagan religious art below, for those who are interested in such arcana.

See also the companion piece, The Yezidis, a Mysterious Kurdish Religious Sect. This piece was written two years after that one when I realized that the prior piece had barely touched the surface of this very strange religious sect.

The Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group in Iraq practicing an ancient religion, have been accused of being devil worshipers by local Muslims and also by many non-Muslims. I wrote about the Yezidis in depth in a previous post; see them for more background on these interesting people.

The Yezidis appeared in Western media in 2007 due to the stoning death of a Yezidi teenage girl who ran off with a Muslim man. The stoning was done by eight men from her village while another 1000 men watched and cheered them on. Afterward, there has been a lot of conflict between Muslim and Yezidi Kurds.

As Western media turned to the Yezidis, there has been some discussion here about their odd religion. For instance, though the local Muslims condemn them as devil worshipers, the Yezidis strongly deny this. So what’s the truth? The truth, as usual, is much more complicated.

The Yezidis believe that a Creator, or God, created a set of deities that we can call gods, angels or demons, depending on how you want to look at them. So, if we say that the Yezidis worship the devil, we could as well say that they worship angels. It all depends on how you view these deities.

In the history of religion, the gods of one religion are often seen as the devils of another. This is seen even today in the anti-Islamic discourse common amongst US neoconservatives, where the Muslim God is said to be a demonic god, and their prophet is said to be a devilish man.

Christian anti-Semites refer to the Old Testament God of the Jews as being an evil god. Orthodox Jews say that Jesus Christ is being boiled alive in semen in Hell for eternity.

At any rate, to the Yezidis, the main deity created by God is Malak Taus, who is represented by a peacock. Although Yezidis dissimulate about this, anyone who studies the religion closely will learn that Malak Taus is actually the Devil.

On the other hand, the Yezidis do not worship evil as modern-day Satanists do, so the Satanist fascination with the Yezidis is irrational. The Yezidis are a primitive people; agriculturalists with a strict moral code that they tend to follow in life. Why do they worship the Devil then?

First of all, we need to understand that before the Abrahamic religions, many polytheistic peoples worshiped gods of both good and evil, worshiping the gods of good so that good things may happen, and worshiping the gods of evil so that bad things may not happen. The Yezidis see God as a source of pure good, who is so good that there is no point in even worshiping him.

In this, they resemble Gnosticism, in which God was pure good and the material world and man were seen as polluted with such evil that the world was essentially an evil place. Men had only a tiny spark of good in them amidst a sea of evil, and the Gnostics tried to cultivate this spark.

This also resembles the magical Judaism of the Middle Ages (Kabbalism). The Kabbalists said that God was “that which cannot be known” (compare to the Yezidi belief that one cannot even pray to God), in fact, the concept of God was so ethereal to the Kabbalists that mere men could not even comprehend the very concept. A Kabbalist book says that God is “endless pure white light”. This comes close to my own view of what God is.

Compare to the Yezidi view that God “pure goodness”. The Yezidi view of God is quite complex. It is clear that he is at the top of the totem pole, yet their view of him is not the same as the gods of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or of the Greeks, although it is similar to Plato’s conception of the absolute.

Instead, it is similar to the Deists. God merely created the world. As far as the day to day running of things, that is actually up to the intermediary angels. However, there is one exception. Once a year, on New Years Day, God calls his angels together and hands the power over to the angel who is to descend to Earth.

In some ways similar to the Christian Trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost, the Yezidis believe that God is manifested in three forms.

An inscription of the Christian Trinity, the father, or God, as an old man with a beard; Jesus, a young man, and the Holy Ghost, here depicted as a winged creature similar to Malak Tus, the winged peacock angel. Compare to Yezidi reference for Šeiḫ ‘Adî, Yazid and Malak Tus (Father, Son and Holy Ghost)

The three forms are the peacock angel, Malak Tus; an old man, Šeiḫ ‘Adî (compare to the usual Christian portrayal in paintings of God as an old man with a long white beard); and a young man, Yazid (compare to the usual Christian paintings of Jesus as a healthy European-looking man with a beard and a beatific look – a similar look is seen in Shia portraits of Ali).

Since there is no way to talk to God, one must communicate with him through intermediaries (compare to intermediary saints like Mary in Catholicism and Ali in Shiism). The Devil is sort of a wall between the pure goodness of God and this admittedly imperfect world.

