Monday, March 23, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org
Middle East
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Texts
Devil Worship — The Sacred Books and Traditions of the YezidizIsya Joseph's 1919 compilation of Yazidi religious texts — containing translations of the Kitab al-Jilwa (Book of Illumination), the Mashaf Reš (Black Book), the Poem in Praise of Sheikh Adi, the principal prayer, the articles of faith (1872 petition), and a substantial scholarly discussion of Yazidi origins, theology, and customs — presented as a documentary source with full scholarly framing of the texts' disputed authenticity.MandaeismAn ethnographic introduction to the Mandaeans — the last surviving Gnostic religion of late antiquity, practitioners of repeated water baptism and holders of a sacred scripture in Classical Mandaic, whose Iraqi heartland community was effectively destroyed after 2003 and whose continuation now depends on a global diaspora navigating the most acute existential crisis of any ancient living religion.SamaritanismAn ethnographic introduction to the Samaritans — one of the smallest religious communities on earth, the surviving custodians of the most ancient continuous form of Israelite religion, practitioners of the only surviving biblical animal sacrifice, and holders of a sacred scripture in Samaritan script that preserves variant textual readings predating the rabbinic canon, now approximately nine hundred people divided between Mount Gerizim and the Israeli city of Holon.The Bahá'í FaithAn ethnographic introduction to the Bahá'í Faith — founded in nineteenth-century Persia, the youngest of the major world religions, whose theology of progressive revelation, the oneness of all religions, and the unity of humanity represents one of the most comprehensive and explicitly universalist expressions of Aquarian religious consciousness.The DruzeAn ethnographic introduction to the Druze — Muwahhidun, the Unitarians — an esoteric monotheist tradition born from the Fatimid caliphate in eleventh-century Cairo, sealed to converts since 1043 CE, and now maintained by approximately one million people across Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the diaspora, navigating the most acute political pressures in the living Middle East.YarsanismAn ethnographic introduction to Yarsanism (Ahl-e Haqq / Kaka'i) — the syncretic mystical religion of the Kurdish world, founded by Sultan Sahak in the fourteenth century, centered on direct access to divine truth, reincarnation through a thousand and one lives, the sacred music of the tanbur, and the secret transmission of the Kalâm-e Saranjâm through hereditary lineages that have survived Persian empires, Arab conquest, Ottoman indifference, Baathist Arabization, and the Islamic Republic — and are now, in diaspora, confronting the same question every displaced ancient tradition must answer: can the sacred survive without its land?YazidismAn ethnographic introduction to the Yazidis — a Kurdish-speaking religious community of Mesopotamian and Iranian origins centered on devotion to Tawûsê Melek, the Peacock Angel, whose population of approximately 700,000 was subjected to a UN-recognized genocide by ISIS in 2014 that killed thousands, enslaved thousands more, and displaced the community from its ancestral homeland in Sinjar, Iraq.ZoroastrianismAn ethnographic introduction to Zoroastrianism — the ancient Iranian prophetic religion founded by Zarathustra, oldest surviving tradition of prophetic monotheism, source of the cosmic dualism, eschatology, and angelic hierarchies that would shape Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and now maintained by two small and declining communities: the Parsis of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran.