Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Defenders of religion as a positive force for humanity need to consider the stoning death of a teenage girl who was stoned to death in the supposedly “liberated” Iraqi Kurdistan. Amnesty International reports that she was struck by relatives with stones until dead as punishment for staying out the night with a Muslim boyfriend.
Girl was not Muslim, exactly, but from a Yezidi family. The Yezidi have a system of religious belief that is influenced by Islam, but is not strictly Islamic.
Want to find out more about this religion? Go ahead and Google “Yezidi”. You’ll find some information about the Yezidi religious practice in the abstract, but two of the ten links on the first page of the search results are about the stoning.
Certainly, for myself, the story of the Yezidi stoning dominates my thinking about this cultural group. I’m curious about their beliefs and practices, but first and foremost, the though comes into my mind that, gosh, the Yezidi may be interesting and unique, but they stone teenage girls to death.
That’s a big lesson for cultures, as they seek to present themselves in the world. All the highfalutin ideas about the creation of the Universe and the meaning of life are great, but when you engage in barbaric practices, that’s all that will matter to most people.
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June 10th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Killing teenage girls whose reproductive lives cannot be controlled is common in the Arab world. It’s called “honor killing”. It’s not Yezidi, it’s not Moslem, it’s really more cultural and especially tribal. Children don’t belong to the parents; they belong to the husband’s family. If the boy is too immature to raise his children they wil be raised and supported by the entire family. Indeed Arab families can be quite poor and live a dozen or so people in one room. The only way they can survive is by this extended family system. You can see how a girl who wanted to marry for love and not marry the first cousin they have planned for her would throw a monkey wrench in this whole works. Marrying outside her religion could well trigger a murder, especially if it was the wife who changed her religion. The killing of a woman generally has no repercussions. If the husband changes his religion there may be talk of killing, but they would probably not actually kill the man as they know the death of a male would be avenged on their own tribe. Apparently the Yezidi woman who married outside her clan has also now been avenged, and several times over. So there you have it. Gender equality in the Middle East.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Looking at the Wikipedia article on the Yezidi, it seems that it’s not Islamic at all. It’s older than Islam; it’s sort of monotheistic, and sort of not (there’s a creator God, but the important figures are his angels); and Moslems regard it as a form of devil-worship.
I don’t really see much in the way of highfalutin ideas. It’s a tribal religion full of non sequitur prohibitions (they can’t eat lettuce, they can’t wear the color blue) and nonsensical pride (they claim to be descendants of Adam rather than Eve). It’s not focused on ethics; it’s focused on placating the angel that rules the world. And, to them, it doesn’t really matter how they’re presented to the world, since they’re an isolationist religion. They don’t do conversion; they don’t have close contact with unbelievers; they don’t even talk much about their religion to outsiders. They know they’re right because Daddy said so, and they don’t care if the rest of us think they’re Stone Age barbarians.