This is similar again to Gnosticism, where the pure good God created intermediaries called Aeons so that a world that includes evil (as our world does) could even exist in the first place. On the other hand, Malak Tus is seen my the Yezidis as neither an evil spirit nor a fallen angel, but as a divinity in his own right.

One wonders why the Malak Tus is represented by a bird. The answer is that worshipping birds is one of the oldest known forms of idol worship. It is even condemned in Deuteronomy 4: 16, 17: “Lest ye corrupt yourselves and make a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air.”

More likely, the peacock god is leftover from the ancient pagan bird-devil gods of the region. The ancient Babylonians, Assyrians both worshiped sacred devil-birds, and carvings of them can be seen on their temples. The Zoroastrians also worshiped a sort of devil-bird called a feroher.

A winged demon from ancient Assyria. Yezidism appears to have incorporated elements of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions, making it ultimately a very ancient religion. Note that devils often have wings like birds. Remember the flying monkey demons in the Wizard of Oz?

The pagan Phoenicians, Philistines and Samaritans worshiped a dove, and the early monotheistic Hebrews condemned the Samaritans for this idol-worship. The pagans of Mecca also worshiped a sacred dove. Pagan Arabian tribes also worshiped an eagle called Nasar.

What is truly odd is that peacocks are not native to the Yezidi region, but instead to the island of Sri Lanka. The Yezidis must have heard about this bird from travelers and incorporated it into their religion somehow.

In the Koran, both the Devil and the peacock were thrown out of Heaven down to Earth, with the Devil and the peacock both suffering similar punishments. So here we can see Islam associating the peacock with the Devil also.

In popular mythology, peacocks tend to represent pride. Note that the Koran says that the Devil was punished for excessive pride (compare with a similar Christian condemnation of excessive pride). Peacocks are problematic domestic fowl, and tend to tear up gardens, and so are associated with mischief.

The Yezidis revere Malak Tus to such a great extent that he is almost seen as one with God (compare the Catholic equation of Mary with Jesus, the Christian association of Jesus with God, and the Shia Muslim association of Ali with Mohammad).

Malak Tus was there from the start and will be there at the end, he has total control over the world, he is omniscient and omnipresent and he never changes. They do not allow anyone to say his name, as this seems to imply that he is degraded. Malak Tus is the King of the Angels, and he is ruling the Earth for a period of 10,000 years.

They also superstitiously avoid saying an word that resembles the word for Satan. When speaking Arabic, they refuse to use the Arabic shatt for river, as it sounds like the word for Satan. They substitute Kurdish ave instead. Compare this to the Kabbalist view of God as “that which can not even be comprehended (i.e., spoken) by man.

In addition to Malak Taus, there are six other angels: Izrafael, Jibrael, Michael, Nordael, Dardael, Shamnael, and Azazael. They were all at a meeting in Heaven when God told them that they would worship no one other than him. This worked for 40,000 years, until God mixed Earth, Air, Fire and Water to create Man, as Adam.

God told the seven angels to bow before Adam, and six agreed. Malak Taus refused, citing God’s order to obey only Him. Hence, Malak Taus was cast out of Heaven and became the Archangel of all the Angels. Compare this to the Christian and Muslim view of the Devil, the head of the angels, being thrown out of Heaven for the disobedience of excessive pride.

In the meantime, Malak Taus is said to have repented his sins and returned to God as an angel. So, yes, the Yezidis do worship the Devil, but in their religion, he is a good guy, not a bad guy. They are not a Satanic cult at all. In Sufism, the act of refusing to worship Adam (man) over God would be said to be a positive act, one of refusing to worship the created over the creator, as in Sufism, one is not to worship anything but God.

The Yezidis say that God created Adam and Eve, but when they were asked to produce their essences, Adam’s produced a boy, but Eve’s was full of insects and other unpleasant things. God decided that he would propagate humanity (the Yezidis) out of Adam alone, leaving Eve out of the picture. Specifically, he married Adam’s offspring to a houri.

We can see the traditional views of the Abrahamic religions of women as being sources of evil, tempters, sources of strife, conflict and other bad things. The Yezidis see themselves as different from all other humans. Whereas non-Yezidis are the products of Adam and Eve, Yezidis are the products of Adam alone.

Eve subsequently left the Garden of Eden, which allowed the world to be created. So, what the Abrahamic religions see as man’s greatest fall in the Garden, the Yezidis see as mankind’s greatest triumphs. The Yezidis feel that the rest of humanity of is descended from Ham, who mocked his father, God.

