The Yazidis Worship a Peacock, Not a Devil

Lalish, a small valley shrine north of Mosul, is the only place a Yazidi must visit at least once before dying. The story their priests tell is that when God assembled the world, he placed seven angels above creation and put one of them in charge: Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel. He flew over a barren earth, his rainbow plumage settled the volcanoes, and he set down at Lalish. From that descent the village inherits its sanctity and the religion its central icon.

The trouble began when Muslim and later Christian neighbors heard a story Yazidis tell about Tawûsî Melek refusing God's command to bow to Adam, and matched it onto their own narrative of Iblis, the proud angel who fell. In Yazidi telling the refusal is obedience: God had earlier ordered the angels to bow to no one but God, so Tawûsî Melek's refusal proved his loyalty. To outsiders it scanned as Satan-worship. The community is forbidden even to pronounce the Arabic word Shaytan, partly to protect against that conflation.

The libel was not academic. Ottoman firmans in the 19th century authorized punitive raids. In August 2014 ISIS reached the Yazidi heartland around Sinjar, drove tens of thousands onto the mountain without water, killed an estimated 5,000 men, and abducted thousands of women into sexual slavery, citing exactly this charge of devil-worship as religious license.

Ten years later, the survivors are still rebuilding villages and arguing in court about a genocide most of the world had never heard of until it happened.