Yazidi
Ideology | Active
1156 CE to 2057 CE
The Yazidi (also Yezidi, or Êzidî) are a Kurdish ethnoreligious group with Indo-Iranian roots.
They currently live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq.
Additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Turkey, and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany.
Their religion, Yazidism, is a branch of Yazdânism, and is seen as a highly syncretic complex of local Kurdish beliefs that contains Zoroastrian elements and Islamic Sufi doctrine introduced to the area by Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir in the 12th century.
The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel.
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The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking people who adhere to a branch of Yazdanism that blends elements of Mithraism, pre-Islamic Mesopotamian religious traditions, Christianity and Islam.
Their principal holy site is in Lalish, northeast of Mosul.
The Yazidis' own name for themselves is Êzidî or Êzîdî or, in some areas, Dasinî (the latter, strictly speaking, is a tribal name).
Some scholars have derived the name Yazidi from Old Iranic yazata (divine being), but most say it is a derivation from Umayyad Caliph Yazid I (Yazid bin Muawiyah), revered by the Yazidis as an incarnation of the divine figure Sultan Ezi.
Yazidis, themselves, believe that their name is derived from the word Yezdan or Êzid "God".
The Yazidis' cultural practices are observably Kurdish, and almost all speak Kurmanjî (Northern Kurdish), with the exception of the villages of Bashiqa and Bahazane, where Arabic is spoken.
Kurmanjî is the language of almost all the orally transmitted religious traditions of the Yazidis.
Thus, religious origins are somewhat complex.
The religion of the Yazidis is a highly syncretic one: Sufi influence and imagery can be seen in their religious vocabulary, especially in the terminology of their esoteric literature, but much of the mythology is non-Islamic.
Their cosmogonies apparently have many points in common with those of ancient Persian religions.
Early writers attempted to describe Yazidi origins, broadly speaking, in terms of Islam, or Persian, or sometimes even pagan religions; however, publications since the 1990s have shown such an approach to be overly simplistic.
The origin of the Yazidi religion is now usually seen by scholars as a complex process of syncretism, whereby the belief system and practices of a local faith had a profound influence on the religiosity of adherents of the ʻAdawiyya Sufi order living in the Kurdish mountains, and caused it to deviate from Islamic norms relatively soon after the death of its founder, Shaykh ʻAdī ibn Musafir (Kurdish Şêx Adî), who is said to be of Umayyad descent.
He had settled in the valley of Laliş (some thirty-six miles northeast of Mosul) in the early twelfth century.
Şêx Adî himself, a figure of undoubted orthodoxy, enjoys widespread influence.
He dies in 1162, and his tomb at Laliş become a focal point of Yazidi pilgrimage.
Following the slow disintegration of the Safavid state at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were uprisings in the Northeast Caucasus against the Persian rule.
The Russian and Ottoman Empire, both imperial rivals of the Persians, had exploited these.
Peter the Great declared war on Persia in 1722 and started the Russo-Persian War, in which the Russians for the first time make an expedition for the capture of Derbent and beyond down to the Caucasus.
During and before the occupation of Derbent by Peter I, the naib of city had been Imam Quli Khan and was naturally a Shiite like the rest of the Safavid Empire.
He offered the Russian emperor the keys to the city gates.
Peter I had reappointed Imam Quli Khan as the head of Derbent and its "native" troops by assigning him the rank of Major-General.
Following the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, the Safavid Shah Sultan Husayn, whose empire was for years already in disarray and crumbling, had in September 1723 been forced to cede Derbent alongside the many other Iranian territories in the Caucasus.
However, some years later in connection with the aggravation of Russian-Turkish relations, and the new rise of Persia now led by the brilliant military general Nader Shah, Russia had found itself forced to cede all territories back by March 1735 in the Treaty of Ganja in order to deter itself from a costly war against Persia, and to construct an alliance against the common neighboring foe; the Ottoman Empire.
Most of the other territories had already been given back in the Treaty of Resht in 1732 for similar reasons.
After the death of Nadir Shah in 1747 his huge empire disintegrates and the former Persian provinces in the Caucasus (Beylerbeyis) form two dozen semi-independent and dependent khanates, one of which is the Derbent Khanate.