Compare this to the Abrahamic religions’ view of women as a source of corruption. Christians say that Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, causing them to be tossed out. In Islam, women are regarded as such a source of temptation and fitna (dissension) that they are covered and often kept out of sight at all times. In Judaism, women’s hair is so tempting to men that they must shave it all off and wear wigs.

The Yezidis say they are descended directly from Adam, hence they are the Chosen People (compare to the Jewish view of themselves as “Chosen People”).

Yezidism being quite possible the present-day remains of the original religion of the Kurds, we must acknowledge that for the last 2000 years, the Yezidis have been fighting off other major religions. First Christianity came to the region.

As would be expected, the Nestorian Christians of Northern Iraq, or “Nasara” Christian apostates, as an older tradition saw them, hold that the Yezidis were originally Christians who left the faith to form a new sect. The Nestorians and other ancient Christian sects deny the human or dual nature of Jesus – instead seeing him as purely divine.

This is in contrast to another group also called “Nasara” in Koran – these being the early Jewish Christian sects such as the Ebionites, Nazarenes and Gnostics, who followed Jesus but denied his divine nature, believe only in the Book of Matthew, and retained many Jewish traditions, including revering the Jewish Torah, refusing to eat pork, keeping the Sabbath and circumcision.

Mohammad apparently based his interpretation of Christianity on these sects. The divinity of Jesus was denied in the Koran under Ebionite influence. The Koran criticizes Christians for believing in three Gods – God, Jesus and Mary – perhaps under the influence of what is called the “Marianistic heresy”. At the same time, the Koran confused human and divine qualities in Jesus due to Nestorian influence.

Finally, the Koran denied the crucifixion due to Gnostic influence, especially the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. The local Muslims, similarly, hold that the Yezidis are apostates, having originally been Muslims who left Islam to form a new religion.

There is considerable evidence that many Yezidis were formerly Christians, as the Christian story holds. Šeiḫ ’Adî, one of the tripartite of angels worshiped by the Yezidis, was a Sufi Muslim mystic from Northern Iraq in the 1100′s. He attracted many followers, including many Christians and some Muslims who left their faith to become Yezidis. Yezidism existed before Šeiḫ ’Adî, but in a different form.

Šeiḫ ’Adî also attracted many Persian Zoroastrians, who were withering under the boot of Muslim dhimmitude and occasional massacre in Iran. Šeiḫ ‘Adî (full name Šeiḫ ‘Adî Ibn Masafir Al-Hakkari) was a Muslim originally from Bait Far, in the Baalbeck region of the Bekaa Valley of what is now Eastern Lebanon.

He came to Mosul for spiritual reasons. He was said to be a very learned man, and many people started to follow him. After he built up quite a following, he retired to the mountains above Mosul where he built a monastery and lived as a hermit, spending much of his time in caves and caverns in the mountains with wild animals as his only guests.

His followers were said to worship him as a God and believed that in the afterlife, they would be together with him. He died in 1162 in the Hakkari region near Mosul. At the site of his death, the Yezidis erected a shrine and it became one of the holiest sites in the religion. However, Šeiḫ ’Adî is not the founder of Yezidism, as many believe. His life and thought just added to the many strains in this most syncretistic of religions.

The third deity in the pseudo-”Trinity” of the Yezidis is a young man named Yezid. They say they are all descended from this man, whom they often refer to as God, as they sometimes refer to Šeiḫ ’Adî. In Šeiḫ ’Adî’s temple, there are inscriptions to both Šeiḫ ’Adî and Yezid, each on opposing walls of the temple. In a corner of this temple, a fire, or actually a lamp, is kept burning all night, reminiscent of Zoroastrianism.

There is a lot of controversy about what the word Yezid in Yezidi stands for. The religion itself, in its modern form, probably grew out of followers of Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan, the 2nd Caliph in the Umayyad Dynasty of Caliphs. Yazid fought a battle against Mohammad’s grandson, Hussayn, in a battle for the succession of the Caliphate.

Hussayn’s followers were also the followers of Ali, the former caliph who was assassinated. The followers of Hussayn and Ali are today known as the Shia. The Sunni follow in the tradition of the Umayyads. In a battle in Karbala in 680, Husayn and all his men were killed at Kufa and the women and children with them taken prisoner.

To the Shia, Yazid is the ultimate villain. Most Sunnis do not view him very favorably either, and regard the whole episode as emblematic of how badly the umma had fallen apart after Mohammad died.

