Who Taught the World That Yazidis Worship Evil?
Questions About Yazidis

Who Taught the World That Yazidis Worship Evil?

Layard was welcomed at Lalish and rejected rumours about Yazidis. Why did his book still carry the accusation across Europe?

Austen Henry Layard went to Lalish as a guest.

Before he arrived, Yazidis had already been described by some Muslim and Christian neighbours through hostile religious labels. Travellers encountered those stories on the road. The danger was what happened next: a European visitor could meet the people being accused, see that other rumours about them were false, and still take the most marketable accusation home.

Şêx Nasr, a Yazidi religious leader, sent a Qewal to invite Layard to a festival. Layard was welcomed, spoke with priests and spent three days among the pilgrims. He described the courtesy he received. He also knew that stories about Yazidi ceremonies circulated among Muslim and Christian neighbours. Some of those stories, he wrote, were fables. The conduct he witnessed did not support them.

Then Layard went home and published Nineveh and Its Remains. In the full title of his 1849 book, he identified the Yazidis as worshippers of the personification of evil.

He had been invited to our holiest place. He left the accusation on the cover.

He knew what a lie looked like

Layard wanted to see ceremonies that few Europeans had witnessed. In his account, he describes rumours of nocturnal misconduct told by Muslims and Christians about the Yazidis. He rejects those particular tales. Their villages were orderly, he wrote, and the people he met did not behave as the stories alleged.

That should have changed the way he approached every other accusation he had heard.

At Lalish, Layard saw pilgrims, music, lamps and religious observances. He spoke privately with Şêx Nasr about Tawûs-î-Melek. Şêx Nasr explained that the bird figure Layard asked about was a symbol, not an idol. Layard recorded that explanation. But he also imposed an identification with the figure of evil from outside Yazidi faith. He did not witness Yazidis worshipping evil. He interpreted a sacred Yazidi figure through a belief that was not theirs.

He could recognise the lies about his hosts’ behaviour. He could see the rumours collapse in front of him. But when it came to their faith, he still trusted the outsider’s interpretation over the Yazidi explanation.

He even wrote warmly of Yazidi hospitality before remarking that gratitude was, in his view, uncommon in “the East”. Later he speculated that Yazidi priests themselves had only a vague understanding of their religion. There is the voice of European superiority: the visitor is grateful for access, but still assumes he is better equipped than his hosts to explain what they believe.

We cannot prove what Layard privately believed. We can read what he printed. He doubted the neighbours’ stories, heard Şêx Nasr’s explanation and still put the accusation on the cover. His published choices are damning enough.

Who taught the world?

Muslim and Christian neighbours circulated degrading stories about Yazidis. Layard says so himself. His book does not identify who first told him the accusation he printed in its title, and we cannot assign that sentence to a named Kurdish, Arab or Christian informant. We can trace what Layard did with the stories he encountered.

A Yazidi Qewal, sent by Şêx Nasr, invited him to Lalish. His Yazidi hosts gave him access, conversation and hospitality. Layard saw enough to reject other rumours. Yet he returned to Britain and presented their faith under the old accusation. The outsider’s printed verdict travelled farther than the Yazidi answer he had heard.

Neighbours carried the stigma. European writers gave it a cover, an audience and the appearance of authority. That is how a story told about Yazidis became something readers abroad thought they knew about Yazidis.

Layard’s book reached a large audience and appeared in cheaper editions. Other writers continued to put the charge before readers. William Francis Ainsworth used it in the title of an 1861 paper, though he qualified it as so-called. Isya Joseph used it in the title of a 1919 book on Yazidi religious traditions. William Seabrook used it to advertise the Yazidi part of his 1927 travel account. In one publication it looked like a traveller’s observation; in another, a subject for scholarship; in another, an exotic adventure. It remained the same false description.

Joseph’s book exposes a further problem with the source chain. In its introduction, he acknowledged that his material came from different places, including stories told about Yazidis by Christian neighbours. He could not always establish where a particular account originated. That uncertainty should have been prominent. Instead, readers met the accusation in the title.

A claim does not become independent evidence because three authors repeat it. Sometimes the third writer has simply inherited the first writer’s mistake, and the first writer inherited a neighbour’s prejudice.

