Tracing the disappearing religions of the Middle East

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A Yazidi religious leader blesses a worshipper in northern Iraq, during the community’s main festival of Eid al-Jamma. Reuters

Peter Hellyer
November 27, 2014 Updated: November 27, 2014 03:31 PM

Trying to understand the turmoil throughout the Middle East is a hugely difficult task. Experts have wrestled with day-to-day developments, the origins of the conflicts and predicting what may happen in the coming years (and, I fear, decades) since the start of the Arab Spring nearly four years ago. Yet they are still taken unawares when a particular factor, present yet overlooked, comes suddenly to the forefront.

Such was the case recently with the Yazidi ethno-­religious community, when the assault on their homeland by the fanatics of ISIL raised the horrendous possibility of their wholesale slaughter.

They are not yet saved: tens of thousands have fled for what one must hope is temporary refuge in Kurdistan, but thousands more are still in great peril and hundreds have been sold into slavery. However, until ISIL’s advance across northern Iraq, few had heard of the Yazidis, followers of a pre-­Islamic, pre-Christian religion and part of the mosaic of ethnic and religious groups that have made up the Middle East for more than 2,000 years.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms is a timely introduction to some of that mosaic. Its author, Gerard Russell, a former British diplomat who has served throughout the region, is a worthy successor to the great British Arabists of the past, passionately interested in the area and its ­people.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/the-review/tracing-the-disappearing-religions-of-the-middle-east



Gerard Russell

Simon & Schuster