Nevertheless, there had been groups of Sunnis who venerated Yazid Ibn Muawiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan and the Umayyads in general in northern Iraq for some time even before Šeiḫ ’Adî appeared on the scene. Šeiḫ ’Adî himself was descended from the Umayyads.

Reverence for Yazid Ibn Muawiyah mixed with the veneration of Šeiḫ ’Adî in the early Yezidis. It was this, mixed in with the earlier pagan beliefs of the Semites and Iranians discussed elsewhere, along with a dollop of Christianity, that formed the base of modern Yezidism. But its ultimate roots are far more ancient. Yezidism had a base, but it was not yet formed in its modern version.

Here we turn to the etymology of the word Yezidi. It is possible that the figure of “Yezid”, the young man-God in the Yezidi trinity, represents Yazid Ibn Muawiyah. By the mid-1200′s, the local Muslims were getting upset about the Yezidis excessive devotion to these two men. In the mid-1400′s the local Muslims fought a large battle against the Yezidis.

To this day, the top Yezidi mirs are all related to the Umayyads. Muslim scholars say that Yezid bin Unaisa was the founder of the modern-day Yezidis. Bin Unaisa was one of the early followers of the Kharijites, an early fanatical fundamentalist sect that resembled our modern-day Al Qaeda and other takfiri Salafi-jihadi terrorists. Bin Unaisa was said to be a follower of the earliest Kharijites.

These were the first Kharijites. Early split-offs from Ali’s army, they took part in the Battle of Nahrawan against Ali’s forces outside Madaen in what is now the Triangle of Death in Iraq. In 661, the Kharijites assassinated Ali, one of the penultimate moments in the Sunni-Shia split.

At some point, bin Unaisa split from the Kharijites, except for one of their early followers who were following a sect Al-Abaḍia, founded by ‘Abd-Allah Ibn Ibad. He said that any Muslim who committed a great sin was an infidel. Considering his fundamentalist past, he developed some very unorthodox views for a Muslim.

He said that God would send a new prophet to Persia (one more Iranian connection with the Yezidis), that God would send down a message to be written by this prophet in a book, and that this prophet would leave Islam and follow the religion of the Sabeans or Mandeans. Nevertheless, he continued to hold some Kharijite beliefs, including that God alone should be worshiped and that all sins were forms of idolatry.

In line with this analysis, the first Yezidis were a Kharijite subsect. The fact that bin Unaisa said that the new prophet would follow Sabeanism implies that he himself either followed this religion at one time or had a high opinion of it.

Muslim historians mention three main Sabean sects. They seemed to have derived in part from the ancient pagan religion of Mesopotamia. They were polytheists who worshiped the stars. After the Islamic conquest, they referred to themselves as Sabeans in order to receive protection as one of the People of the Book (the Quran mentions Jews, Christians and Sabeans and People of the Book).

One of the Sabean sects was called Al-Ḫarbâniyah. They believed that God dwelt within things that were good and rational. He had one essence but many appearances, in other words. God was pure good, and could not make anything evil. Evil was either accidental or necessary for life, or caused by an evil force. They also believed in the transmigration of souls (reincarnation).

It is interesting that the beliefs of this sect of Sabeans resemble the views of modern Yezidis. So Yezîd bn Unaisa believed in God and the Resurrection Day, he probably respected angels and the stars, yet he was neither polytheistic nor a true follower of Mohammad.

At the same time, he lined himself up with those People of the Book who said that Mohammad was a prophet, yet did not follow him (in this respect, he was similar to Western non-Muslims who acknowledge Mohammad as the prophet of the Arabs).

Although most orthodox histories of the Yezidis leave it out, it seems clear at this point that Yezîd bn Unaisa was the founder of the Yezidi religion in its modern form and that the Yezidis got their name from Yezîd bn Unaisa. This much may have been lost to time, for the Yezidis themselves say that Yezidi comes from the Kurdish word Yezdan or Êzid meaning God.

After naming their movement after Yezîd bn Unaisa, the Yezidis learned of Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s reputation, and become his followers, along with many Muslims, Christians and Iranians.

Like their founder, the Yezidis believe in God and the Resurrection, expect a prophet from Iran, revere angels and stars, regard every sin as idolatry, respect Mohammad as a prophet yet do not follow him and at the same time pay no attention to Ali (recall that the early Kharijites assassinated Ali). Being opposed to both Mohammad and Ali, bn Unaisa is logically despised by both the Sunni and the Shia.

