The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, neither Muslim, Christian nor Jewish. At a time when studies of Kurdish nation-building are developing, this book is the first to consider Kurdish oral traditions within their social context and explain their relevance for a large Kurdish community.

The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, neither Muslim, Christian nor Jewish. Their ethnicity has been disputed, but most now claim Kurdish identity. Their heartland, including their holiest shrine, is in the Badinan province of Northern Iraq, and it is the communities in this area which are the main focus of this book. Their highly

Folklore has been a phenomenon based on nostalgic and autochthonous nuances conveyed with a story-telling technique with a penchant for over-playing and nationalistic pomp and circumstance, often with significant consequences for societal, poetic, and cultural areas. These papers highlight challenges that have an outreaching relationship to the regional, rhetorical, and trans-rhetorical devices and manners in Kurdish folklore, which subscribes to an ironic sense of hope all the while issuing an appeal for a largely unaccomplished nationhood, simultaneously insisting on a linguistic solidarity. In a folkloric literature that has an overarching theory of poetics – perhaps even trans-figurative cognitive poetics due to the multi-faceted nature of its application and the complexity of its linguistic structure – the relationship of man (and less frequently woman) with others takes center stage in many of the folkloric creations. Arts are not figurative representations of the real in the Kurdish world; they are the real.

Yezidis in Syria: Identity Building among a Double Minority traces the development of Yezidi identity on the margins of Syria’s minority context. This little known group is connected to the community’s main living area in northern Iraq, but evolved as a separate identity group in the context of Syria’s colonial, national, and revolutionary history. Always on the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy, the two sub-groups located in the Kurdagh and the Jezira experience a period of sociological and theological renewal in their quest for a recognized and protected status in the new Syria. In this book, Sebastian Maisel transmits and analyzes the Yezidi perspective on Syria’s policies towards ethnic and religious minorities.

Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study documents a century long history of Kurdish women’s struggles against oppressive gender relations and state violence. It speaks to bibliographic silences on Kurdish women; silences that are systemic and structured, with many factors contributing to their (re)production. The book records extensive literature on violence perpetrated by the family, community, and the state as well as presenting the reader with a vibrant archive of resistance and struggle of Kurdish women. The analysis avoids the fashionable state-centered scholarship, which purifies processes of nation-building, state-building, and disguises their violence. The image depicted of the women of Kurdistan in this bibliography is shaped also by the languages we have chosen: English, French, and German. It is a record of material in languages that are not spoken by the majority of the Kurds. It will, therefore, be different from a bibliography of works in the Kurdish language, which have a majority of Kurdish authors, with more entries on topics such as poetry, fiction, education, and arts. "Love and learning made the making of this bibliography imaginable. It began more than 20 years ago when Amir was expanding his theoretical ground for class analysis of nationalism and peasant movement in the Kurdish region of Mukriyan (Hassanpour, 2021). Simultaneously, I was engaged with debates on Marxist feminism and transnational feminism while grappling with post-al tendencies in feminism such as post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. We wanted to better understand the explanatory power and political implications of Marx’s dialectical historical materialism in explicating the intersecting and refracting relations of gender, class, race, culture, nation, and nationalism. This commitment, nonetheless, did not remain in the realm of epistemology as a disembodied intellectual exercise. As a member of a dominant nation–a Shirazi born Iranian–I wanted to critically confront this national “identity” and the sense of “belonging.” Amir sought to scrutinize patriarchal structures and gender relations in Kurdish history, society, culture, and nation. This intertwined mind and heart desire put us onto a path of renewed discoveries of our personal and intellectual relations. In a nutshell, this was the beginning of the making of Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study." Women of Kurdistan provides a meticulously researched source book for readers interested in women, gender, and sexuality in Kurdistan and the Middle East. It covers a wealth of bibliographic material, including both scholarly and non-academic publications, many of which have not previously been accessible to broader audiences. But Women of Kurdistan is more than a source of information. It is also an eloquent reflection on the entanglement of knowledge production and political power, and a call to recognize scholarship’s potential in shaping historical change. Above all, it is a passionate statement about the impossibility to comprehend the intersection of colonial, capitalist, and nationalist forces without attention to women’s lives and struggles. - Marlene Schäfers, British Academy Newton International Fellow, University of Cambridge. Women of Kurdistan is simply an excellent template for how to chronicle women’s resistance politics. By framing the Kurdish women’s struggles within a historical materialism under different modes of production and discussing the political influence of five different nations on the Kurdish peoples, the authors offer a rich context that surpasses the common fetishization of women’s armed resistance. Internationally known for their Marxist and feminist works, Mojab and Hassanpour apply theories of nationalism, capitalism, peasantry, knowledge production, and relationship between state and non-state to understand the Kurdish experience, while honouring the struggle, voice, and poetry of Kurdish women activists. The book is as unapologetically critical of regional and religious hegemonies as it is of Kurdish patriarchies and is candid about the slipperiness of the concept of the “ideal Kurdish woman,” while skeptical of the benefits of transnationalization for the women honoured in this book. - Afiya Zia, author of Faith and Feminism: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? CONTENTS PART I. THE MAKING OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY THE STATE OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT KURDISH WOMEN WOMEN OF KURDISTAN PART II. WOMEN OF KURDISTAN: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC STUDY GENERAL WORKS ARTS AND CULTURE CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS DISPLACEMENT, REFUGEES, AND MIGRATION EDUCATION ETHNIC FORMATIONS FEMINIST AND WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS GENDER RELATIONS GENOCIDE, GENDERCIDE, WAR CRIMES, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY GEOGRAPHY HEALTH AND MEDICINE HISTORY LANGUAGE LAW LITERATURE POLITICS RELIGION SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION WAR AND PEACE APPENDIX INDEX

