Claiming the Ezidis (Yezidis): Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Assyrian, Kurdish and Arab sources on Ezidi religious and ethnic identity

Abstract

Focusing on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article explores the ways in which various religious and historical aspects of Ezidism were employed by both non-Ezidi and Ezidi authors to make claims of communal solidarity, national identity or religious categorization. Drawing upon a variety of Kurdish, Syriac, Arabic and Ottoman-language sources, it contextualizes these claims within contemporary historical developments and explores relationships between Ezidis and Assyrian/Syriac Christian communities, state authority, and Kurdish and Arab nationalism.