The fact that the Yezidis renounced the prophet of the Arabs (Mohammad) while expecting a new one from Iran logically appealed to a lot of Persians at the time. Hence, many former Zoroastrians, or fire-worshipers, from Iran joined the new religion, surely injecting their strains into this most syncretistic of religions.

There is good evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians. The Yezidis around Mosul go by the surname of Daseni, of Dawasen in the plural. It so happens that there was a Nestorian diocese in Mosul called Daseni, or Dasaniyat. It disappeared around the time of Šeiḫ ’Adî. The implication is that so many of its members became Yezidis that the Diocese folded.

Furthermore, many names of Yezidi villages are actually names in the Syriac (Christian) language, more evidence that many Yezidis are former Christians.

Adding even more weight to this theory, the Yezidis retain two Christian customs – the baptism and the Eucharist.

The Yezidis must baptize their children at the earliest possible age and the priest puts his hand on the child’s head as her performs the rite. Both customs mirror the Christian baptism precisely.

When a Yezidi couple marries, they go to a local Nestorian Church to partake of the Eucharist. The cup of wine they drink is called the cup of Isa (Jesus). The Yezidi have great respect for Christian saints and houses of worship, and kiss the doors and walls of churches when they enter them.

When a Yezidi woman goes to the home of her bridegroom on wedding day, she is supposed to visit every every religious temple along the way, even the churches. On the other hand, Yezidis never enter a mosque. Sadly, the Yezidi reverence for Christianity is not returned by the Eastern Christians, who despise the Yezidis as devil-worshipers.

They revere both Jesus and Mohammad as religious teachers, not as prophets. They have also survived via a hefty dose of taqqiya, or dissimulation, in this case pretending outwardly to be some species of Shia Muslims.

This is common for minority faiths around the region, including the Alawi and Druze, who have both proclaimed at the top of their lungs that they are Muslims and have hidden to the aspects of their religion which would cause the Muslims to disown them at best or kill them at worst. The primary Islamic influence on the Yezidis is actually Sufism, not Shiism per se.

There are traces of other religions – Hinduism may possibly be seen in the five Yezidi castes, from top to bottom – Pir, Shaikh, Kawal, Murabby, and Mureed (followers). Mureeds are about on a par with Dalits or Untouchables in Hinduism. Marriage across castes is strictly forbidden, as it has been disapproved in India.

On the other hand, pre-Islamic Iran also had a caste system, and the base of the Yezidi religion seems to be derived from Persian Zoroastrianism. The Yezidi, like the Druze and the Zoroastrians, do not accept converts, and like the Druze, think that they will be reincarnated as their own kind (Druze think they will be reincarnated as Druze; Yezidis think they will be reincarnated as Yezidis).

The Yezidis can be considered fire-worshipers in a sense; they obviously got this from the Zoroastrians. The Yezidis say, “Without fire, there would be no life.” This is true even in our modern era, if we substitute “electrical power” for fire, our lives would surely diminish. Even today, when Kurdish Muslims swear on an oath, they say, “I swear by this fire…”

Many say there is a resemblance between Malak Taus and the Assyrian God Tammuz, though whether the name Malak Taus is actually derived from Tammuz is much more problematic. Tammuz was married to the Assyrian moon goddess, Ishtar. But this connection is not born out by serious inquiry.

Ishtar the Goddess of the Moon, here represented as a bird goddess. Worship of birds is one of the oldest forms of pagan idolatry known to man. What is it about birds that made them worthy of worship by the ancients? The miracle of flight?

Where do the Yezidis come from? The Yezidis themselves say that they came from the area around Basra and the lower Euphrates, then migrated to Syria and then to Sinjar, Mosul and Kurdistan.

In addition to worshiping a bird-god, there are other traces of the pre-Islamic pagan religions of the Arabs in Yezidism.

They hold the number 7 sacred, a concept that traces back to the ancient Mesopotamians. The Yezidis have seven sanjaks and each one has seven burners of the flame, their God created seven angels and the sculpture carved on the temple of Šeiḫ ’Adî has seven branches.

The Sabeans, another ancient religion of Mesopotamia who are now called star-worshipers by their detractors, also worshiped seven angels who guided the courses of seven planets – it is from this formulation that our seven days of the week are derived. In the ancient religion of Assyria, Ishtar descended through seven gates to the land of no return. The ancient Hebrews likewise utilized the number seven in their religion.

