When Islam arrived north in the Levant from its birthplace in modern-day Saudi Arabia, and then later arrived west in the Iberian Peninsula and east in the Indian Subcontinent, its followers were guided by what the Prophet (peace be upon him) enjoined Muslims in the Hadith against doing: “He who hurts a Zumian (believers in other faiths) hurts me.” The warning was clear and unequivocal.
Different people from different cultures were put at ease by that dictum, and by those followers’ reassurance that “For you is your religion, and for me is my religion.” (Qur’an, 109:6)
And Muslims at the time practiced, and genuinely so, what they preached. Consider in that regard how Muslims, Christians and Jews in Andalus, among other places in the Islamic Commonwealth of Nations, lived and prospered together for well over 500 years, the only time in European history that anything like it had ever taken place before or since. Read Islamic history and you will never read about intolerance by Muslims for Peoples of the Book.
Now enter an upstart group, not to be dismissed as insignificant by a stretch, that calls itself the Islamic State (IS), which has been committing one outrage after another, including its latest — the assault it mounted last week against the Yazidi community in northern Iraq. At least 150,000 men, women and children were chased out of their ancestral homes, with roughly 30,000 left stranded on Mount Sinjar without food, water or shelter. The images we have seen on our TV screens in recent days of families huddled together, looking harrowed and beaten, are gut-wrenching.
The UN office for Humanitarian Affairs in Irbil, capital of the Kurdish region in Iraq, told reporters last Monday that some Yazidis had escaped from the north side of the mountain and crossed the River Tigris into Syria. Now you truly have to be desperate, or an outright optimist, to seek refuge in a country like Syria that over the last three years had caused three million of its own citizens to flee the regime’s indiscriminate violence.
Since when does Islam sanction such wanton behavior? To the best of one’s knowledge, never. Inflicting an act of terror against a human being because you disagree with his religion, or his ideas, his view of the world or his vision of the hereafter, is not only un-Islamic but inhumane. Militants from IS have found a reason to justify the persecution of Yazidis: This 500,000-strong community, whose ancestral homes are located predominantly in Nineveh Province in the north of Iraq, are “devil worshippers.” That, of course, is not true. Yazidis are an ancient, Kurdish-speaking people who practice a religion rooted in the merging of beliefs, what theologians call the “syncretic” tendency, that combines Shiite and Sufi Islam, along with a dose of indigenous folk traditions.
These traditions are said to include not just elements of early Christianity but elements of ancient Middle Eastern gnostic and Mesopotamian mythologies of hope. The erroneous notion that Yazidis are devil worshippers derives from these folks’ belief in the so-called Peacock Angel, which IS asserts is Iblis, or Satan, thus the moniker that the IS, in its ignorance, has thrust on them. A bit of research by a Freshman in high school would reveal the simple truth that the Peacock Angel, according to Yazidi lore, embodies humanity’s potential for good and evil, and thus the dialectic of the human condition.
Alas, the Yazidis, who represent the world’s oldest religious minority, have experienced discrimination for generations. Anti-Yazidi violence in Iraq, for example, dates back to the second half of the 19th century when members of this community were targeted by leaders of the Kurdish principalities, then under Ottoman control, and subjected to brutal campaigns of religious discrimination.
It’s distressing when members of a community are discriminated against purely because of the social ideology they embrace or, in this case, the faith that, by a trick of fate, they were born to hold at birth. What is more distressing is that this discrimination is being committed by a group that purports to speak for Islam and on behalf of Muslims. It’s dreadful, it’s criminal, it’s unwarranted and it’s assuredly not Islamic.
Distressing or not, the IS continues its relentless march, despite the US’ recent military intervention, via air strikes, that is meant to impede or block its advance.
“We may have blunted some tactical decisions to move further east to Irbil, but what I expect the IS to do is to find other other things to do,” General William C. Mayvile, the director of operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Monday, in his somewhat convoluted English. “However, in no way do I want to suggest that we have effectively contained or broken the effect of IS.”
Who would have guessed that the US, which invaded Iraq in 2003 with the intention of turning it into a “beacon of democracy,” would end up leaving a mess behind, a nation saddled with humanitarian, political, social and communal crisis? Certainly those combative, over-confident neo conservatives (remember them?), who manipulated a clueless president and arm-twisted under-educated legislators, did not. Or did they?