Starting from 1747 with the title of Khan, the first ruler of the Derbent Khanate is the son of Imam Kuli Khan, Muhammad Hassan (also mentioned as Magomed-Hussein or Mohammed Hussein).
Ali-qoli khan is the eldest son of Nader's brother, Ebrahim Khan.
Nader had appointed him governor of Mashad in 1737.
In the same year he married Princess Ketevan, daughter of the Georgian king Teimuraz II, Nader's ally.
In 1740 he was also married to a daughter of Abu'l-Fayz, ruler of the recently subdued Bukhara.
From 1743 to 1747, Ali-qoli khan has commanded Nader's troops against the Yazidis of Kurdistan, the Karakalpaks and Uzbeks of Khwarazm and in Sistan.
He had then run in trouble with his increasingly suspicious uncle over the latter's decision to levy one hundred thousand tomans on him.
In April 1747, in conjunction with the rebels of Sistan, Ali-qoli khan had occupied Herat and had induced the Kurds to enter into a rebellion.
On arriving at Mashad, Ali-qoli sends a loyal force to the fortress of Kalat, where they kill all of Nader's issue with the exception of his fourteen-year-old grandson Shahrukh.
On July 6, 1747, Ali-qoli is declared the shah under the name of Adil Shah, "the just king".
Adil Shah had sent his brother Ebrahim Mirza as a governor to Isfahan, while he remained in Mashad with his unpopular Georgian favorite, Sohrab Khan.
Later this year, he defeats his erstwhile Kurdish allies, who had refused to supply grain for his famine-stricken army and capital, and has several of his supporters put to death on suspicion of conspiracy.
The collapse of Afsharid rule over Iran with the death of Nader Shah has given the chieftain of the Qoyunlu clan, Mohammad Hasan Qajar, the opportunity to try to seize Astarabad, capital of Mazandaran, for himself.
Adil Shah now marches against Mazandaran in a futile attempt to bend the Qajar tribe into submission.
Although he fails to capture Mohammad Hasan, he manages to capture the latter's eldest son, five-year-old Mohammad Khan, whom at first he plans to kill, but whose life he later chooses to spare and instead has him castrated and thereafter freed, which is why he is known by the title of "Agha", a common title among eunuchs who serve at the court.
His childhood and early teens coincided with the occupation of Kakheti by the Ottomans from 1732 until 1735, when they were ousted from Georgia by Nader Shah of Iran, in his two successive campaigns of 1734 and 1735, by which the latter had quickly reestablished Persian rule over Georgia.
Teimuraz had sided with the Persians and was installed as a Persian wali (governor) in neighboring Kartli.
Teimuraz and Heraclius had remained loyal to the shah, partly in order to prevent the comeback of the rival Mukhrani branch, whose fall early in the 1720s had opened the way to Teimuraz's accession in Kartli.
From 1737 to 1739, Heraclius had commanded a Georgian auxiliary force during Nader’s expedition in India and gained a reputation of an able military commander.
He then served as a lieutenant to his father and assumed the regency when Teimuraz was briefly summoned for consultations in the Persian capital of Isfahan in 1744.
During his father's absence, Heraclius defeated a coup attempt by the rival Georgian prince Abdullah Beg of the Mukhrani dynasty, and helped Teimuraz suppress the aristocratic opposition to the Persian hegemony led by Givi Amilakhvari.
As a reward, Nader had granted the kingship of Kartli to Teimuraz and of Kakheti to Heraclius in 1744, and arranged the marriage of his nephew Ali-Qoli Khan, who eventually would succeed him as Adil Shah, to Teimuraz’s daughter Kethevan, yet, both Georgian kingdoms had remained under heavy Persian tribute until Nader was assassinated in 1747.
Teimuraz and Heraclius tske advantage of the ensuing political instability in Persia to assert their independence and expel Persian garrisons from all key positions in Georgia, including Tbilisi.
In close cooperation with one another, they manage to prevent a new revolt by the Mukhranian supporters fomented by Ebrahim Khan, brother of Adil Shah, in 1748.
They conclude an anti-Persian alliance with the khans of Azerbaijan, who are particularly vulnerable to the aggression from Persian warlords and agree to recognize Heraclius's supremacy in eastern Transcaucasia.
Ebrahim, blinded on September 24, 1748, soon dies, while ...