Khanna Omarkhali (ed.), Religious Minorities in Kurdistan: Beyond the Mainstream [Studies in Oriental Religions, Volume 68], Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014, xxxviii + 423 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-447-10125-7).
This book could hardly have appeared at a more appropriate time. It presents a broad overview of the main religious minorities existing in Kurdistan and the problems they have been facing in the past century (with an emphasis on recent developments). The occupation of Mosul and Sinjar by the so-called Islamic State this summer, followed by the expulsion of Christians, the murder and enslavement of Yezidi men and women, and violent assaults on all non-Sunni groups in the region, have given this book a sudden relevance beyond its merits as an academic publication.
The book celebrates the religious diversity of Kurdistan, where many different religious communities have long co-existed in relative harmony, but it is pervaded by a deep concern that this diversity is under threat, not only due to persecution and oppression by dominant groups but also as a result of urbanisation and globalisation that are breaking up communities and provide strong incentives to assimilation and conversion. Most of the communities have been decimated by migration, to cities or nearby different regions in the same country or abroad, mostly to North America and Western Europe (or Israel, in the case of the Jews). In the diaspora there have been attempts to reconstitute their distinctive religious practices and the structures of social and religious authority of their communities, but this is a precarious process, as several of the contributions in this book show.
Khanna Omarkhali has succeeded in bringing together a remarkable team of seventeen contributors, including established authorities as well as promising young scholars, whose knowledge of these communities is based on recent field research, so that they are qualified to discuss recent developments. The editor’s introduction touches upon some of the broader issues affecting all minorities; the other contributions each focus on a specific community. Sections of three chapters each deal successively with the Ahl-i Haqq, Yezidis, Alevis, (heterodox) Sufi orders and Shabak, Jews and Christians. The limitations of a book review do not allow me to do justice to each of the contributions.
Omarkhali’s own chapter on transmission of religious knowledge, in the Yezidi section, discusses a structural aspect that is also relevant to the Ahl-i Haqq, Alevi and Shabak communities: the existence of sacred lineages of ritual specialists (şêx and pîr, pîr and delîl, dede, seyyid, etc.), in whom religious authority is vested and without whom major rituals cannot be performed. These lineages constitute an endogamous priestly caste, most strictly so among the Yezidis, where even individual linages are endogamous. Religious knowledge was until recently transmitted orally, within these lineages as well as by non-priestly specialists (qewlbêj, kalâmkhwân, hozan), in the form of religious poetry. Only recently have these sacred texts been made available in print, by which specific versions of them became fixated and standardised. Omarkhali investigates the effects of this process of scripturalisation of religious authority and its implications for the identity quest of young Yezidis in the diaspora.
Several of these themes recur in other papers. The ethnomusicologist Partow Hooshmandrad, whose primary interest has been in the performance of Ahl-i Haqq religious poetry (kalâm) in ritual contexts, highlights both the role of the kalâmkhwân as the authoritative repositories of religious knowledge and that of the hereditary pîr as the ultimate judge of correct performance. She was involved in a project of establishing a definitive version of kalâm, on the basis of different manuscripts held by kalâmkhwân. Significantly, the leading pîr, who had authorised this work of standardisation, does not allow publication of the texts, which would have given everyone unmediated access.
A contrasting case is presented by Mojan Membrado in her biography of the charismatic Ahl-i Haqq leader Hajj Neʿmatollah Jayhunabadi, who wrote (in Persian) a large corpus of religious texts synthesising and reinterpreting older Gurani kalâm, part of which was later published in print. He did not belong to one of the existing sacred lineages but gained a following on the basis of his qualities as an inspired visionary (didedar) and is considered by some as the founder of a new sacred lineage. His son Nur ʿAli Elahi also published major works, restating Ahl-i Haqq religious ideas in a framework of esoteric Shiʿism, appealing to educated urban Iranians but rejected by many of the traditional established authorities in Kurdistan. Membrado is highly critical of earlier scholars who have emphasised the pre-Islamic elements in the Ahl-i Haqq tradition and argues that the accommodation with Shiʿa esotericism is not an innovation by this family but had been present in the tradition before them.
One of the connections between the Ahl-i Haqq and esoteric Shiʿa traditions has been the Khaksar Sufi order, with which Shahrokh Raei’s contribution deals. One of the higher stages of spiritual advancement in this order demands initiation by an Ahl-i Haqq pîr (suggesting one-way rather than two-way communication). Some of the earliest published Ahl-i Haqq texts had in fact belonged to, or were written by, Khaksar dervishes. Raei’s chapter focuses on how the Khaksar established a permanent presence in Kermanshah in the mid-20th century, which they have been able to maintain after the Iranian revolution.
