Yazidis, Stop Saying “Inshallah”

Names are never just sounds. They carry family, place, power and memory. For Yazidis, they can also record flight, pressure and the price our ancestors paid to survive among larger populations that did not always accept them.

I understand why Yazidi families adapted. I am not going to sit safely in the present and romanticise cultural purity. People who were persecuted, displaced or forced to begin again could not always insist that the world pronounce, register and understand their names correctly. Sometimes a changed name opened a door. Sometimes it prevented another door from being kicked in.

But understanding something does not mean I have to celebrate it. There comes a point when adaptation stops protecting an identity and starts dissolving it.

The Names Survival Gave Us

Yazidi families fled before, during and after 1915. Later generations lived under Soviet administration, in the Caucasus, in the Middle East and eventually across Europe. Their names passed through different alphabets, bureaucracies and dominant languages.

Endings such as -ov and -ova, altered spellings and locally familiar given names tell us something about the environment in which a family had to survive. They do not automatically tell us who that family was.

This was not one uniform process. Some names were changed by officials. Some made everyday life easier. Others helped families avoid attention or become less visible in a new society. A name can carry both loss and survival at the same time.

I will not condemn an ancestor who changed a name to protect a child. Survival is not cowardice, and judging it decades later from a safe chair would be very easy.

But a survival strategy inherited from a dangerous past should not automatically become a cultural ideal for the future.

Understanding Is Not Approval

There is a difference between carrying a name that history placed upon your family and deliberately choosing a religiously charged name for a Yazidi child today.

The name Muhammad is often defended with the same explanations. It is Arabic. It means “the praised one.” It existed before Islam.

Fine.

All of that can be discussed linguistically. None of it settles the cultural question.

People love reaching for dictionaries in these conversations, as if etymology can wipe history clean. It cannot. Words do not live inside dictionaries. They live inside history.

Today, Muhammad is not perceived internationally as a neutral adjective meaning “praised.” The name is inseparable from the founder and prophet of Islam. That association is not accidental, obscure or limited to extremists. It is the name’s dominant public meaning.

For me, a Yazidi family choosing that name can feel as grotesque as a Jewish family choosing the name Adolf for a child.

Before anyone deliberately misunderstands me, I am not claiming that the two historical figures or histories are identical. The comparison describes the moral function of memory. Persecution can permanently change what a name carries for the people who were targeted.

Yes, the comparison is harsh. So is the history behind it.

A community that remembers does not have to pretend that every name is innocent.

When a Phrase Is More Than Its Translation

The same problem appears with expressions such as inshallah, mashallah and Allahu akbar.

Whenever this is mentioned, the same counterargument arrives with an entire guest list.

“They are only Arabic words.”

“Arabic-speaking Christians use them.”

“Jews use them.”

“Agnostics use them.”

Good for them. Other communities can decide for themselves how they speak. Their choices do not create an obligation for Yazidis.

Language is social, not merely etymological. In many non-Arabic societies, these expressions function as recognisable signs of Islamic speech.

The reaction to Anne Hathaway using inshallah in a 2026 interview made that very clear. The internet did not react as though she had simply used another word for “hopefully.” A single expression became international news. Social media users celebrated her as “Sister Anne” and filled the comments with Islamic jokes and references.

Nobody said: how interesting, Anne Hathaway has used a culturally neutral Arabic expression.

They immediately understood it as Islamic.

Whether anyone liked or disliked her use of the word is not the point. The reaction showed that the expression was not heard as culturally empty.

A word can be older than a religion. It can be shared across communities. It can still carry a dominant religious association today. History does not freeze a word’s meaning at the moment of its birth.

Ellah, Xwedê and the Yazidi Şehda

Then comes the supposed final argument.

“But Yazidis use Ellah in the Şehda.”

Yes, some versions do. That still does not turn the Yazidi Şehda into the Islamic Shahada.

Yazidi oral religious texts include the declaration Şehda dînê min êk Ellah: my testimony of faith is one God. Other transmitted versions use Xwedê, while written transcriptions vary between forms such as Ellah, Ella and, in some publications, Allah.

That variation should be represented honestly. What should not happen is flattening everything into the convenient claim that Yazidis simply recite an Islamic declaration of faith with a few local adjustments.

Our Şehda does not declare Muhammad to be God’s messenger. It affirms the Yazidi faith and its sacred order.

Similar sounds do not create identical theology.

If using a related word for God were enough to make Yazidis religiously acceptable, why were our ancestors repeatedly pressured to convert to Islam? Why did persecutors demand more than belief in one God?

Apparently, our monotheism was acceptable only when we abandoned everything that made it Yazidi.

This is why “Allah is only another word for God” fails as an answer. The linguistic relationship does not erase the religious boundary. Ellah in a Yazidi prayer belongs to its Yazidi context. Xwedê remains the clearest term in our own language.

Neither gives outsiders permission to reinterpret Yazidism as an incomplete version of somebody else’s religion.

For a wider discussion of divine names in Yazidi sacred tradition, read A Thousand and One Names.

Recognition Is Not Submission

A Yazidi can recognise that Muhammad is the prophet of Islam. We can recognise the place of Jesus in Christianity and Moses in Judaism.

Recognition means understanding how another religion describes itself. It does not mean accepting that religion’s claims as binding upon us.

Respect should be enough.