The arrogance behind the accusation

There is a kind of curiosity that listens. There is another kind that arrives hoping to find a spectacle.

The Yazidis who received Layard were not characters invented for a European adventure. They were people practising their faith, welcoming a guest and answering what they were willing to answer. Layard wanted access to ceremonies unfamiliar to European readers. He got it. What he saw did not prove the accusation in his title. The accusation survived his visit anyway.

That is the ugly part of this history: hospitality was no guarantee of being heard. Yazidis could open a sacred place, share an explanation and still become a curiosity in someone else’s book.

Christian missionary interest also belongs in this story. George Percy Badger was an Anglican missionary who wrote about communities in the region, including Yazidis. Missionaries and travellers did not all write the same thing or pursue the same purpose. But when a writer approaches another faith convinced that his own religious categories are the standard by which it must be understood, a conversation can become a verdict. The Yazidi answer is recorded, then corrected by the outsider who claims to know better.

The arrogance is in the act: hearing a community explain its faith, then announcing that your religious categories outrank its answer. What kind of certainty needs to call another people dangerous before it can feel secure?

For a long time, Western audiences had limited access to the extensive religious literature Yazidis transmitted orally. Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Khalil J. Rashow describe how much of it remained unknown to Western scholars until the late twentieth century. The traveller’s printed interpretation travelled farther than the Yazidi explanation. That imbalance helped the accusation survive.

The old writers also often described Yazidis distinctly from the neighbouring Kurds and other communities they encountered. Their labels do not grant them the right to define Yazidi identity for us. But it is revealing that outsiders could recognise Yazidis as a community worth visiting in their own right, then refuse that community authority over the meaning of its own faith.

The same road, a different camera

I have seen YouTube and TikTok videos of European or American tourists taking a taxi to Lalish. In the scenes I remember, a Kurdish driver tells them that Yazidis worship the personification of evil. He laughs. He mocks the people whose sanctuary he is driving towards and asks, in effect, why the tourists want to go “to those people”. His warning casts Yazidis as people the visitors should fear.

The tourists film it.

Perhaps to them it is an odd encounter on the way to a landmark. To a Yazidi watching, it is a familiar insult delivered to a fresh audience. The driver knows the road to Lalish. He has no licence to turn the people of Lalish into a joke.

I cannot identify the video or verify his exact words from memory. That is my recollection, not a transcript. The pattern is familiar: a neighbour speaks about Yazidis, foreign visitors record him, and the Yazidi answer is missing again.

That scene does not tell us who taught Layard. It tells us how easily the accusation can still find an audience on the road to Lalish.

The accusation has lived alongside a history of hostility and violence. In 2016, a United Nations commission concluded that ISIS had committed genocide against Yazidis. Against that history, the driver’s joke is no innocent piece of local colour. It gives the old lie another audience and leaves Yazidis to answer it again.

Layard had a publisher. The tourist has an upload button. Both can make an outsider’s voice travel farther than the Yazidi answer.

Nearly two centuries after Şêx Nasr invited a British visitor to Lalish, we are still being asked to defend ourselves against a description that visitor helped spread. He saw our hospitality. He saw enough to reject other rumours. He heard that Tawûs-î-Melek’s figure was a symbol. Then he published the accusation.

Layard described Yazidis and Kurds separately. He recorded Kurdish attacks on Yazidis. He did not introduce us to his readers as a Kurdish religious subgroup. Read his own book: he named us as Yazidis when he wanted access to our sacred place, our priests and our hospitality. Yet the man who could recognise us on the page still presumed to tell the world what we worshipped.

What would he say if he saw Yazidis today having to fight for the right to name ourselves, while Kurdish nationalists and European writers fold us into somebody else’s identity? I cannot put an answer in his mouth. The irony is sharp enough without it: Layard separated us from Kurds in his descriptions, then helped teach Europe to distrust our own account of our faith.

We welcomed him. We answered him. He went home and put the accusation on his book cover. More than a century later, the same presumption keeps returning in a different form: outsiders hear Yazidis speak, then decide they know better who we are.

Sources

Text by Şêx Danyal
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