MESOPOTAMIA NEWS “NEW”! – MARTIN VAN BRUINESSEN
Journal of Kurdish Studies Review of The Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition: From Oral to Written (by Martin van Bruinessen, 2018)
The study of Yezidi religion has made major advances in the past two decades, even as the Yezidi communities and their religious traditions have been facing existential threats, not only in the form of genocidal campaigns by the Islamic State and earlier by the Saddam Hussein regime, but also from the less spectacular consequences of modernisation, mass education, migration and assimilation. It is tragic that the recent accumulation of scholarly knowledge of Yezidism reflects and, in a sense, was made possible by the gradual disappearance or transformation of living Yezidi belief and practice.