We can say: this is your prophet, your scripture and your path. I do not insult it, but I remain Yazidi.

For the forces that tried to convert Yazidis, that answer was not enough. They did not want mutual recognition. They wanted surrender. Accept Islam, recognise Muhammad as God’s messenger in the Islamic profession of faith and abandon the Yazidi religion.

A peace that begins only after one side disappears is not coexistence.

“Islam Means Peace” Is Not an Answer

Whenever Yazidis speak about persecution committed in the name of Islam, somebody places the sentence “Islam means peace” into the conversation like a fire extinguisher.

There. Problem solved.

Except it is not.

Linguistically, islām is commonly rendered as submission or surrender to God, while salām means peace. The words share an Arabic root, but they are not interchangeable definitions.

More importantly, a slogan is not an analysis of history.

ISIS did not describe its crimes against Yazidis as random violence that had nothing to do with religion. It publicly classified Yazidis through Islamic legal categories, placed us outside the protected groups recognised by its doctrine and used that classification to justify forced conversion, enslavement and murder.

In 2016, a United Nations commission concluded that ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis.

This does not mean that every Muslim accepts the ISIS interpretation. It means that “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam” is an inadequate response to Yazidi survivors. It avoids the arguments the perpetrators actually made and replaces examination with reassurance.

I also reject the ritual demand that Yazidis must defend Islam before we are allowed to describe what was done to us.

First, we must say that Islam is peaceful. Then we must explain that ISIS members were not real Muslims. After that, we should reassure everyone that we do not hate Muslims. If there is still time left, perhaps we may mention the genocide.

I have seen far more energy spent protecting Islam’s reputation than confronting the theological language used against our people.

Telling us that the perpetrators were not “real Muslims” may comfort Muslims. It does not answer Yazidi memory.

Meeting peaceful and decent Muslims proves that peaceful and decent Muslims exist. It does not prove that their interpretation is the only interpretation found in Islamic history or doctrine.

A person’s decency and a religion’s contested textual traditions are not the same question.

The Price of Belonging

I understand why some Yazidis adopt the vocabulary of the people around them. Human beings want to belong. Social rejection hurts, and conformity can become a way to avoid exclusion.

People change their accent, humour, clothing and vocabulary to appear familiar and safe.

I am introverted. I can remain silent for a very long time without feeling the need to force friendship or approval. Silence does not frighten me. Sometimes I even prefer it to another stupid conversation.

Not everyone is built that way.

Growing up between cultures can be exhausting, especially for young Yazidis who do not want every conversation to become a defence of their identity.

Sometimes a supposed friend asks a degrading question, makes a mocking remark or creates an uncomfortable situation out of “curiosity.” The Yazidi person feels that something is wrong but laughs anyway. Then they explain, reassure and make the situation comfortable for the person who caused the discomfort.

Because apparently even our humiliation should come with good customer service.

Losing the friendship feels worse than listening to the warning inside.

That person is not proving openness. They are paying for belonging with pieces of themselves.

A friend who respects you does not require you to trivialise your religion, repeat Islamic expressions to appear relaxed or declare that the people who hunted your community had simply misunderstood everything.

If I have to make myself smaller so that another person can feel tolerant, the friendship is already too expensive.

The Lettuce That Never Hunted Us

Then there is the lettuce.

Poor lettuce.

There is an absurd contradiction within our community. Some Yazidis treat lettuce as forbidden because of a story they cannot clearly explain, yet casually use expressions that are inseparable, for many survivors, from the religious environment in which Yazidis were persecuted.

Lettuce has never issued a fatwa. Lettuce has never demanded a conversion. Lettuce has never chased a Yazidi family from its home while shouting the name of God.

Still, the vegetable is treated with suspicion while inshallah receives an entire cultural defence team.

Apparently, lettuce is dangerous, but language connected to real historical trauma is harmless.

I cannot understand that hierarchy.

I examined the lettuce stereotype and the way outsiders use it to turn Yazidis into a spectacle in More Than a Lettuce Taboo.

A Boundary Is Not Hatred

I am not demanding hostility towards every Muslim, every Arab or every neighbour. I am arguing for the Yazidi right to establish boundaries.

In my opinion, Yazidi parents should think seriously before giving their children names that now function as declarations of another religion.

Yazidis should not treat inshallah, mashallah or similar expressions as compulsory decorations intended to prove that we are tolerant, modern or socially relaxed.

We do not owe anyone a performance of proximity to Islam.

Other people set cultural and religious boundaries all the time without writing an apology first. Yazidis are allowed to do the same.

Others will disagree. That is their right.

This column states mine.

Adaptation helped many of our ancestors survive. But survival was the means, not the final purpose. The purpose was that a Yazidi child could remain Yazidi.

Remembering what certain names and expressions have carried for our people is neither hatred nor moral decay.

Forgetting it just to be liked would be.

For the broader argument about Yazidi self-definition, read Who Are the Yazidis? And Why Does Misinformation Persist?.

Sources and Further Reading

• United Nations: ISIS crimes against the Yazidis
• Research on Ottoman conversion policies toward Yazidis, 1830 to 1909
• Versions of the Yazidi Şehda and other oral religious texts
• Research on Yazidi religious transformation in the diaspora
• Research on collective trauma and collective memory
• Research on self-protective code-switching and social pressure
• The public reaction to Anne Hathaway saying “inshallah”