The dominant discourse on Alevism in Turkey has emphasised its origins in Turkish pre-Islamic beliefs and practices and insisted that all its sacred texts – poetry and prayer – are in Turkish. Kurdish Alevi intellectuals have recently made efforts to rediscover the specifically Kurdish elements of their religious tradition. The suppressed oral tradition of prayers and poems in Zaza or Kurmanci, was partially recovered and made available in print. The chapter by Lokman Turgut analyses a similar effort, a book written by a dede living in Germany, Pir Ali Bali, on Alevi ritual among the Kurds, as remembered from his youth. The entire book is in Kurdish; it contains lengthy prayers and other ritual texts and is thereby an interesting contribution to the scripturalisation of Kurdish Alevism.
The Shabak are one of the most elusive communities, about whose religious as well as ethnic identity there has been much controversy. Michiel Leezenberg surveys the evidence and presents new findings on developments in the post-Saddam period. Some of the ambiguity in the Shabak’s religious identity may have to do with the sacred lineages to which individuals or entire villages attached themselves: some of these were Bektashis, others Shiʿis, and Leezenberg found a community of Shabak origin that had attached itself to a Kakaʾi (Ahl-i Haqq) sayyid.
The small Haqqa community, by contrast, is unambiguously Kurdish and Muslim but nonetheless sharply distinguished from its Muslim neighbours. It emerged from the orthodox Sunni Sufi order Naqshbandiyya but by the 1920s had become a utopian, egalitarian sect accused by their neighbours of heretical ideas and practices. Thomas Schmidinger traces the little-known history of this community and its confrontations with political and religious authorities, on the basis of interviews and literature only available in Sorani.
Yezidis and Alevis have massively emigrated from Kurdistan and are facing the choice between assimilation or reconstruction of their community structures and religious (and ethnic) identities. A lengthy analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet censuses by Nodar Mossaki throws light on the shifting (self-)definition of the Yezidis as a religious or ethnic group, subsumed under or separate from the Kurds, and processes of conversion and assimilation, noting the presence of Christian Yezidis in Russia. Markus Dressler and Janroj Keleş discuss Alevi associations and identity debates in Turkey, Germany and Britain.
The Kurdistani Jews (chapters by Birgit Ammann and Yona Sabar) are an exceptional case in this collection, because they have long disappeared from Kurdistan (although they have continued playing a role in its history); the last members of the community migrated to Israel in the 1950s. They remained a highly distinct community there, with a nostalgic attachment to Kurdistan and a material culture that differed little from that of their former Kurdish neighbours. Some of them were instrumental in the secret military support Israel provided the Iraqi Kurds in the 1960s (and most probably later as well). However, the younger generation is rapidly being assimilated into the Israeli mainstream, giving up the Aramaic language of their ancestors for modern Hebrew. As Ammann writes, the community’s culture will soon be “lost forever.” Not entirely lost, however, thanks to the efforts of Yona Sabar, who has painstakingly recorded a large corpus of oral tradition of the Kurdistan Jews. His contribution here discusses the various genres of this neo-Aramaic oral literature, and presents samples of each genre. He points at several distinct Kurdish influences, including the borrowing of Kurdish folk themes (including Mem û Zîn) and the use of entire sentences in Kurmanci embedded in neo-Aramaic texts.
For Iraqi Christians, Kurdistan is currently a (relatively) safe haven. Erica C. D. Hunter sketches the migration to Kurdistan in an apparent reversal of the inexorable exodus of Christians from Central Kurdistan of the past century, new hopes of establishing an autonomous Christian enclave in the partly Kurdish-controlled Nineveh plains (which were never realistic, and were definitively shattered with the arrival of IS), and the lasting suspicions in Christian-Kurdish relations. Those suspicions are rooted in old memories of depredations by Kurdish tribesmen and the stereotype of the “thieving Kurds”, on which Martin Tamcke contributes a quaint article, largely based on reports in the German missionary press of the previous turn of century. Another aspect of the return of Christianity to Kurdistan is documented in a report by Marcin Rzepka on his research on recent Kurdish Bible translations which, unlike the 19th-century translations, do not appear to address Kurdish-speaking Armenians and Syrians but Kurdish converts from Islam.
Reflecting the diversity of the religious communities in Kurdistan and problems they are facing, there is little uniformity in the format of the contributions in this book, and the quality is uneven – some chapters might have profited from heavy-handed editorial intervention. On the whole, however, this volume is highly informative and provides an important and authoritative overview of the current state of affairs.