(Ebook) The Yezidis by Eszter Spät ISBN 9780863565939, 086356593X

(Ebook) The Yezidis by Eszter Spät ISBN 9780863565939, 086356593X

high quality scan This is the first detailed survey of Yezidi culture to appear in English. Little is known about these ancient Kurdish mountain people, considered one of the oldest ethnicities in the Middle East, often unjustly derided as "devil-worshippers."Although a sizeable proportion of the Yezidi community now lives in Europe, Yezidi culture and religion are still little known in the West. In the mid-nineteenth century, when travellers began to write about this group, there was a great deal of interest in these pleasant ‘devil worshippers’ — an epithet that is not based on any actual practices or beliefs — but research and speculation focused on the origins of Yezidi traditions, and few attempts were made to study the present realities of the community. As little could be learned about the history of this traditionally non-literate community, even this interest soon waned.In the past decade, the Yezidi community in the West has manifested itself more clearly in the public sphere. Together with new discoveries about their religious tradition, this helped revive academic interest in the group. However, descriptions of Yezidi culture that have appeared so far have tended to concentrate either on the immigrant community in Europe, or on specific aspects of their religious tradition. So far, up-todate, descriptive accounts of the Yezidis’ way of life and religious attitudes, in their homelands of Northern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and Georgia, have remained a desideratum. This book, therefore, fills a keenly felt gap.The author, a historian of religions, spent ten months in the heartland of Yezidism, in Northern Iraq. She follows in the footsteps of the earliest and most influential authors on the Yezidis by offering us an intelligent and very readable account of her experiences and observations. In doing so she has written an immensely useful book for specialist