Landscapes of Resistance

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-71164-8
Verlag: World Bank Publications

Buch, Englisch, Band 4, 385 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 743 g

Reihe: Iran and the Caucasus Monographs

On August 3, 2014, the Sinjar region of Northern Iraq was attacked by the “Islamic State”. Killing and abducting thousands, the jihadists also destroyed many of the religious minority’s shrines. Others, however, were defended by local fighters and groups affiliated with the PKK. In the aftermath of the genocide, stories of divine intervention into the defence bolstered land claims of serveral Kurdish political groups.
Through extensive fieldwork in the region, I trace imaginaries of Sinjar as a landscape of resistance and a communal history of continuous persecution to current political disputes and attempts to construct a unified Yezidi identity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rassbach, Benjamin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Notes on Transcription and Transliteration

Introduction

Part1 Communal Identities, Sacred Places and Concepts of History

1 Kurdish Territories, Yezidi Landscapes

1 The Kurdish Question

2 The Yezidis—an Encounter through the Kurdish Militants’ Perspective

3 Yezidi Shrines’ Embeddedness in Middle Eastern Landscapes

2 Visiting the Holy Beings in Their Places

1 Dividing Time and Thinking Temporalities—the Shrines’ Relation to the “Mystery”

2 “Sign-Places” and Symbolic Graves

3 Lalis—the Yezidi Axis Mundi

4 Worship of Emplaced Powers throughout the Middle East

5 Traces Left on the Land by the Holy Beings

6 “Strong Incarnation”

7 The Emplacement of Ritual

3 Yezidi Sacred Places and Communal Memory

1 Communal Memories of Conflict around Sacred Places

2 Genres of the Yezidi Oral Tradition

3 Conceptualising Yezidi History

4 The Time of Sêx ?Adî

5 The Evolvement of Yezidism from a Historical Perspective

6 The Fermans

Part2 Contention and Symbolic Order: Yezidi Sacred Landscapes

4 Sinjar—a Landscape of Miracles and Contention

1 “All Sacred Things Must Have Their Place”

2 A Landscape of Miracles

3 “The Mountain of the Hairy Ones”—Political Contentions Over Sinjar

4 Narratives about the Yezidi Settlement in Sinjar

5 Symbolic Order and Spatialised Narratives of Conflict

1 Sêx ?Adî’s Revelation

2 “You Have Stopped the Pilgrimage to Mecca!”

3 Sêx Mend—Ruler of Aleppo and Master of the Snakes

4 An Ambivalent Relation to Islam

5 Conflictual Mimesis

6 Appropriation and Layers of Meaning

6 Yezidi Shrines, Social Formations and the Consolidation of Identity

1 People Belong to Their Shrines

2 Exclusion

3 Sêx(ê) Ma?ama

4 Collective Identities in Sinjar and the Rise of Religion

5 Sêx Kurês, Sêx Rumî, Pîr Zekr: Sharing Sacred Places in Sinjar

6 Seeing the Future from the Past: Yezidi Identity in Apocalyptic Times

Part3 Defending Sinjar: Kurdish Nationalism, Religious identity and the Making of the Past

7 The Miracle of Serfedîn

1 The Figure of Serfedîn

2 The Hymn of Serfedîn (Qewlê Serfedîn)

3 Narrating the Miracle, Claiming the Shrine

4 Traditional Tribal Authority at the Serfedîn Shrine: The Seso Family

5 Traditional Religious Authority at the Shrine: The Ba?rî Micawirs of Serfedîn

6 Sharing Serfedîn

8 Mezarê Sehidên—Monuments, Martyrs and “the PKK” in Sinjar

1 The Material Construction of Memory

2 Death, Revolution and the Sacred Martyrs

3 “Martyrs of the Sacred Earth”

4 The PKK and Its Affiliates in Sinjar

Concluding Reflections

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Topographical Terms

Index of Concepts and Foreign Terms

Index of Published Yezidi Oral Accounts

Über Autor(innen)

Benjamin Raßbach, Ph.D. (2024), Orient-Institute Beirut, is a postdoc researcher working on politics and traditions of Middle Eastern religious minorities, looking back on ten years of fieldwork experience. He studied at Philipps University Marburg and Leipzig University, and received his Ph.D. from Leipzig University.