An ancient seven-armed candelabra, a symbol nowadays used in the Jewish religion, with demonic sea monsters drawn on the base.

The Yezidis worship the sun and moon at their rising and setting, following the ancient Ḥarranians, a people who lived long ago somewhere in northern Iraq. Sun-worship and moon-worship are some of the oldest religious practices of Man. The ancient pagans of Canaan worshiped the Sun.

At the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the religion practiced there had little in common with Talmudic Judaism of today. For instance, the horses of the Sun were worshiped at that temple (see II Kings 25: 5, 11). The ancient Judeans, who the modern-day Jews claim spiritual connection with, actually worshiped the “host of heaven” – the Sun, the Moon and the Planets. So much for “the original monotheists, eh?

In Babylonia, there were two temples to the Sun-God Shamas.

Another pre-Islamic Arab pagan belief is the belief in sacred wells and sanctuaries that contain them. The springs contain water that has curative powers. The holy water found at the Zamzam Well in Mecca is an example; even to this day, Muslims bottle the water and carry it off for this purpose. Often sacred clothes are used to make these pilgrimages, because ordinary clothes are thought to contaminate the holy site.

In pre-Islamic days, when the pagans circled the rock at the Kaaba, they were completely naked. In Islam, men and women are supposed to remove their clothing and wear a special garb as they circulate around the rock. In Mandeanism, both men and women go to the Mishkana, or tabernacle, take off their clothes, and bathe in the circular pool. Emerging, they put on the rasta, a ceremonial white garment.

At the temple of Šeiḫ ‘Adî, there is a sacred pool. The Yezidis throw coins, jewelry and other things into this pool as offerings. They think that Šeiḫ ‘Adî takes these things from time to time. And they must remove their clothes, bathe and wear a special garment when they visit the holy valley where this temple resides.

The ancient Arabs also worshiped trees. There were sacred trees at Nejran, Hadaibiya and Mecca. The pagans hung women’s ornaments, fine clothes, ostrich eggs, weapons and other items.

Similarly, the Yezidis also worship trees. They have their favorite trees, and sick people go to these trees and hang pieces of cloth on them, hoping to get well, and believe that whoever takes one of these down will get sick with whatever disease the person who hung the cloth had.

An inscription of a sacred tree from Ancient Babylonian civilization. Trees were worshiped not just in ancient Arabia; they were also worshiped in Mesopotamia.

The Christian Trinity combined with the pagan Tree of Life, in an interesting ancient Chaldean inscription that combines pagan and Christian influences. The Tree of Life was also utilized in Kabbalism, Jewish mysticism from the Middle Ages. Nowadays the symbol is used by practitioners of both White and Black Magic. Radical Islam is committing genocide once again on the Christians of Iraq, including the Chaldeans.

Yet another Tree of Life, this time from ancient Assyria, an ancient civilization in Mesopotamia. The concept of a tree of life is a pagan concept of ancient pedigree.

The ancient Meccans used to worship stones. At one point the population became so large that they had to move out of the valley where the Kaaba resided, so when they formed their new settlements, they took rocks from the holy place and piled them outside their settlements and made a sort of shrine out of these things, parading around the rock pile as they moved around the Kaaba.

In Palestine, there were sacred wells at Beersheba and Kadesh, a sacred tree at Shekem and a sacred rock at Bethel. As in animism, it was believed that divine powers or spirits inhabited these rocks, trees and springs. This tradition survives to this day in the folk religion of the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.

The Yezidis also have certain stones that they worship. They kiss these stones in reverence.

When the Yezidis reach the goal of their pilgrimage or hajj, they become very excited and start shouting. After fasting all day, they have a big celebration in the evenings, with singing and dancing and gorging on fine dishes.

This hajj, where they worship a spring under Šeiḫ ‘Adî’s tomb called Zamzam and then climb a mountain and shoot off guns, is obviously taken from the Muslim hajj. Mecca has a Zamzam Spring, and pilgrims climb Mount ‘Arafat on hajj.

The shouting, feasting, singing, dancing and general excitement is typical of a pagan festival. The non-Yezidi neighbors of the Yezidis claim that Yezidis engage in immoral behavior on this hajj. No one knows if this is true or not, but if they do, it may be similar to the festivals of the Kadeshes discussed in the Old Testament, where people engaged in licentious behavior in their temples.

Although the Yezidis have a strict moral code, observers say that they allow adultery if both parties are willing. That’s pretty open-minded for that part of the world.