There still are Yazidis in Iraq and elsewhere.
Whether the community in Iraq will survive the current turmoil is
difficult to predict. If they do not some of us will mourn their lose
as we would mourn the lose of anything old and different. Religious
people may exult at their eradication.
We know a lot now about the Yazidis and their religion. They are not
"devil wor****ppers". In fact their religion is very much like Islam.
Here I would like to make a modest proposal as to the Yazidis and what
their religion signifies.
Suppose the Yazid named really is Ibn Mu'awiya, the second Umayyid
caliph. Yazid did not reign very long and his rule was rejected by
many Muslims. On the other hand he must have had many sup****ters and
these would have been called Yazidis.
The fitna that started over Yazid finally ended when Abd al-Malik's
troops killed Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr. The next thing that happened
was that Abd al-Malik initiated "reforms" (actually innovations) that
led, in the end, to the Islam we know today. I believe that many of
these innovations were the work of Ibn al-Zubayr and that Abd al-Malik
adopted them - but that is neither here nor there. What matters is
that they were innovations.
Suppose that there was a community (in what is now northern Iraq) far
from the actual conflict of the fitna which preferred the old ways
they knew under Mu'awiya. They need not have been sup****ter of Yazid.
Their progressive neighbors would have called them Yazidis to
disparage them. This is what I suggest happened.
Hence the Yazidis would be to Islam what the Ebionites were to
Christianity. That is, a community that did not go along with the
mainline innovations in their religion and became schismatic because
they were conservative.
Hence if we study the Yazidi religion we might discover, under almost
fourteen hundred years of separate evolution, the religion that was
practiced by Mu'awiya and the other proto-Muslims in that days before
Ibn Zubayr's and Abd al-Malik's innovations.