Ezidi people (Yezidi/Yazidi) and their culture suffered greatly at the hands of Daesh before, during, and after the 2014 Sinjar (Shingal) Genocide. Since the resulting forced migration, the Ezidi ­community as one of the most marginalised societies in the Middle East has undergone a significant amount of society-wide transformation. New avenues for agency have opened, and Shingali Ezidi women have taken these opportunities to express transformed identities, filling spaces previously unavailable, and altering “traditional” gender roles. This first extensive ethnographic work ever conducted with Ezidi women examines origins and developments of transformations in their female identity and agency. The analysis of their expressions and performances is particularly notable because of the subaltern position under numerous layers of minority, e.g. ethnicity, geography, religion, politics, culture, language, as well as gender. The aim of this study is to investigate the utilisation of subaltern identity to actualise agency among women after genocide.

The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Kurds greatly expands on the first edition through an updated chronology, an introductory essay, an expanded bibliography, maps, photos, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics.

The A to Z of the Kurds covers the largest nation on Earth that does not have its own independent state. Scholars, government officials who are dealing with the Middle East and the Kurds, the news media, as well as the general reader will find this an accessible historical account about a people who are becoming increasingly important for the future of the geostrategic Middle East. Maps, a chronology of Kurdish history, an introductory essay on the Kurds, a dictionary containing several hundred entries on various aspects of the Kurdish experience, and an extensive bibliography comprise this volume.

The diversity of Kurdish communities across the Middle East is now recognized as central to understanding both the challenges and opportunities for their representation and politics. Yet little scholarship has focused on the complexities within these different groups and the range of their experiences. This book diversifies the literature on Kurdish Studies by offering close analyses of subjects which have not been adequately researched, and in particular, by highlighting the Kurds' relationship to the Yazidis. Case studies include: the political ideas of Ehmede Xani, “the father of Kurdish nationalism”; Kurdish refugees in camps in Iraq; the perception of the Kurds by Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire and the Turks in modern Western Turkey; and the important connections and shared heritage of the Kurds and the Yazidis, especially in the aftermath of the 2014 ISIS attacks. The book comprises the leading voices in Kurdish Studies and combines in-depth empirical work with theoretical and conceptual discussions to take the debates in the field in new directions. The study is divided into three thematic sections to capture new insights into the heterogeneous aspects of Kurdish history and identity. In doing so, contributors explain why we need to pay close attention to the shifting identities and the diversity of the Kurds, and what implications this has for Middle East Studies and Minority Studies more generally.

Yezidism is a fascinating part of the rich cultural mosaic of the Middle East. The Yezidi faith emerged for the first time in the twelfth century in the Kurdish mountains of northern Iraq. The religion, which has become notorious for its associations with 'devil worship', is in fact an intricate syncretic system of belief, incorporating elements from proto-Indo-European religions, early Iranian faiths like Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, Sufism and regional paganism like Mithraism. Birgul Acikyildiz here offers a comprehensive appraisal of Yezidi religion, society and culture. Written without presupposing any prior knowledge about Yezidism, and in an accessible and readable style, her book examines Yezidis not only from a religious point of view but as a historical and social phenomenon. She throws light on the origins of Yezidism, and charts its development and changing fortunes - from its beginnings to the present- as part of the general history of the Kurds. Her book is the first to place Yezidism in its complete geographical setting in Northern Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Transcaucasia. The author describes the Yezidi belief system (which considers Tawusi Melek - the 'Peacock Angel' - to be ruler of the earth) and its religious practices and observances, analysing the most important facets of Yezidi religious art and architecture (including funerary monuments and zoomorphic tombstones) and their relationship to their neighbours throughout the Middle East. Acikyildiz also explores the often misunderstood connections between Yezidism and the Satan/Sheitan of Christian and Muslim tradition. Richly illustrated, with accompanying maps, photographs and illustrations, this pioneering book will have strong appeal to all those with an interest in the culture of the Kurds, as well as the wider region.